That Katherine Boo’s book ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ hammers India’s delusion of being a progressive or humane or democratic society goes without saying. There are enough hard statistics available today to prove this a hundred times over of course, but Boo’s book brings it home hard with her detailed depiction of life in a Mumbai slum.
The book recalls Slumdog Millionaire in many ways, and may even have been inspired by it, with the latter beginning in a similar settlement adjoining the airport. It shares the film’s witty and no-holds-barred look at Bombay’s ‘profound and juxtaposed inequality’, though it eschews the film’s mocking bow to Bollywood escapism in the fantastic rise of its lead character literally out of shit to super success in love if not everything else. Also absent is the soft-hearted or even romantic picture of India’s poor found in Dominic Lapierre’s City of Joy and Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram, both again depictions of slum life by White people. This best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist Katherine Boo has however neither fantasy nor rose-tinted glasses, and sears especially for its depiction of how monstrous and unrelenting abuse turns the victims into monsters as well.
This is the true story (down to the names) of the people of Annawadi, a slum near Mumbai’s international airport, surrounded by 5 posh hotels, but hidden behind a wall covered in advertisements for tiles that would remain ‘beautiful forever’. ‘Everything around us is roses,’ says an ‘Annawadian’. ‘And we’re the shit in between.’ Among them is a teenager who is an expert sorter of rich people’s waste, and silently hates his garbage-immersed life till disaster makes him yearn to have it back. Then there is the wanna-be lady slum-boss, trying to make a profit from the problems of her neighbours and the corruption-ridden welfare schemes of the government, ‘a chit in the national game of make-believe in which many of India’s old problems – poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labour – were being aggressively addressed’. The only college-going girl in Annawadi studies Congreve’s The Way of the World in her English Literature course but without ever reading the book; only the best colleges, dominated by high caste and affluent students, would expect such a thing. her teachers provide summaries instead, which she ‘by-hearts’.
Everybody is ill, tired, worried, and very ambitious. ‘Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.’
Although only 6 of the slum’s 3000 residents have permanent jobs, although some of them eat rats and frogs for dinner, although all of them live either in the open or in poorly-constructed shanties with thin walls and damp uneven floors, on the edge of an overflowing sewage lake that colours the animals who enter it blue, they are not considered poor by the Indian government’s new benchmarks of poverty. Some other stark facts of life for the same not-poor: government hospitals were dangerous places to be in if you are unwell; Muslims have no hope of landing a good job; thefts and corruption are the safety valves that keep the system from exploding; the justice system functioned ‘like garbage’; the police would ‘gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread’; the death or ill-treatment of animals could cause a media outcry and state intervention, but not that of a human, or even a hundred humans.
One limitation of the book is that it is just a description. What is behind those behind the beautiful forevers? Boo does not discuss causes, neither cultural context nor history, except for hinting rather unconvincingly that things might have been better off in the past when everybody was more fatalistic and accepting, and so preyed less on each other. But hers seems to be a fairly accurate description of a small bit of contemporary India, of the scraps of perverse opportunity before millions of people, and of the all-pervading mind-numbing callousness of those with power, however little. And though metropolitan Annawadi is certainly not Goa, we are not that far away, for this callousness that is the affliction of South Asian society affects us too. Goans often identify their troubles with ‘bhaile’ or ‘outsiders’ in the tiny fledgling Annawadis scattered here and there across the state, without realising that it is not the migrant poor who eat away at a society’s foundations, but the rotten attitude of the rich and the powerful.
There is a problem too in the book’s very truthfulness. Boo says at the end that all the names and incidents are true. The incidents range from illegal occupation and robbery, to cheating, misrepresentation, and prostitution. As Boo herself says, ‘To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another.’ So who is going to protect these people connected to these names and incidents? The only justification for the openness with identities seems to be journalistic accuracy, which seems an unnecessary vanity compared to the vulnerability of the people concerned.
And if one wants the truth and nothing but it, what about the description of the thoughts of people, running all through the book? Surely it would have been more correct to say ‘ABC says she thought…’ or ‘XYZ remembered thinking…’, if one is going to be journalistically accurate? Boo’s estimate of what a person was thinking is also based on her reading of every situation and every individual, which is hardly likely to be right every time.
A question that socially vulnerable interviewees might ask is — why should we speak to you? So that you use our story to make your career, while we remain where we are? Journalists, social scientists, photographers, and others documenting the ugliness of the world we live in have to answer this question. Boo’s book has earned well-deserved praise. One hopes that the people in it are happy with it too.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural
historian and novelist.)
