Book Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

In her brilliant debut, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist takes an unsparing look at the crippling poverty of a Mumbai slum

Katherine Boo, a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, is a leading chronicler of the disadvantaged Photo illustration by Gluekit

By Patrick French

Behind the Beautiful Forevers:
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
By Katherine Boo
Random House; 256 pp; $27

The cramped and bustling city formerly known as Bombay has Dickensian qualities. Minutes away from some of the most expensive real estate in the world, you can find tubercular families living in concrete drainage pipes. The scale of Mumbai’s divisions may explain why, in recent years, the city has been the subject of nonfiction of the highest quality: Meenal Baghel’s Capote-style reconstruction of a sensational murder, Death in Mumbai; Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, an eye-popping study of bar dancers; and Suketu Mehta’s bestseller, Maximum City.

The title of Katherine Boo’s remarkable new contribution to the genre, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, evokes the shocking social polarity endemic to Mumbai. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has established herself as a leading chronicler of the disadvantaged, whose struggles she depicts in extraordinary detail and without sentimentality. Such is her reportorial technique: to hang around in desperate places—from destitute pockets of Oklahoma City to homes for the mentally impaired—for months or even years, until she becomes a fly on the wall, a rat on the floor. And in a place like Annawadi, a slum on the fringes of Mumbai’s airport, life is so frantic that its inhabitants have more to worry about than a tenacious foreign reporter and her interpreter.

The author’s exceptional access allows her to frame her study as a narrative, with beautifully defined protagonists, rather than as an overview. Boo also makes diligent use of records, requested under India’s 2005 freedom-of-information legislation, lending credibility to even the most dystopian descriptions.

The book’s guiding premise is that gaming the system is the only means of survival in Annawadi. “For the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity,” she writes, “corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.” To quote a character in V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River: “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.” This is as far as you can get from Patrick Swayze in City of Joy.

Boo’s story begins with Abdul, a cautious and determined boy with a talent for finding trash: cans, cardboard, screws, foil, different types of plastic, anything that can be sorted and sold. His life unravels when he is arrested for involvement in the murder of a neighbor, known as One Leg, a woman who had previously drowned her daughter in a bucket. Abdul is innocent: One Leg had poured kerosene over her own head in a rage. Her immolation becomes the book’s moral pivot.

Vivid characters populate Behind the Beautiful Forevers under their real names. Consider the slumlord who owns nine horses, “two of which he’d painted with stripes to look like zebras” so he can hire them out for children’s parties. Or young Manju, who learns English literature by rote and is on her way to college. When her mother, Asha, organizes an event at a temple to impress a local politician (who fails to show), a beautiful eunuch appears and does a high-speed spinning dance, before answering questions on behalf of a goddess who has taken over his body.

To communicate the constant, suffocating pressure of living in Annawadi, the book concentrates on minute details, allowing us to see through the eyes of the undercity’s inhabitants. We follow a small boy dragging a piece of scrap iron wrapped in a bedsheet through a swamp in the dark. We watch as the same boy, after discovering “a jamun-fruit tree where parrots nested,” decides not to catch and sell the birds but to encourage others to leave them alone. We witness Abdul being released from prison and trying to start over with his trash collecting under the boiling April sun.