Title:               Behind the Beautiful Forevers—Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Author:           Katherine Boo

Publisher:      Random House/New York 2012

A ghost wrote “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”. There is no other explanation for journalism that reads like a tragic fairy tale. Where is the writer Katherine Boo in the Mumbai ultra-slum? Annawadi teems with disease and vermin, and is bordered by the corrosive run-off from a glittering luxury hotel and international airport construction. In the midst of this “sumpy plug”, she somehow hovered almost unseen for four years. Ms. Boo is a small, rheumatic American blonde in a place that makes the setting of “Slum Dog Millionaire” seem like a paradise of upward mobility. She tells the story from the inside out, with characters who always speak with their own voices, never hers. The reader becomes a fly on the wall watching Abdul, the extraordinarily adept teen-aged dealer of trash, and his parents—who go to panicky extremes to keep him out of prison. The gossip loving neighbors, only slightly less well-off, watch the family’s downfall with the same rapt disinterest they give to a Mumbai soap opera. All the participants are roundly drawn and become as familiar to the reader as beloved fictional heroes, a Tom Joad running for his life, or a Sydney Carton making the ultimate sacrifice. The villain here is monumental too—a corrupt system that tramples the Annawadians like a blind giant squashing insects. The only character that eludes us is the author, and it jars the reader to acknowledge her presence in the midst of epic misery and injustice.

Katherine Boo won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000 for a series of articles for the Washington Post. Forest Haven, a DC area institution was closed in the 1990s because of its criminal neglect of the severely mentally and physically handicapped people in its care. When Forest Haven was replaced by scattered group homes and nominally therapeutic programs, Ms. Boo found a cruelly inept system that ignored incidents of abuse, sexual predation and theft. Nonetheless, the operators of these facilities were allowed to function without interference by the government agencies whose job it was to protect those who could not care for themselves. The subheading of that article, “Gone, But the Agony Remains,” could also describe the undercity of Annawadi. In both places, programs created to ameliorate the effects of a very uneven society end up making the problems worse. Greed floats like a grease stain on the waters of the putrid lake that supplies the Annawadi dwellers. The few sources of fresh water that are poured into the lake from time to time are siphoned off by the strongest and greediest of them.

In the Author’s Note at the end of the book Ms. Boo asks, “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society?” She hopes that she at least partially provides an answer. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” along with her articles, reminds us that it’s a question we should frequently ask ourselves.

For further reading, please see n + 1 magazine, Issue 15: Amnesty for the article On Katherine Boo by Anand Vaidya