For several reasons, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo is the most astonishing non-fiction account of the underbelly of urban Indian life to appear in a long time, but three stand out: its sharply focused, almost forensic examination of poverty and corruption; the quality of writing and observation that unflinchingly brings alive the stories and emotions of the inhabitants of a Mumbai slum; and its setting of a new benchmark in reporting standards, with the narrator a silent, invisible presence in a narrative driven by real characters with real names.
There is nothing imagined here and from beginning to end no use of the personal pronoun “I”. It gives the fly-on-the-wall reportage a compelling, stranger-than-fiction intensity.
Boo spent nearly four years, 2007 to 2011, tracking lives in Annawadi, a slum strategically squeezed between the highway outside Sahar’s new international airport and a string of high-rise luxury hotels — “a stretch where old India collided with new India and made new India late”. When smoke from the cooking fires of 3,000 Annawadians packed into an half an acre of 335 shanties rose in the evening, hotel guests on the upper floors wondered whether the city was on fire. To hide the eyesore on one side the airport management erected tall aluminium fences; on the other side a concrete wall with sunshine-yellow hoardings advertised Italianate floor tiles with the slogan “BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER”.
The book’s odd title derives from this tag but, like its many ironies, this information quietly appears on page 36. By then the reader is engrossed in the forceful central drama that will blight, or brighten, the lives of its main characters.
A handful are centre-stage, against an ethnically diverse cast of displaced settlers — Tamil labour, UP bhaiyyas and Maharashtrians — that includes ragpickers, drunks, prostitutes, layabouts and characters like Kambleji, in continual search of funds for a heart valve operation. There is Abdul, a teenage scrap-sorter, main breadwinner of one of the slum’s few Muslim families, and Sunil, a scavenger raised in the corrupt Sister Paulette’s orphanage, adept at crossing swamps and treacherous barricades and negotiating ledges to collect bits of metal and “rich” pickings such as bottles and paper cups. These he sells to his friend Abdul by the bagful.
In contrast to the boys are two women: Asha, a feisty Maharashtrian nursery-school teacher from Vidarbha, climbing the greasy pole with the backing of police officials and Shiv Sena politicians, with whom she occasionally sleeps, to become Annawadi’s slum boss. And there’s Manju, Asha’s beautiful, educated daughter who runs an informal school for slum kids while battling incomprehensible texts from Restoration drama by Congreve: “Love is subordinated was the trouble spot. Although she had never held the hand of her boy her own age, love was an English word about which she felt confident. Subordinated, though, evoked only irritation at her mother, who hasn’t kept her promise to buy Manju an English-Marathi dictionary.”
In Boo’s microcosmic view of an Indian undercity everyone is on the make and on the take, as a strategy of survival and escape. The trigger for the main action in the book is a burning. A character called One Leg, an embittered woman on crutches, Abdul’s neighbour, dies of burns in hospital. Was it murder or self-immolation, and what caused it? The incident — sudden and inexplicable — unleashes a chain of horrifying events that includes police interrogations, arrests, thrashings, extortions and death. The book opens with a terrified Abdul hiding atop his rat-infested scrap heap on the run from the police.
The seamlessly crafted narrative of incidents in police stations, juvenile homes and courts, and events like children’s suicides (rat poison is a preference, like sniffing a correction fluid called Eraz-X is a high) make the fabrications of Charles Dickens or Slumdog Millionare seem like a walk in the park.
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Boo is acclaimed as a journalist for her investigations of disadvantaged and marginalised communities. She won the Pulitzer at the Washington Post for a series of articles on homes for the mentally impaired, and since she moved to the New Yorker in 2003 her subjects have included call centres in Chennai and a campaign to promote marriage among the poor in Oklahoma. Her own marriage to the historian Sunil Khilnani deepened her interest in India; in an afterword she explains that she felt an early impatience with “snapshots of Indian squalor: the ribby children with flies in their eyes and other emblems of abjectness... [and] felt a shortage in India-based nonfiction: of deeply reported accounts about how low-income people — particularly women and children — were negotiating the age of global markets.”
Zeroing in on Annawadi as a sample, she worked through interlocutors and translators, rigorously interviewing, fact-checking, audio- and videotaping her subjects. She fell into a sewage lake, went on scavenging raids and was harassed by the police. “To Annawadians, I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle,” she writes, but “after a month or two of curiosity, they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives”.
In person, the 47-year-old writer is a small-built blonde, given to listening rather than talking. She suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and writes slowly following surgery on her right hand. She is aware of possible adverse reactions to her book, including the chance of legal action over several of the controversial incidents she describes. But her primary allegiance is to the people of Annawadi who shared their stories with her. As a measure of protecting them, and herself, she is certain that her pathbreaking account of Indian poverty is supported by hard evidence.
BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Author: Katherine Boo
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 280
Price: Rs 499