behind the beautiful forevers [sic],
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity; Katherine Boo; New
York, Random House, 2012.
A concrete wall separates the
Mumbai Airport and its accompanying luxury hotels from the slum settlement
called Annawadi. The wall is plastered with advertisements for Italian
floor tiles that will remain beautiful forever. Annawadi, therefore,
is behind the beautiful forevers. Katherine Boo, staff writer for
The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize winner, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius”
grant and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, spent three years
getting to know Annawadi and its citizens. The result is her first book, a
superb piece of creative nonfiction, a journalist’s report that is at the
same time a profound, compelling novel.
No urban slum that I have
seen—in Detroit, San Salvador, Islamabad, or Cairo—can compare with the
fetid squalor of Annawadi. During the monsoon, “the sewage lake crept
forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food through
mounds of wet, devalued garbage, shitting out the consequences of bad
choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled.” This sewage
lake serves up rats and frogs to be caught for food. Twice a day
Annawadians go to the public taps to draw water. The public toilets are
generally overflowing. The economic base of the slum is scavenging garbage
for saleable items, a highly competitive occupation. As one young
Annawadian described his community: “Everything around us is roses. . .
.And we’re the shit in between.”
The individuals Boo observed and
talked with come alive in her book. Abdul Husain, sixteen years old—or
maybe nineteen, he isn’t sure—is reserved, hard-working, and heroically
honest. He is also, at the beginning of the book, the most successful
scavenger. His family’s situation changes, however, when he and his father
are falsely accused of contributing to the suicide of a community
prostitute, and must spend time in jail, and later, prison. The family’s
business decreases dramatically. It is while in custody, however, that
Abdul demonstrates his integrity. Pressured by the authorities to confess
to his implication in the suicide, he refuses, despite the prospect of more
beatings. Meanwhile, Abdul’s mother, Zehrunisa, frantically tries to raise
the bribe required to release Abdul and his father from prison.
Asha Waghekar is a thirty-nine
year old politically ambitious manipulator, as well as a prostitute, who
schemes her way toward the position of the community’s slumlord, the chief
liaison with the corrupt world outside Annawadi. Her daughter could be the
first Annawadian to graduate from college, such as it is—an institution in
which memorizing the summary of a novel earns credit for studying the
novel. Among the young garbage sorters, Sunil, noted for his foul breath,
lives day to day expecting luck; Meena, beaten mercilessly by her father and
brother, escapes through rat poison, as does Sunjay.
Perhaps the chief character in
the book is blatant Corruption that poisons all institutions: government,
security forces, education. Even Sister Paulette, who runs the Handmaids
of the Trinity Children’s Home, sells donated food outside the orphanage.
Corruption is most obtrusive in Zehrunisa’s attempts to free her husband,
Karam, and Abdul from prison. Every officer she encounters demands
payment. Abdul comes to understand that “The Indian criminal justice system
was a market like garbage. . . .Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold
like a kilo of polyurethane bags.”
The sub-title of this book
promises stories of life, death and hope. The reader finds life and death
abundant, but hope? There is an optimism that somehow rises to the surface
of spirits that will not succumb to victimhood. And there is the
skeptic/realist who hears the hollowness of the words. Boo cites Karam
Husain for the epigraph of Part One: “Everybody talks like this—oh, I will
make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich. It’s vanity,
nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself,
‘What a navigator I am!’ And then the wind blows east.”
Still, Boo wants her reader to
see that the people whose lives she chronicles are neither passive sufferers
nor heroic endurers. They are, like the rest of us, individuals and
families trying to make a life where they are planted.
Why do I strongly recommend this
book to preachers? Unless you can spend three years in a Mumbai slum,
absorb its soul, and share the Word of God from that soul, you need this
book.
Pat Chaffee, OP
Racine, Wisconsin
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