Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers got rave reviews, and was on many best books of the year list, but I resisted reading it--I just didn't want to read a book about poverty in India. But I'm glad I finally did, because her book is not a hand-wringing expose, it's simply a chronicle of how people, in no matter what situation, do their best to survive.

For four years Boo lived among the people of Annawandi, which isn't really a city. It's a ramshackle slum that grew on land owned by the Mumbai airport. "The slum had been settled in 1991 by a band of laborers trucked in from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport. The work complete, they decided to stay near the airport and its tantalizing construction possibilities. In an area with little unclaimed space, a sodden, snake-filled bit of brush-land across the street from the international terminal seemed the least-bad place to live."

Boo focuses mostly on two families. The Husains are Muslim, and are ruled by their indomitable mother, Zuhreisa. The family is in the scavenging business. They buy and sell the trash picked by others, including Sunil, who I believe is in orphan. They live next door to, and share a wall with, Fatima, a one-legged woman who, naturally, is known as One Leg, and is quite promiscuous, though she has a husband.

The other family is also run by a woman--Asha. In fact, she is sort of the boss of the undercity, the solver of problems, the person who others go to for assistance. She is also busy with lovers (the husbands in this book are by and large ineffectual) and has a daughter, Manju, who attends college.

The Husains and Fatima feud with each other, until one day, construction on the wall drives Fatima into a fury. Mr. Husain, Abdul, and an adult daughter threaten Fatima. She decides to douse herself with kerosene and light herself on fire, probably to try to blame it on the Husains. But she ends up dying instead. The three Husains are arrested, and Zuhreisa goes into overdrive trying to save her family and her business.

In the home of Asha, ambitions were also alive. She was tied into everything, sort of like a Mafia don. She owed allegiance to the "corporator" of the village, and the political party. "She had felt herself moving ahead, just a little, every time other people failed...But the facts of her days had barely changed. She was still living with a drunken husband in a cramped hut by a sewage lake. Her vanity--a quality she had passed on to all three children--was being undermined. She had failed to crack the code of the wider city, while at home, many of her neighbors had started to loathe her."

Other characters showcase the plight of the poor. After the Mumbai terrorist attacks, tourist business drops off, and this, plus the worldwide economic crisis, reaches even Annawandi. Sunil turns to thievery. Boo writes a wonderful passage about him: "Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once, he had believed he was smart and might become something--not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if had had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawandi."

We also hear the sad story of Manju's friend Meena, another teenage girl who is doomed to an arranged marriage, and is constantly beaten, once by her brother for failing to make him an omelet. She takes drastic measures to relieve her torture.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers (the title takes its name from a billboard outside the community that promises eternally beautiful floor tiles) does not gawk at the poor, but instead finds the common thread of humanity within. There is a lot of humor among them, even ironic, such as when the death of a horse brings in camera crews and protests: "The forces of justice had finally come to Annawandi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of amusement to Sunil and the road boys."

Boo is a gifted writer, and manages to make Annawandi seem oddly beautiful, even if it is a place no one would want to visit: "The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors' huts, some held together by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Children in school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps. A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats' eyes were heavy with sleep. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the tiny market niche got under way."