“Behind the Beautiful
Forevers – Life, Death & Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”
by Katherine Boo, 2012
This book reads like a luminous
and intense fiction story written by someone who has had much contact with the working
underclass of Mumbai. What astonishes is
that at the end of the book, the author tells you that it is based on 4 years
of interviews with slum dwellers in an actual squatter neighborhood called
Annawadi near the Mumbai airport in India, and a review of 3 thousand public records
that related to these squatters. All the
events and people are real, including the use of their real names. The period is from 2007-2010, during which even this
little community is impacted by Wall Street’s 2008 mortgage crash.
 |
| Recyclers from Annawadi |
So this is some kind of new
form of ‘fiction’ – not historical so much as sociological / political
non-fiction fiction! Because of course
Boo cannot create all thoughts and dialog from research.
The fluffy title “Beautiful
Forevers” comes from an advertising slogan about floor tile posted on the tall wall to the
airport, behind which Annawadi lies. A
bit of irony, as there are no beautiful forevers there.
The book tells the tale of a
few Muslim families living in a majority Hindu slum, peopled by rural migrants
from various parts of northern India. A septic pond sits near the slum. Water is shared by everyone from a single
pipe. Toilets are sorts of
outhouses. The living quarters are made
of loose bricks, plywood, bamboo, tarpaulins, corrugated metal and whatever people can find to
cover themselves. After the 2008
economic crash and a subsequent Islamic terror attack on downtown Mumbai, fewer
tourists came through the airport and so times got harder.
One of the main occupations
is collecting valuable garbage from the near-by airport – cups, cans, metal, plastic
– anything that can be resold. Some get
temp jobs as waiters or baggage boys. Others
run scams based on fake schools or non-existent ‘anti-poverty’ or women’s organizations
to get international aid – money which is then divied-up among the powerful. Bribery demands from everyone in authority –
police, coroners, investigators, government clerks, lawyers, politicians – are
constant. Many voters are
disenfranchised and never get to vote. The
conservative Shiv Sena and the neo-liberal Congress Party take turns basically
buying votes from the slum. Some boys
become thieves. The girls fear being
sent back through arranged marriages to brutal men in backward villages, as they
actually have more freedom in the slum. Suicide
by drinking rat poison or anonymous murder of scavenger boys occurs on a
regular basis. Plans to bulldoze the
slum and build malls or other upscale buildings hover over Annawadi the whole
time.
The key plot here is a fight
between two families in which a women lights herself on fire, and her death is
blamed on a Muslim family. Three members
of that family are arrested and thrown in jail, and into the hands of the absurd
and crumbling Indian ‘justice’ system where they await their fate.
The ‘modern’ people - the
‘over-city’, the foreign airport tourists, the Mumbai wealthy - all weigh on
the denizens of Annawadi. Even these slum people now
think in the new setting of neo-liberalism they may escape their
conditions by working hard, getting a bit of education, by copying or making
friends with the better-off. None of it
happens.
Boo captures their
individual humanity in the midst of this trapped situation. But instead of uniting politically as a class or group, she shows
how they fight among themselves, jealous of any financial success, attempting
some individual financial trick that will catapult them out of the slum. In the process they are unable to conceive of
any bigger force than their own individual families. As the stories show, oppression
oppresses – something those who romanticize poverty forget on a regular basis. It does not always make people stronger, but
instead can destroy them bit by bit.
Other books related to India
reviewed below: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” “Annihilation of Caste,”
“Field Notes on Democracy,” “The God Market,” “Garbageland,”
“Southern Insurgency,” “Walking With The Comrades,” Tropic of
Chaos,” “Story of My Assassins,” and “Last Man in the
Tower.”
Red Frog
February 5, 2017
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