Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
I grew up in Bombay, and I read about the city, as much to keep up with its changes as to keep my roots watered. Katherine Boo is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and spent three years doing her research for this non-fiction book in the Annawadi slum near Mumbai’s international airport. Annawadi could be described as an island of cardboard and plastic shanties in a cesspool of fecal and industrial waste surrounded by drains blocked by carcasses.
The book starts with a crisis to hook the reader.... Abdul Hussain is running from the police and hiding in the dark, now chewing his nails, perhaps unwisely since this threatens to be a cliff-hanger. Abdul Husain, a teenager, is accused of setting Fatima, a one-legged woman on fire. The victim, a hysterical woman and a part-time whore, expected to be only slightly burnt when she doused herself with kerosene and lit a match. The backstory follows, all anyone could ever want to know about Annawadi, Abdul’s family, garbage collection and recycling.
The accident-turned-suicide was witnessed by Fatima’s young daughter, a minor character whose psychological trauma seems irrelevant to this book focused on corruption, despair and injustice in the setting of poverty. The reward for the reader’s persistence comes late in the book when Abdul’s father and sister are acquitted in a trial, but Abdul’s own trial is still awaited. Abdul is portrayed as a deep character, one who considers the difference between water and ice: Ice is pure whereas water is easily contaminated, and he would be like ice, not bear false witness nor sell stolen recyclables.
Boo brings the smells of the slum to life, and then the reader wants to breathe but cannot. Here is a particularly stifling paragraph from near the end (page 218 in my paperback edition).
The new judge was severe and likely to find the Husains guilty, the special executive officer said. Fortunately, Fatima’s husband was willing to take back the case. He would cancel his testimony and the testimony of his late wife, upon which the trial would shut down. The price for ending the trial would be two lakhs -- more than four thousand dollars.
The special executive officer seemed to be banking on the ignorance of slum dwellers: that the Husains wouldn’t understand that the case against them was a criminal one, brought by the state of Maharashtra, and that Fatima’s husband didn’t have the power to call it off, no matter how much the Husains paid.
The author’s American perspective is evident: She does not mention the currency of the two lakhs, Indian rupees, but she does offer an equivalent in dollars, US dollars presumably. The Husains and Fatima’s husband do not think in terms of dollars. To state that the equivalent figure of four thousand per the exchange rate does not signify the enormity of the amount: a non-documented worker in the US could pay off a debt four thousand dollars by saving for, say, six months or a year. To a poor man in India, two lakhs or 200,000 rupees would be as crushing as 200,000 dollars, the labor of twenty years or longer, worse than having a home foreclosed under the threat of bankruptcy. To compare this sum to $4000 is to trivialize the burden and disrespect it, like telling a starving woman you know her pain because you’re on a diet.
Boo’s book could well have been condensed to a decent four page article in the New Yorker. It misses the touch of an editor, the word feral is used four times to describe pigs and dogs, and the book is overpopulated by under-employed characters, much like the slum itself. In a writing workshop, this book would be faulted for not sounding authentic even though the events described might really have happened. I think of the author as an amateur field biologist wielding a magnifying glass and exclaiming, “Look at these grubby little creatures, they have brown wings but don’t fly!” I would not know, for instance, whether Abdul prefers his peanuts with diced onions and green chillies or coriander leaves. At the end of the book, I wish I could empathize with its people rather than pity their plight and shudder.
The consciousness of this non-fiction book is limited in part because the author has had to depend on translators, and to an equal extent because her characters are well-guarded. In her attempt to stay objective, Boo appears safely distant. This book could be accused of being voyeuristic or of belonging to the genre of poverty porn. I remind myself that it was on the NYT best seller list, won the LA Times Book Prize and the PEN/ John Kenneth Galbraith award. Ambassador’s Journal, written when Galbraith was Ambassador to India at the time of John Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru, is a brilliant work, funny and compelling, informative of the workings of two governments in the face of border incursions by China. Now, that is a book I would recommend.
I grew up in Bombay, and I read about the city, as much to keep up with its changes as to keep my roots watered. Katherine Boo is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and spent three years doing her research for this non-fiction book in the Annawadi slum near Mumbai’s international airport. Annawadi could be described as an island of cardboard and plastic shanties in a cesspool of fecal and industrial waste surrounded by drains blocked by carcasses.
The book starts with a crisis to hook the reader.... Abdul Hussain is running from the police and hiding in the dark, now chewing his nails, perhaps unwisely since this threatens to be a cliff-hanger. Abdul Husain, a teenager, is accused of setting Fatima, a one-legged woman on fire. The victim, a hysterical woman and a part-time whore, expected to be only slightly burnt when she doused herself with kerosene and lit a match. The backstory follows, all anyone could ever want to know about Annawadi, Abdul’s family, garbage collection and recycling.
The accident-turned-suicide was witnessed by Fatima’s young daughter, a minor character whose psychological trauma seems irrelevant to this book focused on corruption, despair and injustice in the setting of poverty. The reward for the reader’s persistence comes late in the book when Abdul’s father and sister are acquitted in a trial, but Abdul’s own trial is still awaited. Abdul is portrayed as a deep character, one who considers the difference between water and ice: Ice is pure whereas water is easily contaminated, and he would be like ice, not bear false witness nor sell stolen recyclables.
Boo brings the smells of the slum to life, and then the reader wants to breathe but cannot. Here is a particularly stifling paragraph from near the end (page 218 in my paperback edition).
The new judge was severe and likely to find the Husains guilty, the special executive officer said. Fortunately, Fatima’s husband was willing to take back the case. He would cancel his testimony and the testimony of his late wife, upon which the trial would shut down. The price for ending the trial would be two lakhs -- more than four thousand dollars.
The special executive officer seemed to be banking on the ignorance of slum dwellers: that the Husains wouldn’t understand that the case against them was a criminal one, brought by the state of Maharashtra, and that Fatima’s husband didn’t have the power to call it off, no matter how much the Husains paid.
The author’s American perspective is evident: She does not mention the currency of the two lakhs, Indian rupees, but she does offer an equivalent in dollars, US dollars presumably. The Husains and Fatima’s husband do not think in terms of dollars. To state that the equivalent figure of four thousand per the exchange rate does not signify the enormity of the amount: a non-documented worker in the US could pay off a debt four thousand dollars by saving for, say, six months or a year. To a poor man in India, two lakhs or 200,000 rupees would be as crushing as 200,000 dollars, the labor of twenty years or longer, worse than having a home foreclosed under the threat of bankruptcy. To compare this sum to $4000 is to trivialize the burden and disrespect it, like telling a starving woman you know her pain because you’re on a diet.
Boo’s book could well have been condensed to a decent four page article in the New Yorker. It misses the touch of an editor, the word feral is used four times to describe pigs and dogs, and the book is overpopulated by under-employed characters, much like the slum itself. In a writing workshop, this book would be faulted for not sounding authentic even though the events described might really have happened. I think of the author as an amateur field biologist wielding a magnifying glass and exclaiming, “Look at these grubby little creatures, they have brown wings but don’t fly!” I would not know, for instance, whether Abdul prefers his peanuts with diced onions and green chillies or coriander leaves. At the end of the book, I wish I could empathize with its people rather than pity their plight and shudder.
The consciousness of this non-fiction book is limited in part because the author has had to depend on translators, and to an equal extent because her characters are well-guarded. In her attempt to stay objective, Boo appears safely distant. This book could be accused of being voyeuristic or of belonging to the genre of poverty porn. I remind myself that it was on the NYT best seller list, won the LA Times Book Prize and the PEN/ John Kenneth Galbraith award. Ambassador’s Journal, written when Galbraith was Ambassador to India at the time of John Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru, is a brilliant work, funny and compelling, informative of the workings of two governments in the face of border incursions by China. Now, that is a book I would recommend.
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