Politics & Government
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE
"Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care."-People
"A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece."-Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday
In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport.
As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal.
With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds-and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.
WINNER OF: The PEN Nonfiction Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Publishers Weekly
"Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care."-People
"A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece."-Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday
In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport.
As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal.
With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds-and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.
WINNER OF: The PEN Nonfiction Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Publishers Weekly
Editorial Reviews
"This book is both a tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece."-Judges' Citation for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
"A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking."-Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review
"Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years."-New York
"Incandescent writing and excruciatingly good storytelling."-The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Outstanding."-USA Today
"A richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction."-Los Angeles Times
"Rends the heart, thrills the mind, pricks the conscience, and burns the pages."-Washingtonian
"[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. . . . Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted."-Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction . . . With a cinematic intensity . . . Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you'll not soon forget."-Elle
"Riveting, fearlessly reported . . . [Behind the Beautiful Forevers] plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it's also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A."-Entertainment Weekly
"A shocking-and riveting-portrait of life in modern India . . . This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction. . . . Boo's prose is electric."-O: The Oprah Magazine
"[A] landmark book."-The Wall Street Journal
"Moving . . . a humane, powerful and insightful book . . . a book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame."-The Boston Globe
"A mind-blowing read."-Redbook
"An unforgettable true story, ...
"A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking."-Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review
"Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years."-New York
"Incandescent writing and excruciatingly good storytelling."-The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Outstanding."-USA Today
"A richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction."-Los Angeles Times
"Rends the heart, thrills the mind, pricks the conscience, and burns the pages."-Washingtonian
"[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. . . . Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted."-Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction . . . With a cinematic intensity . . . Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you'll not soon forget."-Elle
"Riveting, fearlessly reported . . . [Behind the Beautiful Forevers] plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it's also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A."-Entertainment Weekly
"A shocking-and riveting-portrait of life in modern India . . . This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction. . . . Boo's prose is electric."-O: The Oprah Magazine
"[A] landmark book."-The Wall Street Journal
"Moving . . . a humane, powerful and insightful book . . . a book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame."-The Boston Globe
"A mind-blowing read."-Redbook
"An unforgettable true story, ...
Readers Top Reviews
S LittonSue Roebuck
I had two problems with this otherwise excellent book. Firstly was the lack of context and a wider view. The focus is very narrow (claustrophobic, even), with no attempt to explain the larger forces at work which keep so many people trapped in grinding poverty. However, I understand that Boo wanted to write something from the slum-dwellers' point of view, rather than a sociological analysis, so I guess I can't really criticise her for not writing a different book. Secondly, her methodology and style of writing caused me some problems. It's written very much like a novel, including direct speech and passages describing the characters' inner thoughts and feelings. I understand that Boo and her translators spent a lot of time in these slums, became close to the people, and gained their trust to the extent that they could almost forget that they were there, watching and listening and taking notes the whole time. And still, I can't help feeling that there must be layers of interpretation and the presence of the observer must have had some effect, however small. I was conscious of this throughout most of the book and found it quite distracting. On the other hand it raises interesting questions about how any kind of reportage or non-fiction book is written. What's undeniable is the power of the stories being told. The sense of hopelessness (in spite of the cover blurb which promised a book about "life, death and hope") is palpable, especially in the face of systemic and generally accepted corruption. At times it just became too depressing and I almost didn't want to read on, but I'm glad I did.
P. G. Harris
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the story of life in Annawadi, a slum situated close to Mumbai Airport. In the prologue we meet Abdul Hussain, a teenager who scratches a living for his family by sorting scrap scavenged by his neighbours and selling it for recycling. At the start of the book, he is hiding from the police, fearful of being arrested for complicity in the attempted suicide of one of his neighbours. As the story opens out, we are introduced to the wider population of the slum, Asha, an unscrupulous fixer, desperate to climb out of the degradation and prepared to do just about anything to escape, her beautiful daughter Manju, who hopes that education will enable her to escape from an arranged marriage, Sunil, a young but resourceful scavenger, the one legged sexually voracious Fatima. The story spreads both backwards and forwards from Adbul’s flight from the law. It provides an account of how he came to be hiding under a pile of rubbish, and also the story of what came after. At its heart this book provides a fundamentally horrific picture of modern India. It is a society divided between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It is a world of endemic corruption, where courts are not courts of justice but courts of law, and the law is driven by those who can pay for it. The slum is not a community, but a brutal dog eat dog world where the inhabitants gleefully seek to climb to the top of the rubbish heap by stepping on each others’ faces. It is a society in which external aid is cynically manipulated to divert funds to the powerful, not those in need. This brings me to the most shocking thing about the book. I read it for my book club, and so knew nothing about it when I picked it up. This is not, or is not positioned as, a work of fiction. This is a documentary. Author Katherine Boo is a journalist who worked within the slum, extensively interviewing, and filming the inhabitants. With that in mind, I find it quite difficult to criticise this brutally dispassionate account of a modern Dante’s Inferno. Living in the affluent west what right I have to form any opinion of an account of a society of such extreme poverty, degradation and struggle. At one level it is difficult to justify a world in which people are forced to live like this and to justify one’s own privileged position within it. Within that, the book for me posed some huge questions. Is this an inevitable part of development? Is it an inescapable part of economic advancement that societies must live through periods of extreme inequality in which huge numbers of people endure an horrendous existence? Is India, along with other developing countries, living through what countries like Britain experienced in Victorian times? Alternatively, is the horror of Annawadi a more modern consequence of globalisation? It is in asking these questions...
Barry Bootle
I must confess I picked this book up with some trepidation. The subtitle - "Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum" - and the cover (of my copy), a young boy sprinting up steps into bright sunlight, made me think it might be another of those. You know, those. The post-Slumdog reportage. "Yes, conditions in Indian slums are appalling. But wait! Look at the way the children run and play! The sights, the smells! The way they can still laugh, in the face of such hardship. The way they just get on with the life they've got!" (What else are they supposed to do?) "So life-affirming!" The hope of it all! "Slumdog" is a good film. And a lot of the reportage is also good, and if it's not it's generally well-meaning. But I find it all a bit discomfiting. It's human to believe in hope, but it seems to me that, as Westerners, focussing on the small hopes that slum-dwellers have might be a convenient way of deflecting our own guilt that people have to live this way. (And the likes of Amitabh Bachchan castigating "Slumdog" for focussing on a small part of Indian life might be an Indian way of doing the same thing). I thought this book might be more of the same. It wasn't. Boo is no polemicist. She's a true journalist, and she tells this story with a journalistic dispassion, making it all the more affecting. (She has a novelist's eye, though; at times, the prose is breathtaking.) The stories are set in a small slum, rather than one of the giant cities-within-a-city like Dharavi; a wise choice, as she manages to paint a picture of a whole community, almost like a small village. There are a lot of characters to keep up with, and at times it's downright confusing. But even this makes sense. After all, urban India is a confusing place, teeming with people. Despite the wonderful writing, there were times when I felt I could not go on. When I read about the disease and the filth and children being bitten by rats as they slept. The fungus "like butterfly wings" that grows on feet in the monsoon season. The exploitation and corruption, the abuse of slum-dwellers by the authorities, the abuse of slum children by their own families. The unsolved murders and streets-sweepers left to die on the pavements, the infanticide and the many suicides. And the hope - what there is of it - is almost the worst. That a family, pursued by a rotten judicial system, might not go to prison for a crime they did not commit. That one slum-dweller might, just possibly, scramble over others and into a very slightly less hardscrabble life. I cried again and again. I became very angry. Occasionally, I laughed out loud. At times I was so scared for the characters that I felt ill with it. And when I had finished, I thought about them all for a long time, and wondered what they are doing now, the ones that survived. Because, of course, there's no story-book ending. Jamal does not w...
Solari
I live in Brazil, a country of great social inequality, but even so the misery and cruelty shown in Behind the Beautiful Forevers is impressive. This work, winner of the 2012’s National Book Award and written by Pulitzer winner Katherine Boo, is the result of three years she spent in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai, India. The title is a reference to an outdoor of Italian luxury mosaics that faces the city’s modern international airport; and Annawadi is right behind, like a black humor joke. It is a place of hunger and constant disease. Where people sleep in the middle of trash and are bitten by rats during the night. Where the fight for survivor surfaces a greedy and cruel side in the neighbors, the police corruption and politics. A place where people supplement their meager diet with rats and frogs from a fetid lagoon. Annawadi shows the combination of the darkest side of globalization with the Indian cast system, defined in the book as “the most perfectly oppressive labor division system ever conceived”. Most of the story revolves around a Muslim family in the place of Hindu majority. They are accused of being responsible for the suicide of a one-legged woman. She set fire to herself because the renovation of a shared wall made dust fall in her rice, and wanted to teach a lesson to the neighbors that went too far. The lawsuit against the father of the family and his son extends for years and becomes a nightmare, revealing an endemic corruption in each and every level of the official system. The Indian bureaucracy seems like a big machine to forget the poor. “In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.” One day the Indian press does visit this place of poverty and injustice because of a death. Of a horse. A few days before, a garbage collector was ran over and died after pleading for help for hours in an active road. They took him out of there when he was already dead and the coroner determined – without an autopsy – that he died of tuberculosis, so that it wouldn’t smudge the region’s statistics. The facts are amazing, and the execution of Behind the Beautiful Forevers too. The author used over a thousand hours of video, photographs and audio interviews to write the book. And Boo also has an incredible sensibility to find the right stories and the literary talent to transcribe them. One of the best non-fiction books I have read. A deep immersion in an incredible theme, with incredible execution, multiple sources, long time of research. A must-read for journalists, those interested in modern India, or any human being.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1.
Annawadi
LET IT KEEP, the moment when Officer Fish Lips met Abdul in the police station. Rewind, see Abdul running backward, away from the station and the airport, shirt buttons opening as he flies back toward his home. See the flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink- flowered tunic shrink to nothing but a matchbook on the floor. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucous love song, her delicate features unscathed. Keep rewinding, back seven more months, and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. It was about as hopeful a season as there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet's poor. A country dizzy now with development and circulating money.
Dawn came gusty, as it often did in January, the month of treed kites and head colds. Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul's ear. "Wake up, fool!" she said exuberantly. "You think your work is dreaming?"
Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family's most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January's income being pivotal to the family's latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine.
Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. 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 small market niche got under way.
One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where site supervisors chose day laborers. Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, to be hawked in Airport Road traffic. Older women sewed patches onto pink-and-blue cotton quilts for a company that paid by the piece. In a tiny, sweltering plastic- molding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads into ornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors-smiling ducks and pink cats with jewels around their necks that they couldn't imagine anyone, anywhere, buying. And Abdul crouched on the maidan, beginning to sort two weeks' worth of purchased trash, a stained shirt hitching up his knobby spine.
His general approach toward his neighbors was this: "The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves." But deep in his own work, as he would be this morning, he could imagine his fellow Annawadians laboring companionably alongside him.
ANNAWADI SAT TWO hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India collided with old India and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously at the bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack of three hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life.
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. When the runway work was 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 brushland across the street from the international terminal seemed the least-bad place to live.
Other poor people considered the spot too wet to be habitable, but the Tamils set to work, hacking down the brush that harbored the snakes, digging up dirt in drier places and packing it into the mud. After a month, their bamboo poles stopped flopping over when they were stuck in the ground. Draping empty cement sacks over the poles for cover, they had a settlement. Residents of neighboring slums provided its name: Annawadi-the land of annas, a respectful Tamil word for older brothers. Less respectful terms for Tamil migrants were in wider currency. But other poor citizens had seen the Tamils sweat to summon solid land from a bog, and that l...
Annawadi
LET IT KEEP, the moment when Officer Fish Lips met Abdul in the police station. Rewind, see Abdul running backward, away from the station and the airport, shirt buttons opening as he flies back toward his home. See the flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink- flowered tunic shrink to nothing but a matchbook on the floor. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucous love song, her delicate features unscathed. Keep rewinding, back seven more months, and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. It was about as hopeful a season as there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet's poor. A country dizzy now with development and circulating money.
Dawn came gusty, as it often did in January, the month of treed kites and head colds. Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul's ear. "Wake up, fool!" she said exuberantly. "You think your work is dreaming?"
Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family's most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January's income being pivotal to the family's latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine.
Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. 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 small market niche got under way.
One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where site supervisors chose day laborers. Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, to be hawked in Airport Road traffic. Older women sewed patches onto pink-and-blue cotton quilts for a company that paid by the piece. In a tiny, sweltering plastic- molding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads into ornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors-smiling ducks and pink cats with jewels around their necks that they couldn't imagine anyone, anywhere, buying. And Abdul crouched on the maidan, beginning to sort two weeks' worth of purchased trash, a stained shirt hitching up his knobby spine.
His general approach toward his neighbors was this: "The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves." But deep in his own work, as he would be this morning, he could imagine his fellow Annawadians laboring companionably alongside him.
ANNAWADI SAT TWO hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India collided with old India and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously at the bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack of three hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life.
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. When the runway work was 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 brushland across the street from the international terminal seemed the least-bad place to live.
Other poor people considered the spot too wet to be habitable, but the Tamils set to work, hacking down the brush that harbored the snakes, digging up dirt in drier places and packing it into the mud. After a month, their bamboo poles stopped flopping over when they were stuck in the ground. Draping empty cement sacks over the poles for cover, they had a settlement. Residents of neighboring slums provided its name: Annawadi-the land of annas, a respectful Tamil word for older brothers. Less respectful terms for Tamil migrants were in wider currency. But other poor citizens had seen the Tamils sweat to summon solid land from a bog, and that l...
