Annawadi is an Indian slum of 3000 people living in 335 huts on a one-half acre of filth, trash and refuse bordering a lake of sewage and separated by a wall from the modern Mumbai Airport. The journalist Katherine Boo spent years interviewing, videotaping and recording Annawadi residents in their struggle to survive. The result is "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." It is generally presented as a closer look at poverty in an emerging modern India where an expanding GDP does not show the full story.
It is a lot more.
The nonfiction narrative is loosely hung on a court case involving the entrepreneurial Husain family who has been accused of instigating the self immolation suicide of their neighbor, Fatima, a one legged prostitute and virago. The case is merit-less but the shameless graft and corruption of everyone involved in the so-called justice system is beyond imagination. And the injustice and horrors of the case more than blends with equal horrors in the everyday lives of the Annawadians. The main income sources of the slum is trash-picking as everyone sifts through the refuse of the airport. Metal--a nail or a pin--is prized but anything that can be recycled is of value. Occasionally someone will hit the jackpot, a job at the airport, but usually the graft involved prevents any meaningful income from being earned. The less successful scavengers--if brave--will steal, risking fatal retribution from the guards. The most successful are the middlemen, like the Husains, who buy the scrap for resale. Starvation, illness, drunkenness, despair, envy and suicide are endemic. Every child is rat-bitten and rats are a normal part of the local diet.
The other affliction is corruption, which seems to be the only true quality that is spread equally among the citizenry. It is appalling. The courts, the police, the commissioners, the politicians, the businessmen, the non-profits--everything with any organizing principle is a lie. Graft underlies every transaction. The only schooling are scams to defraud the government. "Corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained."
Yet in spite of this depressing life, the Annawadians have distinctive and admirable qualities. (Admittedly, being constantly scrutinized by a Western journalist might distort your appearance.) And many are upbeat. There is a faith that hard work will be rewarded, that progress can be made. (There is actually no evidence of this progress in the book.) And the people have real individual lives, are defined as individual people. The poor in the U.S. often seem to generalize themselves--or allow themselves to be generalized--and become one of a group; the Annawandians do not. Some of this is the Threepenny Opera quality about them. A major character is, indeed, a one-legged prostitute. A girl, Manju, actually goes to college--the only one from the slum who ever has--and wanders, saint like, through the slum holding little classes for the children. The thief Sunil develops a skill: He is a thief who is unafraid of heights. A man owns some horses and he whimsically paints them like zebras.
There is a tension that develops between the people and their circumstance, a frisson that is echoed by the author's style. She never scolds or preaches. Somehow Boo allows the reader to escape being drowned in trash and excrement with a curious mixture of the specific and distance that elevates the struggle with the pointed ambivalence practiced by legal-conscious reporters. Like the Coen Brothers, she makes the sordid dramatic and not personal. With understatement, litotes and restraint the story becomes less horrible. A deaf-mute candidate for local leadership is "ideal for keeping secrets, less so for campaigning." Regarding the graft in the municipality, "the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade." A hut was "painted a color of green no longer known in the fields." A prisoner is "beaten in the name of an interrogation." A court stenographer does not know the language the defendant is speaking. On a sham school, "[t]he schools Asha and Manju were pretending to run made the income derived from a real school unnecessary." Perhaps as a result of constant practice skirting American libel law, she is always indirect, wry without being snide. She walks the difficult line between tragedy and comedy and spares the reader without torturing the subjects.
This book is often placed in the "inequality" debate and has encouraged the growth of India's economy to be seen in its context, like a social work problem. But, unlike its topic, this book seems to have accidentally outgrown its aspiration. Historically art's great topics have required the struggles of great men. In the last several hundred years topics and their actors have been freed but it takes poignancy and fine writing to make Rosencrantz interesting. Even more is required when your scene is a graft-ridden cesspool. Somehow Boo and her subjects make it all worthwhile.
It is a lot more.
The nonfiction narrative is loosely hung on a court case involving the entrepreneurial Husain family who has been accused of instigating the self immolation suicide of their neighbor, Fatima, a one legged prostitute and virago. The case is merit-less but the shameless graft and corruption of everyone involved in the so-called justice system is beyond imagination. And the injustice and horrors of the case more than blends with equal horrors in the everyday lives of the Annawadians. The main income sources of the slum is trash-picking as everyone sifts through the refuse of the airport. Metal--a nail or a pin--is prized but anything that can be recycled is of value. Occasionally someone will hit the jackpot, a job at the airport, but usually the graft involved prevents any meaningful income from being earned. The less successful scavengers--if brave--will steal, risking fatal retribution from the guards. The most successful are the middlemen, like the Husains, who buy the scrap for resale. Starvation, illness, drunkenness, despair, envy and suicide are endemic. Every child is rat-bitten and rats are a normal part of the local diet.
The other affliction is corruption, which seems to be the only true quality that is spread equally among the citizenry. It is appalling. The courts, the police, the commissioners, the politicians, the businessmen, the non-profits--everything with any organizing principle is a lie. Graft underlies every transaction. The only schooling are scams to defraud the government. "Corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained."
Yet in spite of this depressing life, the Annawadians have distinctive and admirable qualities. (Admittedly, being constantly scrutinized by a Western journalist might distort your appearance.) And many are upbeat. There is a faith that hard work will be rewarded, that progress can be made. (There is actually no evidence of this progress in the book.) And the people have real individual lives, are defined as individual people. The poor in the U.S. often seem to generalize themselves--or allow themselves to be generalized--and become one of a group; the Annawandians do not. Some of this is the Threepenny Opera quality about them. A major character is, indeed, a one-legged prostitute. A girl, Manju, actually goes to college--the only one from the slum who ever has--and wanders, saint like, through the slum holding little classes for the children. The thief Sunil develops a skill: He is a thief who is unafraid of heights. A man owns some horses and he whimsically paints them like zebras.
There is a tension that develops between the people and their circumstance, a frisson that is echoed by the author's style. She never scolds or preaches. Somehow Boo allows the reader to escape being drowned in trash and excrement with a curious mixture of the specific and distance that elevates the struggle with the pointed ambivalence practiced by legal-conscious reporters. Like the Coen Brothers, she makes the sordid dramatic and not personal. With understatement, litotes and restraint the story becomes less horrible. A deaf-mute candidate for local leadership is "ideal for keeping secrets, less so for campaigning." Regarding the graft in the municipality, "the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade." A hut was "painted a color of green no longer known in the fields." A prisoner is "beaten in the name of an interrogation." A court stenographer does not know the language the defendant is speaking. On a sham school, "[t]he schools Asha and Manju were pretending to run made the income derived from a real school unnecessary." Perhaps as a result of constant practice skirting American libel law, she is always indirect, wry without being snide. She walks the difficult line between tragedy and comedy and spares the reader without torturing the subjects.
This book is often placed in the "inequality" debate and has encouraged the growth of India's economy to be seen in its context, like a social work problem. But, unlike its topic, this book seems to have accidentally outgrown its aspiration. Historically art's great topics have required the struggles of great men. In the last several hundred years topics and their actors have been freed but it takes poignancy and fine writing to make Rosencrantz interesting. Even more is required when your scene is a graft-ridden cesspool. Somehow Boo and her subjects make it all worthwhile.
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