Books: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (2012) by Katharine Boo

Katharine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is not a book about the India of palatial hotels or the Taj Mahal at sunrise. Far from it.

Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker, accompanied her husband to Mumbai in 2007. Over the course of the next three years, she observed and reported about the residents of Annawadi, one of the city’s most notorious slums bordering the airport. “Forevers,”

which reads more like a novel than non-fiction, focuses on the hardships of a few of the families she comes to know.

Seventeen-year-old Abdul Hussein makes a living picking and sorting through garbage from hotel airports and tourist establishments, reselling what he can. He eventually earns enough money to renovate the hovel he shares with his siblings and parents.

Fatima, a one-legged prostitute who lives next door, becomes jealous of the Husseins’ good fortune. So she decides to commit suicide by pouring kerosene over her head and lighting herself on fire, but not before framing Abdul and his father. They are arrested and thrown into jail without trial, and can hope to be released only by declaring themselves guilty or having Abdul’s mother bribe the judge.

Meanwhile, another resident, Asha, has ambitions of becoming a slumlord. She hitches her star to the extreme rightwing Marathi chauvinist party. When Asha eventually tires of politics, she takes a private sector job where she skims the company’s profits.

Daily life in slums like Annawadi is so unpredictable it grinds down any individual promise or ambition. “We try so many things," as one character puts it, "but the world doesn't move in our favor."

What do residents fear most? That the airport authority will bulldoze their homes, since they are immigrants from up north and are living in Annawadi illegally. As Boo writes, “Soon, the taxi drivers who littered this ledge with garbage would be pushed elsewhere, as the new airport fulfilled its talismanic role: becoming an elegant gateway to one of the twenty-first century's most important world cities.”

In Boo’s India, nobody goes on a game show, nobody becomes a millionaire, nor does anyone dance to ”Jai Ho.” Instead what we see is that due in part to India’s global ambitions, the gap between rich and poor is becoming even wider. It’s a sobering view of a country with the fifth highest GDP in the world—where 60 percent of its residents live on less than $3.10 a day.

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