Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  There were days when he spent more on gasoline, looking for work, than he earned from commissions, but there were good days, too, humping down the road, his tiny truck overloaded with trash. There was no place he wouldn’t go for money, the farther from Annawadi the better. He went over the state border to Vapi, in Gujarat. He went to Kalyan, to Thane. But mostly he stayed in Mumbai.

  Driving his circuit late at night, he sometimes imagined not returning to his family in a slum he now thought of as “just another kind of prison”—imagined pressing forward and disappearing into some distant, perhaps better, unknown. Eventually, though, his city would jerk him back to his senses. The buses and SUVs barreling toward him, swerving. The children stepping obliviously from the roadsides into traffic, as Fatima’s daughter was always doing, as if they didn’t know the value of their lives.

  “One mistake at the wheel, and it will finish me,” Abdul would complain to his mother upon the inevitable return to Annawadi. “It’s so much tension out there—the mind cannot wander. Every second you have to be alert.”

  In truth, he felt powerful moving through midnight traffic, his tired eyes narrowed to pinpoints. If there was no mastering this vast, winking city, he could still master a few feet of gummy road.

  Early one morning, Abdul was perched on a black garbage bag by the video shed, contemplating another fruitless trip to Dongri and the “Anything to move?” routine of the evening to follow, when Sunil nestled into the garbage bag beside him. They hadn’t seen each other in a while, with Abdul away, driving. Sunil leaned in close, as an almost-friend will sometimes do.

  “Lend me two rupees for something to eat?”

  Abdul reared back. “Ugh! Talking to me so close and you haven’t washed your mouth! It’s horrible. And your face. Go wash your face! I get scared just looking at you.”

  “Okay, okay, I will,” Sunil said, laughing. “Just got up.”

  “Early for a thief.”

  “Not doing that anymore.”

  Garbage prices had been inching back up, police beatings had been intensifying, and security guards at the airport had stripped him naked and shaved his head. Sunil had decided to return to scavenging. In fact, this decision to scavenge was why he was sitting with Abdul on a garbage bag on the road. The Tamil who owned the game shed was angry at the loss of Sunil’s stolen goods and wouldn’t let him sit there anymore.

  The blinky boy, Sonu, had almost forgiven Sunil for becoming a thief, but not for his habit of waking after dawn. Sunil wanted to join up with Sonu again, and was working on the early rising. He was also developing a formula for not hating himself while doing work that made him loathsome to his society. Eraz-ex worked, Sunil had discovered, but not for very long.

  “Always I was thinking how to try to make my life nicer, more okay, and nothing got better,” Sunil said. “So now I’m going to try to do it the other way. No thinking how to make anything better, just stopping my mind, then who knows? Maybe then something good could happen.”

  Abdul swatted him. “I lose my head, listening to you,” he said. He felt old, sitting next to someone who still had ideas. When the slum got demolished, they’d probably never see each other again. Sunil wanted to start his life over somewhere outside the city, where there were trees and flowers, but Abdul thought it likelier that Sunil would end up sleeping on city pavement. These last days of Annawadi might be the best days Sunil would get.

  A large, glossy leaf gusted across the road and landed at Abdul’s feet. The filth in the air had barely browned it. He reached for it, took a rusty razor blade from his pocket, sliced the leaf into tiny pieces, then blew into his palm. Green confetti settled on Sunil’s eyebrows, in his lashes, and on top of his rough-shorn head.

  “So what now?” asked Sunil after a minute.

  “What now? So wash your mouth and go to work! Already you’re late. What’s going to be left on the ground at this hour?”

  “Okay, bye,” said Sunil, jumping up, brushing off the leaf bits, and starting to run. Abdul watched him go. Weird and decent kid—he wished the boy luck, and half an hour later Sunil would find it, on a narrow ledge high above the Mithi River.

  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. But for now, eleven cans, seven empty water bottles and a wad of aluminum foil rested on a long spit of concrete, awaiting the first child with the courage to claim them.

  Ten years ago, I fell in love with an Indian man and gained a country. He urged me not to take it at face value.

  When I met my husband, I’d been reporting for years from within poor communities in the United States, considering what it takes to get out of poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. When I came to India, an increasingly affluent and powerful nation that still housed one-third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet, parallel questions persisted.

  I quickly grew impatient with poignant snapshots of Indian squalor: the ribby children with flies in their eyes and other emblems of abjectness that one can’t help but see within five minutes of walking into a slum. For me—and, I would argue, for the parents of most impoverished children, in any country—the more important line of inquiry is something that takes longer to discern. What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor?

  And another set of questions nagged, about profound and juxtaposed inequality—the signature fact of so many modern cities. (The scholars who map levels of disparity between wealthy and impoverished citizens consider New York and Washington, D.C., almost as unequal as Nairobi and Santiago.) Some people consider such juxtapositions of wealth and poverty a moral problem. What fascinates me is why they’re not more of a practical one. After all, there are more poor people than rich people in the world’s Mumbais. Why don’t places like Airport Road, with their cheek-by-jowl slums and luxury hotels, look like the insurrectionist video game Metal Slug 3? Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?

  I wanted to read the book that would begin to answer some of my questions, because I felt I couldn’t write it, not being Indian, not knowing the languages, lacking a lifetime of immersion in the context. I also doubted my ability to handle monsoon and slum conditions after years of lousy health. I made the decision to try in the course of an absurdly long night at home alone in Washington, D.C. Tripping over an unabridged dictionary, I found myself on the floor with a punctured lung and three broken ribs in a spreading pool of Diet Dr Pepper, unable to slither to a phone. In the hours that passed, I arrived at a certain clarity. Having proved myself ill-suited to safe cohabitation with an unabridged dictionary, I had little to lose by pursuing my interests in another quarter—a place beyond my so-called expertise, where the risk of failure would be great but the interactions somewhat more meaningful.

  I had felt a shortage in nonfiction about India: of deeply reported accounts showing how ordinary low-income people—particularly women and children—were negotiating the age of global markets. I’d read accounts of people who were remaking themselves and triumphing in software India, accounts that sometimes elided early privileges of caste, family wealth, and private education. I’d read stories of saintly slumdwellers trapped in a monochromatically miserable place—that is, until saviors (often white Westerners) galloped in to save them. I’d read tales of gangsters and drug lords who spouted language Salman Rushdie would envy.

  The slumdwellers I’d already come to know in India were neither mythic nor pathetic. They were certainly not passive. Across the country, in communities decidedly short on saviors, they were improvising, often ingeniously, in pursuit of the new economic possibilities of the twenty-first century. Official statistics offered some indication of how such
families were faring. But in India, like many places in the world, including my own country, statistics about the poor sometimes have a tenuous relation to lived experience.

  To me, becoming attached to a country involves pressing uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens. The better one knows those people, the greater the compulsion to press. Although I had no pretense that I could judge a whole by a sliver, I thought it would be useful to follow the inhabitants of a single, unexceptional slum over the course of several years to see who got ahead and who didn’t, and why, as India prospered. There being no way around the not-being-Indian business, I tried to compensate for my limitations the same way I do in unfamiliar American territory: by time spent, attention paid, documentation secured, accounts cross-checked.

  The events recounted in the preceding pages are real, as are all the names. From the day in November 2007 that I walked into Annawadi and met Asha and Manju until March 2011, when I completed my reporting, I documented the experiences of residents with written notes, video recordings, audiotapes, and photographs. Several children of the slum, having mastered my Flip Video camera, also documented events recounted in this book. Devo Kadam, one of Manju’s former pupils, was an especially passionate documentarian.

  I also used more than three thousand public records, many of them obtained after years of petitioning government agencies under India’s landmark Right to Information Act. The official documents—from agencies that included the Mumbai Police, the state public health department, the state and central education bureaucracies, electoral offices, city ward offices, public hospitals, morgues, and the courts—were crucial in two ways. They validated, in detail, many aspects of the story told in these pages. They also revealed the means by which government corruption and indifference erase from the public record the experiences of poor citizens.

  When I describe the thoughts of individuals in the preceding pages, those thoughts have been related to me and my translators, or to others in our presence. When I sought to grasp, retrospectively, a person’s thinking at a given moment, or when I had to do repeated interviews in order to understand the complexity of someone’s views—very often the case—I used paraphrase. Abdul and Sunil, for instance, had previously spoken little about their lives and feelings, even to their own families. I came to my understanding of their thoughts by pressing them in repeated (they would say endless) conversations and fact-checking interviews, often while they worked.

  Although I was mindful of the risk of overinterpretation, it felt more distortive to devote my attention to the handful of Annawadians who possessed a verbal dexterity that might have provided more colorful quotes. Among overworked people, many of whom spent the bulk of their days working silently with waste, everyday language tended to be transactional. It did not immediately convey the deep, idiosyncratic intelligences that emerged forcefully over the course of nearly four years.

  When I settle into a place, listening and watching, I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.

  While I spent time in other slums for comparative purposes, I chose to focus on Annawadi for two reasons: because of the sense of possibility there, as wealth encroached on every side, and because its scale was small enough to allow door-to-door household surveys—the vagrant-sociology approach. The surveys helped me start to differentiate between isolated problems and widely shared ones, like the disenfranchisement of Annawadi’s migrants and hijras.

  My reporting wasn’t pretty, especially at first. To Annawadians, I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle, given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping and running afoul of the police. However, residents had concerns more pressing than my presence. After a month or two of curiosity, they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives.

  The gifted and generous Mrinmayee Ranade made this transition possible. She was my translator in the first six months of this project, and her deep intelligence, scrupulous ear, and warm presence allowed me to come to know the people of Annawadi, and for them to know me. Kavita Mishra, a college student, also translated ably in 2008. And beginning in April of that year, Unnati Tripathi, a brilliant young woman who had studied sociology at Mumbai University, joined the project as a translator. She was skeptical of a Westerner writing about slumdwellers, but her attachments to Annawadians proved greater than her reservations. She quickly became a fierce co-investigator and critical interlocutor; her insights litter this book. Together, over the course of three years, we wrestled with the question of whether days in rat-filled Annawadi garbage sheds and late-night expeditions with thieves at a glamorous new airport had anything to contribute to an understanding of the pursuit of opportunity in an unequal, globalized world. Maybe, we firmly concluded.

  I witnessed most of the events described in this book. I reported other events shortly after they occurred, using interviews and documents. For instance, the account of the hours leading up to Fatima Shaikh’s self-immolation, and its immediate aftermath, derives from repeated interviews of 168 people, as well as records from the police department, the public hospital, the morgue, and the courts.

  As I reported this and many other aspects of the narrative in which facts were hotly contested, I found Annawadi children to be the most dependable witnesses. They were largely indifferent to the political, economic, and religious contentions of their elders, and unconcerned about how their accounts might sound. For instance, Fatima’s daughters, present during the arguments that ended with their mother’s burning, were consistent in their exoneration of Abdul Husain, as were other Annawadi children on whose sharp eyes and wits I had learned, over time, to rely.

  Being present for events or reporting them soon afterward was crucial, since as years passed, some slumdwellers recalibrated their narratives out of fear of angering the authorities. (Their fear was not irrational: Sahar police officers sometimes threatened slumdwellers who spoke to me.) Other Annawadians rearranged narratives for psychological solace: giving themselves, in retrospect, more control over an experience than they had had at the time. It was considered inauspicious and counterproductive to dwell on unhappy memories, and Abdul spoke for many of his neighbors when he protested one day, “Are you dim-witted, Katherine? I told you already three times and you put it in your computer. I have forgotten it now. I want it to stay forgotten. So will you please not ask me again?”

  Still, from November 2007 to March 2011, he and the other Annawadians worked extremely hard to help me portray their lives and dilemmas. They did so even though they understood that I would show their flaws as well as their virtues, and with the knowledge that they wouldn’t like or agree with everything in the book that resulted.

  I feel confident in saying they didn’t participate in this project out of personal affection. When I wasn’t dredging up bad memories, they liked me fine. I liked them more than fine. But they put up with me largely because they shared some of my concerns about the distribution of opportunity in a fast-changing country that they loved. Manju Waghekar, for instance, spoke frankly about corruption in the hope, however faint, that doing so would help create a fairer system for other children. Such choices, given the socioeconomic vulnerability of those who made them, were simply courageous.

  Just as the story of Annawadi is not representative of a country as huge and diverse as India, it is not a neat encapsulation of the state of poverty and opportunity in the twenty-first-century world. In every community, the details differ, and matter. Still, in Annawadi, I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.

  In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredi
ctability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weak government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capability.

  The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is a shrug. How does that happen? How—to use Abdul’s formulation—do children intent on being ice become water? A cliché about India holds that the loss of life matters less here than in other countries, because of the Hindu faith in reincarnation, and because of the vast scale of the population. In my reporting, I found that young people felt the loss of life acutely. What appeared to be indifference to other people’s suffering had little to do with reincarnation, and less to do with being born brutish. I believe it had a good deal to do with conditions that had sabotaged their innate capacity for moral action.

  In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.