Photo: Ben Goldstein/Studio D
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
By Katherine Boo
288 pages;
Random House
Annawandi, "a sumpy plug of slum," is tucked between the Mumbai airport
and a fleet of luxury hotels, a rejoinder to the story of the "new,"
prospering India. Here on reclaimed bog land, Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Katherine Boo spent a little over three years among 3,000
squatters packed into 355 shanties to produce Behind the Beautiful
Forevers. This is one stunning piece of narrative
nonfiction; it not only reports on some of the world's poorest people
and their dizzying resourcefulness and criminality but portrays them in
all their humanity. There's a brothel owner and goat keeper who can't
keep either of his quarries in line; an ambitious woman named Asha who's
trying to jump-start her career in corruption; and, most memorably,
"One Leg," a Mumbai mother with, yes, one leg, who's notorious for a
"sexual need as blatant as her lipstick" and who's not above setting
herself on fire and framing her neighbors for the crime. Boo's prose is
electric as she illustrates, with affection, the contradictions of this
Annawandian community—the enviable kinship, the casual
backstabbing, the drive to survive; in one heartbreaking scene, a boy
steals the sandals off his sleeping father's feet and sells them for
food. Even more impressive is how Boo explores the most difficult
question of all: In a country booming with development, what keeps these
slumdwellers so poor?
— Parul Sehgal