After years in a Mumbai slum, writer Katherine Boo found scant hope ...

By EDWARD M. EVELD

The Kansas City Star

By EDWARD M. EVELD The Kansas City Star

It's an unseen place in full view, a collection of huts near the luxury hotels on the road to Mumbai's airport. At least it has a name, Annawadi, home to 3,000 slum dwellers, a label that's about as dismissive as any we attach to fellow human beings. Inconsequential. Unknown, and best kept that way.

Katherine Boo, reporter and author, spent more than three years in Annawadi, watching and listening, taping and keystroking, until she felt she understood the place, felt she knew the people and their stories deeply enough to comprehend and relay their lives.Boo's nonfiction book, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers, " is the current selection of the FYI Book Club.Its chief thread follows a calamity in the Husain family, whose breadwinner is the young Abdul. Another follows Asha, who jockeys for a kind of slum leadership spot, and her overachieving daughter Manju. Their stories examine the often warped workings of Indian society, inside and outside the slum.It's unlikely that Hollywood or Bollywood will be calling for the screenplay. There are no hidden angels or unplucked geniuses in Boo's stark account of the Indian "undercity." There are strivers but no winners.Here is our edited conversation with Boo, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius grant." We reached her by phone in London.Q. What led you to Annawadi?A. It was in 2007 and I was in several slums in Mumbai, thinking about whether it was possible to write about the people there. A government official wanted to show me this microlending project, and we went from one slum to another. The last slum of the day was Annawadi.Many of the people being gathered for me to see weren't any part of this project, just random people. Basically, I was watching a show set up by the official.That was the day I met Asha. She really interested me. And I met Manju, her daughter, who spoke a little English and was the only person there going to college. I said to Manju in a whisper, "When I get a translator, I'm coming back." Two months later I went back.What were your first impressions of Annawadi?It's in this area of the city that is just exuding wealth and opulence, on the road to the international terminal of the Mumbai airport. On one side of the road is the gleaming, modern Hyatt and a very fancy Sheraton and on the other side is the Intercontinental.Annawadi is down a rut road, this web of hand-built huts and lanes clotted with people. And all of these huts were essentially beachfront property, sitting on this vast lake of sewage and chemicals. Sewage and sickness. It was a public health catastrophe, but for the people there, getting up everyday, they weren't wringing their hands about it.They were thinking about how to get by another day.Yes, which required just an endless amount of imagination and resilience. Only six people had permanent work, small jobs. But they had some place to go every day. They were the celebrities. The people who didn't have jobs, they would try to get work at a construction site or sort and sell garbage and recyclables. And it wasn't a problem solved once.That was Abdul's business, trash.One of the major forms of self-employment - collecting trash and recyclables. Abdul is a middleman, a little higher on a very short totem pole. It's highly stigmatized work in India. He buys the trash brought to him and sorts it, even biting into the plastic to get the taste and smell of the polyurethane to know its grade. He's been doing it since he was 6, and he's incredibly proficient. He has managed to lift a family of 11 out of subsistence, which is something.One awful aspect of their lives is the infection and disease that come with the sewage lake and the slum. Another awful aspect in a very different way is how society, from the slums on up, operates on bribes and extortion. And not just with officials but among regular people.The relentlessness of it was staggering to me. One of the things that's true across societies, when the legitimate means of social mobility break down, people will find other means to advance the fortunes of their families. Abdul encounters a doctor while in prison, and the doctor wants 2,000 rupees to help him: money from a child in prison. Even Abdul is shocked. The doctor is on the make. The police are on the make.I think what happens is when the prosperity in some quarters is so immense, many people feel that it's this close to them, then the opportunity and the urge is quite strong to extort the less powerful.Did you ever have the feeling that you just wanted them to rise up, band together in some kind of protest?I was waiting for it to happen. I was waiting for heroic leaders from a nonprofit to come in. I wanted to write that story. But I'm writing nonfiction. Often the people in the charities became one more obstacle the people had to work around.When we think about the nature of public protest across the planet, there's this sense that the masses are tweeting and taking to the public square. But when people are working frantically to make life slightly better for themselves, they don't have the leisure to come to the public square.And the residents of the slums aren't seeing their situation as a problem of political action or market forces. The problem they see is that their neighbor has a job and they don't have one, and so the neighbor is the problem. It's a very painful zero-sum game going on.Evidence of that are the suicides, particularly among young people.A friend of a young woman who committed suicide said, "We try so many things and the world doesn't work in our favor."There's this conceit that suffering is ennobling, that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But there's a point for some people, that if they can't figure a way to live a life of more decency and freedom, they're going to opt out. To see these vibrant, young people simply give up was one of the most painful things I experienced.Now would be a good time to tell about any beauty you found there.I try to show the immense power of some of the relationships there. Yes, there was a tremendous amount of suspicion and competition, but there also were sustaining and beautiful friendships. Between Manju and Meena was one. Another was between Sunil, a young scavenger of garbage, and his best friend, Sonu. They had this wonderful relationship as two loser kids doing their best in the slums. That was a beautiful thing to be around.And in a world that could be quite harsh, there was the power of family love. Abdul's mother, the way she tried to protect her young children from catastrophe was quite beautiful to see.How did you go about trying to blend in?People thought I had taken a wrong turn at the international airport. I'd walk into Annawadi and suddenly 100 people would be surrounding me. I thought at first I wouldn't be able to do the kind of reporting I do. But eventually they stopped worrying about me. They had other things to do. I was just the journalist with a laptop, sitting every night in the garbage shed. You can't be fully invisible, but you try to stay out of the way.Part of why this worked was because of the amount of time you spent there.Between three and four years, from November 2007 to about June of 2011. And, yes, what would I have known in three or four months? I wouldn't have known anything. There were many things I didn't realize until much later. I didn't realize for some time the (corrupt and sometimes sexual) nature of Asha's relationship to the police and politicians. That came as a shock to me.In the writing, you left yourself out of the story. Why was that?That was a decision I didn't make lightly. I know that many writers would have done it differently. I wanted every single sentence to bring you closer to someone you might never meet otherwise, close to the mind and thinking and daily life of people who are not educated writers.And speaking of the writing, there doesn't seem to be an uncrisp sentence in the book.I've always felt that the best writing in nonfiction comes not from a capacity for metaphor or the pretty words in your vocabulary as much as from the facts you have to convey.I can write a truer sentence the better I've reported it. I've had this great luxury of time in my reporting. Videotape and audiotape helped immensely for me. I started to use these gradually over the years and now I wouldn't be without them. That and the work with public documents give you confidence you got it right.I'm a constant reviser and self-editor. And I've got a subject that not everyone wants to read about. I'm very mindful of that. I know I have this limited space to reach the reader.To reach Edward M. Eveld, call 816-234-4442 or send email to eeveld@kcstar.com.An excerptThis is from the prologue of "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, " by Katherine Boo (Random House). The title refers to an advertisement on a concrete wall between the slum and the airport road. The ad is for Italianate floor tiles, and the corporate slogan runs the length of the wall: "BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER."Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father. In a slum hut by the international airport, Abdul's parents came to a decision with an uncharacteristic economy of words. The father, a sick man, would wait inside the trash-strewn, tin-roofed shack where the family of eleven resided. He'd go quietly when arrested. Abdul, the household earner, was the one who had to flee.Abdul's opinion of this plan had not been solicited, typically. Already he was mule-brained with panic. He was sixteen years old, or maybe nineteen - his parents were hopeless with dates. Allah, in His impenetrable wisdom, had cut him small and jumpy. A coward: Abdul said it of himself. He knew nothing about eluding policemen. What he knew about, mainly, was trash. For nearly all the waking hours of nearly all the years he could remember, he'd been buying and selling to recyclers the things that richer people threw away.Now Abdul grasped the need to disappear, but beyond that his imagination flagged. He took off running, then came back home. The only place he could think to hide was in his garbage.He cracked the door of the family hut and looked out. His home sat midway down a row of hand-built, spatchcock dwellings; the lopsided shed where he stowed his trash was just next door. To reach this shed unseen would deprive his neighbors of the pleasure of turning him in to the police.He didn't like the moon, though: full and stupid bright, illuminating a dusty open lot in front of his home. Across the lot were the shacks of two dozen other families, and Abdul feared he wasn't the only person peering out from behind the cover of a plywood door. Some people in this slum wished his family ill because of the old Hindu-Muslim resentments. Others resented his family for the modern reason, economic envy. Doing waste work that many Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large family above subsistence.The open lot was quiet, at least - freakishly so. A kind of beachfront for a vast pool of sewage that marked the slum's eastern border, the place was bedlam most nights: people fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending goats, playing cricket, waiting for water at a public tap, lining up outside a little brothel, or sleeping off the effects of the grave-digging liquor dispensed from a hut two doors down from Abdul's own. The pressures that built up in crowded huts on narrow slum lanes had only this place, the maidan, to escape. But after the fight, and the burning of the woman called the One Leg, people had retreated to their huts. ...It was as safe a moment as Abdul was going to get. He bolted for the trash shed and closed the door behind him.The Katherine Boo FileAge: 47Home: Washington, D.C., London and MumbaiEducation: Bachelor's in English from Barnard CollegeFamily: Husband, Sunil Khilnani, writer and political historianAwards: Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, Washington Post (2000), MacArthur Fellowship (2002), National Magazine Award for Feature Writing (2004)The FYI Book ClubThe Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a "book of the moment" selection every six to eight weeks and invites the community to read along.Members of FYI and the library staff chose Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" for the current book club selection.This story first appeared in The Star on June 30, 2012.

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/11/15/3918518/living-in-squalor-after-years.html

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