Behind the Beautiful Forevers: life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity

by Katherine Boo

ABDUL AND HIS NEIGHBORS were squatting on land that belonged to the Airports Authority of India. Only a coconut-tree-lined thoroughfare separated the slum from the entrance to the international terminal.

One corporate office was named, simply, “More.”

Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned his snot black.

Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life.

In the sheet days, as now, Abdul believed his mother, Zehrunisa, to be right about most things. She was tender and playful with her children, and her only great flaw, in the opinion of Abdul, her eldest son, was the language she used when haggling. Although profane bargaining was the norm in the waste business, he felt his mother acceded to that norm with too much relish. “Stupid pimp with the brain of a lemon!” she’d say in mock outrage.

Abdul didn’t dare voice the great flaw of his father, Karam Husain: too sick to sort much garbage, not sick enough to stay off his wife.

as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday,

Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables.

But most of them would gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread.

The habit killed time and gave him theories, one of which came to prevail over the others. It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught. And while he regretted not being smarter, he believed he had a quality nearly as valuable for the circumstances in which he lived. He was chaukanna, alert.

Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed.

Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family’s most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son.

Seventeen years later, almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks. Rather, the Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when, around the same moment as the small slum’s founding, the central government embraced economic liberalization. The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding.

Annawadians also dumped things there: most recently, the decomposing carcasses of twelve goats.

lol...

He would take his catch to the Marol market to be ground into fish oil, a health product for which demand had surged now that it was valued in the West.

Once, working on this shortcoming, he’d floated a tale about having been inside the Intercontinental himself—how a Bollywood movie called Welcome had been filming there, and how he’d seen Katrina Kaif dressed all in white. It had been a feeble fiction. Rahul had seen through it immediately. But Rahul’s latest report would allow Abdul’s future lies to be better informed.

All those swollen rat bites on his cheeks, on the back of his head.

BY 3 P.M., ABDUL WAS FACING down the bottle caps, a major sorting nuisance. Some had plastic interior linings, which had to be stripped out before the caps could be assigned to the aluminum pile. Rich people’s garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic.

It took Abdul more than an hour to go three miles,

Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he

hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “Sa’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.

He had made a profit of five hundred rupees, or eleven dollars a day

That job had been to clean public toilets and falsify the time sheets of his benefactor and other sanitation workers, so that they could take other jobs while collecting their municipal pay.

Mumbai’s public hospitals were supposed to do such operations for next to nothing, but the hospital surgeons wanted under-the-table money.

A government-sponsored women’s self-help group looked somewhat promising, now that she knew how to game it. The program was supposed to encourage financially vulnerable women to pool their savings and make low-interest loans to one another in times of need. But Asha’s self-help group preferred to lend the pooled money at high interest to poorer women whom they’d excluded from the collective—the old sewer cleaner who had brought her a sari, for instance.

Asha thought the family could have done better, financially, if they’d left Lakshmi alone and run her as a circus act.

Some of the men flashed knives to keep Sunil out of promising dumpsters; more often, they waited until he had filled his bag, then kicked his ass and stole it.

And on the streets, new municipal garbage trucks were rolling around, as a civic campaign fronted by Bollywood heroines attempted to combat Mumbai’s reputation as a dirty city.

Subhash Sawant wasn’t low-caste, though. He’d simply manufactured a new caste certificate, a new birthplace, and a new set of ancestors to qualify for the ballot.

ANNAWADIANS AGREED THAT Manju was nicer than she had to be, given her looks, her mother’s political connections, and her punishing schedule.

These obligations were fulfilled by sleeping only four hours a night, and rarely impinged on her temperament.

The central government called schools like Manju’s “bridge schools.” Her brief was to provide two hours of daily lessons to child laborers or girls kept home by household responsibilities, in order to get them acclimated to, and excited about, formal education. Sparking enthusiasm wasn’t hard. As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.

“At Marol, we play, take recess, play again, then have lunch,” was how the Nepali boy, Adarsh, described the municipal school curriculum.

“No car will kill you! No god will save you! You went in the road, roaming loose like that, and now you will die at my hands!”

“Children, quickly now,” she called, clapping her hands as she turned into one of the slumlanes. “Phut-a-phut! It’s late!” Her official position was that having to round up her students was a bother. Shouldn’t they show up voluntarily? In fact she liked being outside, peering into doors and collecting snatches of neighborhood gossip, in these minutes when the mantle of teacher protected her from rumor.

Her stepmother reserved the food of the house for her own children.

Today’s smile was the go-away version, which indicated that she was on lockdown, allowed out only to fetch water or use the toilet. Her crime, as usual, was a failure to hold her tongue with her brothers and parents. Why couldn’t she listen to the boys in the maidan when they were talking about the hotels? Why couldn’t she go to school? During the day, she did her household duty, but at night fury sometimes overcame her, and her mother and brothers would feel compelled to beat it out of her.

She had no interest in playing the shuffling, grateful role that the charitable types expected of the disabled.

She had an IV bag with a used syringe sticking out of it, since the nurse said it was a waste to use a fresh syringe every

The Sahar Police had a more typical holding pen elsewhere in the station. The room where Abdul and his father were kept was what repeat inhabitants called the “unofficial cell”—a large office where police paperwork was supposed to get done. As a matter of official record, the Husains had not been arrested, were not in custody.

The idea was to get terrified prisoners to pay everything they had, and everything they could secure from a moneylender, to stop a false criminal charge from being recorded.

35 percent of Fatima’s body upon admission to Cooper became 95 percent at her death

Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.

He thought it better to start the day by acknowledging that it was going to be just as dull as the days preceding it. That way, you wouldn’t be disappointed.

Most of the other boys in his barrack were Muslim—across India, Muslims were overrepresented in the criminal justice system—and when they sat on the floor to eat, they laughed about the terrible food. They called the Children’s Home the chillar home, meaning small change, practically worthless.

Two boys who looked to be seven years old had been picked up while sweeping floors in a cheap hotel. They reminded Abdul of his little brothers, and he felt emotional being around them. He couldn’t see why the state had taken them from their parents. Being so poor that you had to work so young seemed like punishment enough.

Only in detention had it occurred to him that drudge labor in an urban armpit like Annawadi might be considered freedom. He was gratified that boys from other urban armpits agreed.

moneylenders became unofficial village chiefs.

Vidarbha bureaucracy indicated that modern means of suicide—drinking pesticide, mainly—had supplanted self-immolation.

A massive national scheme to increase rural incomes was also underway, guaranteeing unemployed villagers a hundred days a year of publicly subsidized work.