Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

by Katherine Boo

“Stupid pimp with the brain of a lemon!” she’d say in mock outrage. “You think my babies will go hungry without your cans? I ought to take down your pants and slice off what little is inside!”

His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul’s ear. “Wake up, fool!” she said exuberantly. “You think your work is dreaming?” Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family’s most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January’s income being pivotal to the Husains’ latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine.

True, only six of the slum’s three thousand residents had permanent jobs. (The rest, like 85 percent of Indian workers, were part of the informal, unorganized economy.) True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake’s edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slumdwellers who didn’t fry rats and eat weeds, like Abdul, a felt sense of their upward mobility.

Manju looked at her mother with compassion, not comprehension, when Asha tried to describe it.

“So do I have to teach you all over again how to make the rotis round?” Asha teased her daughter, merrily holding one of them up. “Come on! Who will marry you when you make such ridiculous bread?”

But by then, the habit of not asking anyone for anything had become a part of who he was.

These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.

Manju wanted to be a teacher when she finished college, and her great fear was that, in a fit of pique, her mother would wed her to a village boy who didn’t think that a woman should work. That she’d die doing the things she was doing now: sweeping the dirt that had blown in from outside, mopping, then sweeping the new dirt that had blown in while she mopped.

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.

Only in the hours when the men came—husband at work, daughters at school—did the part of her body she had to offer feel more important than the part of it she lacked.

Young girls in the slums died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth. Sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.

“Mother, I want a wife just like you—she’ll do all the work, and I’ll do nothing.”

Annawadi’s lack of censorious, conservative Muslims allowed her to call out her husband when necessary, just as it had allowed her to work to feed her children. Such freedoms would be painful to give up.

Asha’s husband, Mahadeo,

Her eight-year-old daughter, Noori, had been especially clear in her account: that she’d watched through a hole in the family hut as her mother set herself on fire.

“Record made under clear light of tubelight,”

Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. “Out of stock today” was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in.

Annawadi’s Asha was on the phone. Abdul was terrified then. She was probably calling to make the beatings worse, so that his mother would change her mind about paying her off. Suddenly, Officer Thokale was standing in the unofficial cell. “Asha says this boy didn’t set anyone on fire, doesn’t cause any trouble in Annawadi, so there’s no point in hitting him,” he told his colleagues with the straps. Abdul was let up, and neither he nor his father was beaten again. Abdul’s shackles came off, too. Abdul tried to make sense of this reprieve. Asha’s son Rahul was Mirchi’s best friend. Maybe Rahul had convinced his mother to protect Abdul. Or maybe Asha had noticed Abdul over the years, sorting his trash on the maidan—seen he was a hardworking kid, a quiet loser who didn’t deserve to be brutalized. Abdul’s father had a better guess. The call was probably a show conducted for father and son, who could be counted on to report it to Zehrunisa. Asha and Thokale often worked together. Now Thokale was demonstrating his power to ensure that Abdul and his father would not be severely injured in police custody—what he’d assured Zehrunisa in exchange for money. For Asha, the show would prove to the Husains that she did have influence at Sahar Police Station, and increase the likelihood that she would get a payoff, too. But Karam wasn’t about to explain the economics of reprieve to his traumatized son. He thought it better for the boy to believe that someone had noticed his frantic labor o...

Sick water buffalo nosed for food through mounds of wet, devalued garbage, shitting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled.

The police were going to charge Abdul as an adult, because he looked like one, and because Zehrunisa lacked any proof of his age. Hence he would be sent to Arthur Road Jail along with his father. Zehrunisa didn’t know Abdul’s age herself. Seventeen was what she’d said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.

In a certain morning light, Manju could see the name MEENA traced faintly in a broken piece of cement just outside the toilet. “Only in that light,” she said, “and even then, it’s barely there.” Another, lesser Meena lived in Annawadi, and a man who loved that Meena had once carved her name on the inside of his forearm. Manju thought he’d probably written MEENA in the wet cement, too. It stood to reason. But she preferred to believe that Meena’s own finger had made the letters, and that the first girl born in Annawadi had left some mark of herself on the place.

Instead, 2009 arrived in the slum under a blanket of poverty, the global recession overlaid by a crisis of fear. More Annawadians had to relearn how to digest rats. Sonu deputized Sunil to catch frogs at Naupada slum, since Naupada frogs tasted better than sewage-lake ones.

Abdul went on. “I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.’

His daughters were back at Annawadi now. He’d removed them from Sister Paulette’s care upon finding bruises on their arms and legs. They’d been elated to leave. “Always we had to say ‘Thank you, Jesus’ to a picture of a white man,” his younger daughter said. “It was so boring!”

Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had.

She had identified an opening in land speculation, of which there was much at Annawadi lately. The apartments promised to displaced airport slumdwellers would be tiny—269 square feet—but would have running water, which made them a valuable asset in a city starved of affordable formal housing. Hence overcity people had been buying up shacks in the slums and concocting legal papers to show that they were longtime Annawadi residents.

Manju loved her computer, as did the children she had taught in her slum school. They popped in regularly to contemplate its splendor. The children still called her “Teacher” and looked at her expectantly, unwilling to believe that their education was over. But the schools Asha and Manju were pretending to run made the income derived from a real school unnecessary.

The previous week, a Congress Party truck had pulled up outside Annawadi, and workers unloaded eight stacks of concrete sewer covers. A crowd amassed on the road, excited at the pre-election gift. Thanks to Priya Dutt’s party, the slumlanes would have no more open sewers. A few days later, the Congress Party workers returned in the truck. Instead of installing the sewer covers, they reclaimed them. The covers were needed in one of the district’s larger slums, where the prop might influence a greater number of voters. Older Annawadians laughed as they watched the truck depart. The blatancy was refreshing.

“For some time I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting,” was how he put it. “But now I’m just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.”

Abdul swatted him. “I lose my head, listening to you,” he said. He felt old, sitting next to someone who still had ideas.

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?”