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

by Katherine Boo

July 17, 2008—Mumbai

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.

“Everything around us is roses” is how Abdul’s younger brother, Mirchi, put it. “And we’re the shit in between.”

For Abdul, words came stiff and slow. Where he excelled was in the sorting—the crucial, exacting process of categorizing the purchased waste into one of sixty kinds of paper, plastic, metal, and the like, in order to sell it. Of course he would be fast. He’d been sorting since he was about six years old, because tuberculosis and garbage work had wrecked his father’s lungs.

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

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. The Wahhabi sect in which he’d been raised opposed birth control, and of Zehrunisa’s ten births, nine children had survived.

the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet’s poor.

Mumbai

In a small, sweltering plastic-molding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads into ornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors—smiling ducks and pink cats with jewels around their necks that they couldn’t imagine anyone, anywhere, buying.

Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life.

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.

The leaves of the tree were gray, like many things in Annawadi, on account of sand and gravel blowing in from a concrete plant nearby. You won’t die to breathe it, old-timers assured red-eyed new arrivals who fretted about the spoon-it-up air. But people seemed to die of it all the time—untreated asthma, lung obstructions, tuberculosis. Abdul’s father, hacking away in their hut, spoke of the truer consolation. The concrete plant and all the other construction brought more work to this airport boom-town. Bad lungs were a toll you paid to live near progress.

Asha understood plenty. She was a chit in a national game of make-believe, in which many of India’s old problems—poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor—were being aggressively addressed. Meanwhile the other old problems, corruption and exploitation of the weak by the less weak, continued with minimal interference. In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

Across the city, gangs of young Maharashtrians had begun beating up migrants from the North—bhaiyas, as they were called—in hope of driving them out of the city and easing the scramble for jobs. Though Abdul had been born in Mumbai, the fact that his father had come from the North qualified the family as targets, and not abstractly.

the anti-migrant campaign had been orchestrated in the overcity by an aspiring politician—a nephew of the founder of Shiv Sena. The upstart nephew wanted to show voters that a new political party he had started disliked bhaiyas like Abdul even more than Shiv Sena did.

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.

Manju was always relieved to hear of local scandals in which her mother played no pivotal role.

No onlooker asked, Why fix a house when the airport authority might demolish it?

As Manju became consumed with shame and worry over her mother’s affairs, Meena could only offer perspective. Her own parents and brothers beat her regularly, with force, and the big expeditions punctuating her housekeeping-days were visits to the public tap and the toilet. In Meena’s opinion, any mother who financed her daughter’s college education, rarely slapped her, and hadn’t arranged her marriage at age fifteen could be forgiven for other failings.

Meena was all for bands, amps, and twinkling lights. This would be her last Navratri before starting a life she dreaded, as a teenaged bride in a Tamil Nadu village.

In November, the waste market in free fall, the Tamil who owned the game shed tried to help the scavengers grasp why their trash was worth so little. “The banks in America went in a loss, then the big people went in a loss, then the scrap market in the slum areas came down, too”: This was how he explained the global economic crisis.

2008

Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of. He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.

Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. “We try so many things,” as one Annawadi girl put it, “but the world doesn’t move in our favor.”

Abdul could control many of his desires, but not this one. He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.

Gold pots flaked away, revealing mud pots.

In newspaper interviews, Gaikwad spoke of his search for unschooled children and his hope of giving them the sort of education that would lift them out of poverty. His less public ambition was to divert federal money to himself. Working with community development officials across the city, he found frontmen to receive government funds in the name of educating children. Then he and his colluders would divvy up the spoils.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

“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.”

Author’s Note starts here

The events recounted in the preceding pages are real, as are all the names.

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.