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

by Katherine Boo

coward: Abdul said it of himself. He knew nothing about eluding policemen. What he knew about, mainly, was trash.

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.

Some people wished Abdul & his family ill. Some thought they were higher than others. Some because of Hindu-Muslim resentments.

Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo, and the usual belly-down splay of alcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small, unspookable boy from Nepal. He was sitting, arms around knees, in a spangly blue haze by the sewage lake—the reflected neon signage of a luxury hotel across the water. Abdul didn’t mind if the Nepali boy saw him go into hiding. This kid, Adarsh, was no spy for the police. He just liked to stay out late, to avoid his mother and her nightly rages.

Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea so fiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form.

A modest, missable presence was a useful thing in Annawadi, the sumpy plug of slum in which he lived.

Here, in the thriving western suburbs of the Indian financial capital, three thousand people had packed into, or on top of, 335 huts. It was a continual coming-and-going of migrants from all over India—Hindus mainly, from all manner of castes and subcastes. His neighbors represented beliefs and cultures so various that Abdul, one of the slum’s three dozen Muslims, could not begin to understand them.

335 huts in a tiny space...3000 people consisting primarily of Hindus. Abdul himself is a Muslim.

Annawadi was also magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich people’s garbage.

Annawadi was richly perched to sell useable garbage.

In the new century, as India’s economy grew faster than any other but China’s, pink condominiums and glass office towers had shot up near the international airport. One corporate office was named, simply, “More.” More cranes for making more buildings, the tallest of which interfered with the landing of more and more planes: It was a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the overcity, from which wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums.

LOTS OF INFO backgrd HERE

vendible excess—a few pounds of the eight thousand tons of garbage that Mumbai was extruding daily.

Vendible garbage...a few pounds of the 8k tons of garbage created daily!

Abdul would be waiting at his rusty scale. In the hierarchy of the undercity’s waste business, the teenager was a notch above the scavengers: a trader who appraised and bought what they found.

His profit came from selling the refuse in bulk to small recycling plants a few miles away.

Abdul waited for the garbage laden people to come to him...he chose what he wanted to sell as recyclables.

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.

Abdul's mother was the hagler, but Abdul was the sorter.

Although profane bargaining was the norm in the waste business, he felt his mother acceded to that norm with too much relish.

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.

There was too much wanting at Annawadi lately, or so it seemed to Abdul. As India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention. Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.

Asha, a fighter-cock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her teenaged daughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become Annawadi’s first female college graduate.

What Abdul wanted was this: a wife, innocent of words like pimp and sisterfucker, who didn’t much mind how he smelled; and eventually a home somewhere, anywhere, that was not Annawadi. Like most people in the slum, and in the world, for that matter, he believed his own

dreams properly aligned to his capacities.

To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another.

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.

Keep rewinding, back seven more months, and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. It was about as hopeful a season as there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet’s poor. A country dizzy now with development and circulating money.

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.

The slum had been settled in 1991 by a band of

laborers trucked in from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport. The work complete, they decided to stay near the airport and its tantalizing construction possibilities. In an area with little unclaimed space, a sodden, snake-filled bit of brush-land acros...

Annawadi—the land of annas, a respectful Tamil word for older brothers.

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.

only six of the slum’s three thousand residents had permanent jobs.

Only 6 of the slum's 3000 residents had oermanent jobs.

Annawadians liked to talk about the hotels and the depraved things that likely went on inside. One drug-addled scavenger talked to the hotels: “I know you’re trying to kill me, you sisterfucking Hyatt!” But Rahul’s accounts had special value, since he didn’t lie, or at least not more than one sentence out of twenty. This, along with a cheerful disposition, made him a boy whose privileges other boys did not resent.

As the population of Greater Mumbai pressed toward twenty million, competition for jobs and housing was ferocious, and Shiv Sena blamed migrants from other states for taking opportunities that rightfully belonged to the natives.

The friendship of Rahul and Mirchi transcended ethnic and religious politics, though. Mirchi sometimes raised his fist and yelled the Shiv Sena greeting, “Jai Maharashtra!” just to make Rahul laugh. The two ninth graders had even started to look alike, having decided to let their bangs grow into long floppy forelocks, which they brushed out of their eyes like the film hero Ajay Devgan.

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.