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

by Katherine Boo

The central government funded Manju’s “bridge school” and hundreds like it in Mumbai through contracts with nonprofit organizations. Although public funds for education had increased with India’s new wealth, the funds mainly served to circulate money through the political elite. Politicians and city officials helped relatives and friends start nonprofits to secure the government money. It was of little concern to them whether the schools were actually running.

The eunuchs, who were migrants from Tamil Nadu, saw little difference among the political parties, but they were eager to vote nonetheless. Their problem was that district elections officials sometimes failed to process registration forms submitted by migrants and other reviled minorities. While Asha and her husband had voter cards and I.D. numbers that allowed them each two votes, in two different precincts, many non-Maharashtrians in Annawadi had yet to secure their one vote. Zehrunisa and Karam Husain were local record holders in disenfranchisement, having spent seven years trying unsuccessfully to register to vote. To the excluded Annawadians, political participation wasn’t cherished because it was a potent instrument of social equality. The crucial thing was the act of casting a ballot. Slumdwellers, who were criminalized by where they lived, and the work they did, living there, were in this one instance equal to every other citizen of India. They were a legitimate part of the state, if they could get on the rolls.

As I reported this and many other aspects of the narrative in which facts were hotly contested, I found Annawadi children to be the most dependable witnesses. They were largely indifferent to the political, economic, and religious contentions of their elders, and unconcerned about how their accounts might sound. For instance, Fatima’s daughters, present during the arguments that ended with their mother’s burning, were consistent in their exoneration of Abdul Husain, as were other Annawadi children on whose sharp eyes and wits I had learned, over time, to rely. Being present for events or reporting them soon afterward was crucial, since as years passed, some slumdwellers recalibrated their narratives out of fear of angering the authorities. (Their fear was not irrational: Sahar police officers sometimes threatened slumdwellers who spoke to me.) Other Annawadians rearranged narratives for psychological solace: giving themselves, in retrospect, more control over an experience than they had had at the time. 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?” Still, from November 2007 to March 2011, he and the other Annawadians worked extremely hard to help me portray their lives and dilemmas. T...

In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weak government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capability.

The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is a shrug. How does that happen? How—to use Abdul’s formulation—do children intent on being ice become water? A cliché about India holds that the loss of life matters less here than in other countries, because of the Hindu faith in reincarnation, and because of the vast scale of the population. In my reporting, I found that young people felt the loss of life acutely. What appeared to be indifference to other people’s suffering had little to do with reincarnation, and less to do with being born brutish. I believe it had a good deal to do with conditions that had sabotaged their innate capacity for moral action.