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

by Katherine Boo

“Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that,” 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.

Sunil thought that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly—the kind that could be ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he’d come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.

trick of shadow and light-slant on the wall of his hut. But standing back to back with Sunita, it was confirmed. He was taller. As a thief, Sunil Sharma had finally started to grow.

who remembered enough not to need telling.

But ugly words were unlikely to send them to prison.

But at the stand, as in Annawadi, Priya wore her damage like a slash across the face.

This outside noise seemed to be sucked in by the ceiling fan, churned and flung outward by its metal blades.

Kehkashan stopped leaning forward, started sagging in her seat. She was so poised the day Fatima’s husband took the stand.

They’d fought regularly about her lovers, the force with which she beat the children, the force with which he beat her when drunk.

Fatima’s suicide had thieved him of the chance, however remote, of finding peace with his wife and giving his beloved daughters a happy home.

He didn’t want them to grow up knowing that their mother had burned herself, lied, and died.

Abdul Shaikh thought this was correct, though he didn’t have a great mental reserve of Fatima smiles to reflect on.

But her performance was over, and no one was filming.

Abdul’s father said that what Kasab had done was wrong—that the Koran didn’t entitle Muslims to kill innocent civilians, some of whom had also been Muslim.

That had to be less stressful than being beaten when you were innocent. The

The best government is the one that gets out of the way.

by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had.

But here was the interesting thing. 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.

Before telling the woman off, Abdul’s father checked his facts with his lawyer. He wanted to make sure that what he’d gleaned about legal process from reading Urdu newspapers was correct. It was. Finally, a small triumph of information over corruption.

Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation—the idea that their country’s rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life. In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.

It was beautiful—like he was walking into an Urdu calendar.

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.

The questions had even entertained her: What to try, whom to try, next?

Gold pots flaked away, revealing mud pots.

What you don’t want is always going to be with you What you want is never going to be with you Where you don’t want to go, you have to go And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die.

When not reflecting on the cause of past failures, she brooded on the smallest of slights:

And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die.

Like most Annawadians, they wanted to be part of the exhilarating moment when politics was forced from its cryptic quarters and brought into the open air.

The blatancy was refreshing.

To the excluded Annawadians, political participation wasn’t cherished because it was a potent instrument of social equality.

But in the someplace for which Asha seemed already to have departed, she didn’t hear.

She was a respectable woman in the land of make-believe, who also happened to be late for a date.

“Oh ho, nice,” concurred one of the eunuchs sullenly, as the new Asha stepped into the dark.

few weeks later, the children found a still more exciting diversion: journalists bearing cameras with long black snouts. Suddenly, Annawadi was in the news.

The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.

their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all.

Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked.

Outside the courthouse, a city garbage truck rolled over a dog. It yelped and died, and Kehkashan and her father decided the courthouse canteen was a better place to wait.

Thus, prosecution has miserably failed to establish guilt against accused beyond reasonable doubt.”

By the end of 2010, she and Abdul had concluded that a suspended state between guilt and innocence was his permanent condition.

man, if sensible, didn’t make bright distinctions between good and bad, truth and falsehood, justice and that other thing.

“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.”

Driving his circuit late at night, he sometimes imagined not returning to his family in a slum he now thought of as “just another kind of prison”—imagined pressing forward and disappearing into some distant, perhaps better, unknown. Eventually, though, his city would jerk him back to his senses. The buses and SUVs barreling toward him, swerving.

If there was no mastering this vast, winking city, he could still master a few feet of gummy road.

He was also developing a formula for not hating himself while doing work that made him loathsome to his society.

“Always I was thinking how to try to make my life nicer, more okay, and nothing got better,”

“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? May...

He felt old, sitting next to someone who still had ideas.

But for now, eleven cans, seven empty water bottles and a wad of aluminum foil rested on a long spit of concrete, awaiting the first child with the courage to claim them.