‘The Beautiful Forevers’: A true-life ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
The hit movie Slumdog Millionaire made viewers around the world aware of the poverty and slums in Mumbai, India. In her outstanding first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo takes a microscope to that world. The result is original, detailed and so unbearably sad, it makes Slumdog seem almost like a romantic comedy.
Boo centers her book on a specific slum called Annawadi. Though small in size — 3,000 people — Annawadi possesses symbolic significance because of its location, next to the sparkling new Mumbai airport and the adjacent luxury hotels which serve the financiers traveling to India's equivalent of Wall Street.
But Westerners, charity workers and middle-class or wealthy Indians are not the stars of Boo's narrative.
She focuses on a small group of Annawadi residents. They are very poor, very desperate, and very human, similar to the slum dwellers you'd find in the gin alleys of 18th-century London. The book is less about India and more about how the struggle to stay alive affects the heart and the soul.
Boo's too-real "characters" include the quiet but perceptive Abdul, a Muslim teenager; and the ambitious, middle-aged Asha, who is the woman to see if you have a problem in Annawadi.
Only six residents of the slum have a regular job. Many are like Abdul — one of nine children — who spends 14 hours a day picking through the garbage created by the luxury hotels and airport, then selling it. The slum is scheduled for demolition because it illustrates the grinding poverty that conflicts with India's image as an emerging economic superpower.
Abdul's hard work and relative success incites envy in a neighbor named Fatima. Her suicide results in Abdul, his sister and his father being falsely charged with murder. This tragedy allows Boo to illuminate the corruption of the police and legal community as well as the seething resentments between Muslims and Hindus in Mumbai.
The most dynamic character is Asha, a sari-wearing Godfather. Married to a drunk, she is the mother of the first college-educated girl in Annawadi, the lovely, good-hearted Manju.
Asha's family is doing well: A TV, private education, all of which Asha provides by shaking down her neighbors and networking with corrupt pols and cops. Sometimes there's sex.
Beautiful brings alive an almost unimaginably harsh world through the stories of individuals trying to make their way in a place few of us can imagine.