‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ a brilliant narrative nonfiction

Katherine Boo is an American citizen married to an Indian; she spent three years in research in the slum, the undercity and interviewing the people who live there and are the subjects of this book.

The scene is Mumbai (once Bombay) in India as that Asian giant is beginning to be a player on the world market.

Annawadi, the undercity of the title is a slum, a makeshift settlement of tin shanties that has sprung up on lands around the international airport where workers employed in the construction and expansion of the airport itself and the luxury hotels erected on the roads leading to the airport put up shacks with discarded construction materials.

Over time more and more of the desperately poor moved in, erecting their own shacks. To protect arriving airline travellers’ eyes from the eyesore of slums surrounding both the airport under expansion and the luxury hotels, tall aluminium fences had been erected on the roads to the city so that the only trace of the slums behind the wall was the smoke from the cooking fires, and from the other direction approaching the airport was a concrete wall plastered with advertisements for Italian floor tiles and the corporate slogan “Beautiful Forever”, “Beautiful Forever”, “Beautiful Forever” …

But it is a time of hope, even in the undercity. Teenage Abdul (he never knows exactly how old he is) is a Muslim, he is the sole breadwinner of his large family, supporting them on what he earns by recycling garbage – or rather, he is a middleman who pays the scavengers that sift through the trash around the airport and pick up the cans and bottles, and anything else that can be recycled and take it to Abdul who takes it to the recycling plant in his two wheeled cart.

Abdul’s is but one story of how people survive in the undercity. There are tensions (remember, this book is non-fiction) as some are jealous of Abdul and his family who seem to be on the way up.

Also looking to improve is Asha whose daughter may be the first college student to graduate and get out of the slum …

Fatima, who lived in the other half of Abdul’s family dwelling with her daughters and husband, had only one leg, the other ended in a flipper below the knee. When she quarrelled with Zehrunisa, Abdul’s mother, Fatima accused Zehrunisa of beating her and when that failed, (and after Zehrunisa paid Asha to vouch for her), Fatima poured kerosene over herself and set herself on fire, calling out to the neighbours to save her – which they did, whereupon Fatima accused Abdul of setting fire to her.

Fatima dies of an infection in the hospital as Abdul is being beaten in a police cell … at which point I’m afraid I could read this harrowing true story no longer because, for me, it was too depressing.

But the writing is magnificent. Please, if you have a stronger stomach than mine, don’t let this deter you from rushing down to Nigel R Khan Bookseller to buy this truly brilliant book rated by O – The Oprah Magazine as a ‘stunning piece of narrative nonfiction”, by the Wall Street Journal as a ‘landmark book’ and by Junot Diaz writing in The New York Times Book Review as “A book of extraordinary intelligence (and) humanity … beyond groundbreaking”.