Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (edition 2012)

A wonderfully readable non fiction book about life in Anawadi, a Mumbai slum near the airport where poverty would be a step up from the survival life led. The narrative focuses on Abdul and his family, Fatima the one legged neighbour, garbage recycling as a way of life and the corruption of politicians, police and even neighbours. ( )

Wrenching, infuriating, unforgettable characters. Hard to believe it is nonfiction, but it is. The author researched in the Annawadi slum near the Mumbai airport for years. ( )

I thought this book was a novel, until I finished and heard Katherine Boo describe the work and her process of getting the story. I was so taken with the characters and their lives juxtaposed with events from the world outside, I never suspected for a minute it didn't come out of someone's imagination. A great book. ( )

Katherine Boo has written a powerful and affecting book as she tells the story of individuals who live in one of Mumbai’s many overcrowded, dangerous and filthy slums. In her afterword, Boo reminds us that although India has become a powerful nation and an economic force with which to be reckoned, its population represents one third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet. Though she gives us this shocking statistic and there is no doubt that she has done extensive research and legwork, her talent lies in her writing. She presents us with the stories of a few individuals in a specific slum and in doing so gives us a reality that is at once intimate and personal as well as providing a sense of the collective experience. It is also noteworthy I think, that these stories unfold without any sense that the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist that Boo is, is reporting. Through dialog, narrative, and description, Boo brings drama to this story in a way that is usually the reserved domain of the best novelists.

Boo tells the stories of individuals who live in the Annawadi slum located behind Mumbai’s international airport. The juxtaposition of this modern airport and its neighboring ultra-modern, luxurious hotels with this filthy, disease-ridden, garbage laden and overpopulated village abutting what residents call the sewage “lake” is striking and symbolic of the issues Boo attempts to highlight.

Boo chronicles the story of Abdul and his family as they stand accused of beating their crippled neighbor and setting her on fire. The family’s desperate attempts to maneuver through a corrupt criminal justice and legal system that works almost exclusively on bribery (if it works at all) bring them into close contact with another family in the slum – that of Asha, the politically connected and striving slum leader and her family. Their stories and their struggles to survive are often horrifying and always pitiful.

The title comes from a billboard that separates the slum from the airport hotels. The billboard advertises a flooring company, whose slogan Beautiful Forevers, is repeated over and over again. It is the perfect symbol and the perfect title for this terrific and heartbreaking book. ( )

Are honesty and decency a prerogative of the middle and upper classes? The struggle for the peopleof Annawadi to get out of the slums and better themselves is made almost impossible by the amount of corruption in the system. To survive they have to be corrupt themselves. A horrifying book indeed . ( )