Book: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. The photo on the cover is riveting. It is of a young girl in a light printed dress sitting on her haunches in a puddle. Her eyes are closed and her head is raised to the sky. The slum shacks are in the immediate background and high-rises in the far back.

The "undercity" is one of many in Mumbai, one of thousands worldwide. It is called Annawadi and the author spent time reporting and videotaping there. She says, "My reporting wasn't pretty, especially at first. To Annawadians, I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping and running afoul of the police. However, residents had concerns  more pressing than my presence. After a month or two of curiosity, they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives."

It is therefore a true story of families and their children living in abject poverty in the shadow of an airport and its high-rise hotels. They are a community unto themselves, like your community and my community, but with the differences of economics and opportunities. We have so much; they have so little. Some survive; a few move on; most stay and live lives of tenuous security and nearly constant struggle for the most basic of daily necessities. But, somehow, after reading for awhile, it became an odd normalcy (their lives) and I was able to continue and was not affected as emotionally as I was in the beginning.

I feel strongly that all of us who live safe and secure lives with clean abundant water, modern plumbing, enough food, jobs, a guaranteed education, relatively clean air and access to health care should read books like this one. Kids in schools should read it. It isn't a book offering solutions or explanations and blame so much as a literary photograph of our global neighbors. We need to know about them.

What also struck me was that the good intentions and policies put in place to ease the lives of the poorest of the poor were so often derailed because of greed and graft. Monies were diverted, plans were
never implemented, power was misused.

So these slum dwellers with their complicated lives continue, persevere, love their kids (or not), keep hoping, keep struggling. There are schools and politicians' promises and police...sort of...sometimes, but    more often than not, illusory and ineffective. Not in every case, but most of the time.

"Inside the hut, Abdul was bagging up shards of brick; the cooking shelf was now installed. For some days, Abdul had imagined his mother's pleasure at seeing it done. Instead, she was being held by the police. The floor was half rubble, half wet cement, awaiting tiles his father had not yet bought. The installment-plan television, stored in the brothelkeeper's house, had been broken by the man's son. Abdul's little brothers and sisters had been frightened by all the shouting, and his father, surveying the wreck of his home, appeared to be losing his mind."

"It was a display so abject that Sunil felt prepared to disdain it, until the guard emptied two large trash cans at Sonu's feet. Then Sunil saw the cunning. In the middle of unruly, cutthroat Cargo Road, a slight teenage boy had all to himself, behind security gates, a wealth of plastic cups, Coke cans, ketchup packets, and aluminum foil trays from a canteen where Air India works ate."

"To jumpstart his system, he saw he'd have to become a better scavenger. This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair and gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brother kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die."

Scavenging the stuff we all throw away every day is one way the kids earn money but "Big recycling concerns took most of the luxury-hotel garbage ("a fortune beyond counting" as Abdul put it in a whisper). And on the streets, new municipal garbage trucks were rolling around, as a civic campaign fronted by Bollywood heroines attempted to combat Mumbai's reputation as a dirty city."

Barbara Ehrenreich: "Boo's book is one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I've ever read."

David Sedaris: "It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as a novel."

Ramachandra Guha: "Without question the best book yet written on contemporary India. Also the best work of narrative nonfiction I've read in twenty-five years."

Tracy Kidder: "Garbage pickers and petty thieves, victims of gruesome injustice--Boo draws us into their lives, and they do not let us go. This is a superb book."