To add salt to my literary wounds: That slum is located in Mumbai, the city of my birth, one I’ve written about frequently, and until now, claimed to know and understand.
It turns out I knew little. And understood even less.
“Behind the Beautiful Forevers,’’ divided into four sections, introduces us to an unforgettable group of rag pickers and other marginalized, impoverished residents of Annawadi, located on the edge of the city’s gleaming new international airport. At the center of the tale is a poor family wrangling with the system after being falsely accused in a horrific tragedy involving a neighbor.
These people reveal their true lives to an American woman who spends so many months and years with them - who literally swims in a sewage lake that adjoins the slum - that they forget she is recording and filming them. That kind of immersion journalism - plus the thousands of hours spent poring over hard-to-get government and court records - has produced a brilliant, unforgettable book about “life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity.’’
Hope, you ask? What kind of hope can exist in a place where 15-year-olds commit suicide by consuming rat poison? Where the bleeding, tormented body of a young scavenger hit by a car lies writhing on the pavement while hundreds of people walk past him. Where the police and politicians and judges and caseworkers shake down the slum’s desperate residents for every last, sodden rupee.
Therein lies the genius of this book. “Beautiful Forevers’’ tells the story of the slum against the backdrop of the New India, the shiny India Inc. of booming stock markets and dazzling growth. But to the struggling, striving residents of Annawadi, globalization is not a promise but a taunt, a tease. The billboards, the movie star endorsements, the ads on TV, all sell the promise of transformation, of unimaginable success.
