Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katheriine Boo

This nonfiction book tells of the lives of people living in the Annawadi slum in Mumbai,  The stories are based on people the author met when doing research about the slum.

The title refers to a billboard that is adjacent to the slum which offers wealthy Indians a "Beautiful forever" home.... This promise is in stark contrast to the filth and harshness of the lives of the residents of the slums.

This was a very difficult book to read.  I know of the poverty and the slums in India, but this author has brought it to life in devastating detail.  She tells of the lives of several families, all of whom are trying to survive by harvesting and/or stealing garbage and selling it to recyclers to  make money.  This job is risky, as there is competition for the garbage and it can be dangerous, even deadly to try to steal material from the airport and other building adjacent to the slums.  There is violence, illness, and death.  Girls fret about pending arranged marriages... some people can't take it anymore and commit suicide.

People compete with each other, are jealous of each other when some seem to have more wealth than they do.  Some cheat each  other.  Public officials, including police insist on cuts of the profits or bribes when they arrest people.  Homeless people get injired and people walk on buy, others are murdered but the police don't bother to investigate.

In one family, a Muslim family that seems to be modestly more succesful than others, the father and son are arrested for driving their neighbour to self-imolation.  This is untrue but the man and his son are beaten by police and spend several months in jail.  After years they are eventually exonerated but not until theiir business and reputations are in ruins.  The book talks about government  and business corruption that is rampant

Despite the harshness and seeming hopelessness of their plight, many people do seem to think that a better life might be possible.  Some people cheat and steal from others to try to advance.  But despite all the tragedy and sadness,  some people do worry about and care about each other.

"In the age of globalization -- an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age - hope is not a fiction.  Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly.  But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becaomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has ba way of grinding down individual promise.  Ideally, the government eases some fo the instability.  Too often, weak government itensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capital".

"It is easy, from a safe distancem to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vieon scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.  The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many try to be - all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faces with the dilemma....If the house is crooked and crumbling and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

This book was heartbreaking but it will remain in my thoughts for a long time!