Behind the Beautiful Forevers unfolds in a slum on the western edge of Mumbai ringed by luxury hotels and a gleaming international airport. Annawadi is a community of 3,000 squatters living in, or among, 350 shacks on the edge of a sewage lake. The town’s main industry is garbage. Every day, thousands of waste pickers fan out to from the undercity to harvest the trash of the overcity.
The author, Katherine Boo, is one of the foremost writers on poverty in the United States. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is her first book, based on years of field research corroborated with thousands of public records.
The title comes from a billboard ad for Italianate tiles, which promises a floor that will be “beautiful forever.” Floor tiles are a big deal in Annawadi. To replace a filthy concrete floor with tile is a status symbol.
Annawadi was settled in 1991, just as the Indian government began a program of social and economic liberalization. “Seventeen years later, almost no one in the slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks,” Boo writes. On paper, the Annawadians are counted among the 100 million Indians who are said to have been liberated from poverty by globalization.
“The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding,” Boo writes wryly. It’s not clear how the Indian government measures poverty. Evidently, jobs, housing, running water, healthcare, sanitation, education, and police protection are beside the point.
Many Annawadians are significantly better off than they were before the Indian economic boom, but it is absurd to say they've been lifted out of poverty. Moreover, based on Boo's description, it is difficult to imagine how they could rise much higher.
Boo doesn’t say it in so many words, but the implication is clear. As far as Annawadi is concerned, the supposed neoliberal economic miracle is as much a fraud as the phony coroners’ reports that chalk up the bleeding corpses of teenage scrap metal thieves dumped on the airport’s manicured grounds to tuberculosis.
Everyone in the book is desperately poor, but, relatively speaking, the main characters come from the upper crust of Annawadi society.
Asha is the human face of corruption. Hers is a Horatio Alger story with less moral uplift and more realpolitik. Asha lifted herself out of grinding rural poverty, despite having been married off to a hopeless drunk. For her, as for many slum-dwellers, Annawadi represents opportunity compared to what they left back home.
Asha is proof that you can get ahead in Annawadi, provided you work hard and never play by the rules. When you think about how miserable Asha and her children would have been otherwise, it's hard to begrudge her success, even though she hurts a lot of people. Then again, it becomes clear that she's upholding the system that makes it impossible for anyone else to succeed on the straight and narrow.
The 40-year-old mother of three is nominally a kindergarten teacher, but that’s just a patronage appointment from her allies in the anti-Muslim Shiv Sena party. Asha’s teenage daughter Manju insists on teaching the neighborhood children, to her mother’s chagrin. The gig was supposed to be a sinecure, like a lot of public school teaching jobs in India. The children of Annawadi could go to free public elementary schools, but the schools are so bad that ambitious families scrimp to send their brightest kid to private school.
Asha dreams of becoming Annawadi’s first female slum lord. As the story begins in early 2008, she sees an opening: the current slumlord is distracted with his new business, which involves painting zebra stripes on horses and renting them out for birthday parties.
A slumlord is an unofficial of liaison between the authorities and the neighborhood. Amongst other things, Asha helps the police extort bribes from her neighbors in exchange for a piece of the action.
Asha has already done well for herself. She has a tile floor, a cell phone, and the first television set in Annawadi. But most remarkable of all, she is sending her daughter, Manju, to college. The girl is poised to become the first female college grad in Annawadi history.
Manju is a sweet and gentle young woman who is mortified by her mother’s crassness and corruption. “Manju was always relieved to hear of local scandals in which her mother played no pivotal role,” Boo writes.
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