Illustration by Angélica Atzín García Rodríguez.
Choosing your favourite book is like picking you favourite child. So I may as well pick the youngest because they need the most help. Behind the Beautiful Forever: Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is the last book I read that shook me, rarely it happen but from time to time you are left awe struck by simple words on a page. The story these words form is not a simple one. It concerns a slum called Annawadi and its inhabitants nestled between the international Airport and growing hotels and skyscrapers of Mumbai. The poverty of these slums is magnified by the burgeoning opulence which surrounds them like manure between roses as Boo puts it.
There are many threads to this tale and each character the story follows has their own rich web of wants, needs, desires and justifications. The story follows Abed and his family who are slowly digging their way out of poverty by buying up scrap from the road boys who collect what is discarded or left unattended by the over city to make ends meet. Their success creates jealousy among the other slum dwellers and it finds its release when their neighbour sets herself ablaze and blames her desperate act on threats from the family. This cripple attempts to destroy a family by self immolation.
While all this goes on the boys who make the streets of the slum their home pick trash to keep fed and dulled with antifreeze and would be slum lord Asha exploits the misery of others to gain currency and influence through corruption. The book is so deeply layered and embodies the idea that reality resists simplicity. Every characters inner life is so deeply illuminated there are no easy answers and even poverty is not one dimensional, among the poorest of the poor there are still the haves and have nots.
Corruption is everywhere in Annawadi is everywhere and some like Asha use it to dig their way out. It’s like a crab bucket as each person tries to make their way out others pull them down. It highlights a need for community among the poor and makes clear that capitalistic societies are hugely effective at pulling people apart and having your neighbours hold the ropes.
The most truly astonishing thing about the book is the fact that it is nonfiction, a fact I only stumbled upon when reading the acknowledgements. Boo spent years in the slums observing and holding numerous interviews and collecting government documents. All the people are real and the beauty of the book is that it is all pieced together as a novel would be. The story resists the narrative arch we are all used to and that slightly unnerved me as I read because life does not have easy beginning middle and ends that all make sense we have been trained to accept. It gives the reader insight to a world so far removed from their experience and makes clear some of the most pressing human injustices of the day. It is not an easy book to read but you will carry it with you. Awareness is a must if we want change anyting but it is a curse too.
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Daniel Brennan.
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