So Behind the Beautiful Forevers is about a community of garbage pickers that live in a slum just behind the airport in Mumbai. Katherine Boo is a very matter of fact storyteller and allows the characters---who are real people--not characters---to tell the story themselves, she observes and occasional draws us to the larger picture but is remarkably unobtrusive.
It reminded me of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance which was a book that broke my heart. The level of corruption in India was what got to me the most here though (in A Fine Balance I thought it was fiction!)---here everyone is out to get something out of nothing. The garbage pickers sorting through the cities refuse---paying people to take their garbage, the police extorting money out of people living in squalid shacks, the schools set up for the poor so that they can send photos to the charities that are funding them before they shut them down and pocket the money. At some point Katherine Boo says that corruption is seen not as a negative but as a positive in this society since it is the only way to get ahead. It was a society I knew nothing about and I wanted to read more.
So I have plunged into Beautiful Thing about bar dancers in Mumbai, young girls who dance in clubs to Bollywood music and other unsavory activities. A step up from the garbage pickers in one sense, a step down in many others. So far---not so good. Rather than staying invisible the author has already inserted herself at various points. The language is trying very hard to be lyrical and perhaps mimic the voices of the girls but it just reads as forced. Example: "Such words, if repeated often enough, might result in the gift of a TV, perhaps even a mini fridge stocked with silver-foil mithai rich with ghee and thick with nuts, or of a new wardrobe, everything within 'matching-matching' and sequined one hundred percent, so at night in the light of the creamy street bulbs, the bar dancer walking from her flat to an auto-rickshaw would cause strolling couples and children playing cricket between cars to stare, for she would appear like she was draped in diamonds sparkling so bright they could only be living, breathing things."
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This book awakened me in so many ways. I was awakened as a reviewer, feeling so compelled after finishing the last word to write this review before work. I was awakened as a citizen of this world, to the end result of a world economy that preys on so many and benefits so few. I was awakened in my humanity, as you felt so compelled to reach out to the people in this story, only to realize that a page separates you from them and your relationship ends as you turn the last page. Katherine Boo's magnificently heartbreaking story, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers", is all at once an allegory, an indictment, a Dickensian tale, and a horror story, a true pager turner of our times.
Taking place in the Annawadi slum near the Mumbai airport, Boo spent years with two different families, tracing their paths and lives through poverty so abject that its a wonder people survive. She writes of kids receiving nightly rat bites that become so infected that children lose their hair. People literally sleep on the pavement, some children sleeping on their bags of collected garbage so that no one steals from them. A sewage lake that becomes, among other things, a place to bathe. These details pepper Boo's story, without comment or grandiose flourish. They are simply as they are, and heartbreaking nonetheless.
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