Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a spellbinding story by Katherine Boo. The story is a shining and at the same disturbing testimony on the lives of desperate people living in the slums. Katherine Boo, in the novel, captures the spirit of the world in a setting where inhabitants aspire to see a section of them endure beyond death. The story takes place in the Mumbai slum. Mumbai slum is an under-city located close to an international airport in India. They story describes the lives of several people who reside at the slums and their efforts to run away from the life. The story describes the life of the people who reside at the slum between 2007 and 2011. The living condition of the people in Annawadi is poor, with citizens leaving atop each other. Resources within the locality are scarce and people are forced to survive without food and water for days. Water, for instance, is only available to the people for two hours a day. Some of the families are poor and are forced to go days without food and other basic needs such as good shelter (Boo 8). The state of health in the region is also detrimental. For instance, people do not have proper latrines. They are forced to use the shambolic latrines which make them vulnerable to diseases. The poor state of the sewage disposal system makes it prone to flooding in the rivers. This state of leaving makes residents prone to diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and malaria. According to the novel the life at the Annawadi slum is similar to that of “every man for himself and God for us all.” Children are not spared either. They are taught by their parents fend for themselves. The people who do not want to maneuver by the life of the slum end up starving (Boo 13).
The book by Katherine is well researched and it demonstrates keen insight into the lives of the Indian people. The story unravels the language and the culture of the Indian people. She goes ahead to provide her readers with a handful of evidence and details. For instance, the readers get to know that Husain eat Parle-G biscuits is the cheapest snack that one can get in India at only one rupee. Elsewhere in the novel, tears fall down the face of Prakash. Prakash was the most educated and intelligent student in the Annawadi slum. He cries and fumbles as he prepares for his final examination (Boo 16). Such tiny observations can be combined to demonstrate the existential and cultural structures of the Indians residing in the Annawadian slum. In the author’s note, Boo admits that she had a desire to seek out the infrastructure opportunities in the society characterized by poverty and desperation. In the book, two themes keep surfacing and recurring. The desire for permanence and the significance of memory are the two major themes seen in the novel. Inhabitants of the Annawadi slum sat under roofs constructed by plastic sheet and tarpaulin, and only protected by cardboard walls. It demonstrated the theme of permanence which represented a promise of respect and security. The Husain, a Muslim family, dreamt of a permanent and undeviating resident in the suburbs of Miami town. In a nutshell, people at the Annawadi slum wanted to rise above their own lives and to be appreciated. They wanted to be remembered and celebrated one day by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They too, like other people, wanted to leave a mark on the world. They aspired to achieve this beyond the mutability that the vignettes suggested (Boo 21). It can be argued that it is the main reason the inhabitants spoke with Boo.
Although everybody in the novel is poor, the main characters of the story emanates from the upper crust of the Annawadi society. For example, Asha is a face of corruption. Her story is that of a Horatio Alger with minimum moral uplift and real-politic. Despite being married to a poor and hopeless drunk, she still uplifted herself from the chains of poverty. For her and other many slum-dwellers, Annawadi represents a thriving opportunity compared to what they left behind at home. Asha is proof enough that one can prosper in slums and poverty-stricken regions, provided one plays by the rules of the region. Although she hurts a lot of people, one cannot begrudge her success because she has made much effort to rise the hierarchy of life. Then again, it is evident that she is adopted a system where which makes it difficult for other inhabitants to succeed through the same channel. Manju, Asha’s daughter, is a sweet and gentle woman who has been mortified and her mother’s corruption and crassness. She was fed up with her mother’s scandals and corruption (Boo 25). All these happenings demonstrate that corruption is embedded in all societies irrespective of the social and economic standards of the people. Although the citizens of the slum are poor and desperate, there are others who take advantage of their effort to lynch and extort from them. Katherine Boo layers her interpretation artfully and subtly so that every particular twist in the story demonstrates an insight about gender, poverty, disability, and class. She warns readers against careless generalization from the experience of the subjects she uses in her novel.
However, the power of the narrative derives in part from what the novel misses: the solution. Despite its captivating story, there are not recommendations and policy points; only the insistence that a reader should read and pay attention to the details of the book. Boo does not disregard the Annawadians’ capacity for morality. She also does not canonize the inhabitants of Mumbai as martyrs of globalization. Instead, she invites the readers to admire the challenge of living in the world where the odds are impossible. In the world that tends towards dichotomy in the effort to portray the poor as either damaged beyond control or virtuous, the novel by Boo is ferociously committed to understanding and memorializing the unsolved intricacies of the Annawadian residents (Boo 34). Boo comes clear as having no ill-motive to criticize or defame the Indian government by writing a novel that touches on the poverty of its citizens. The novel came under much criticism from the Indian government due to the illumination of corruption in the public sector by the novel. For instance, Boo described how policemen asked for bribes from the poor citizens. She also illustrates how the government institutions which are meant to liberate citizens from poverty are corrupt and broken. The social workers and slumlords who work in the institutions fluently transfer resources which are meant for social services into their pockets. The same system of administration is found in many countries whereby the rich exploit the poor maintain the social standards. The novel gives much precedence to the problems and hardship faced by the poor class throughout the world (Boo 42). It is therefore for this reason that the novel is captivating and appalling at the same time.
Works Cited
Boo, Katherine. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." Habitat Australia 42.3 (2014): 12. Print
