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Copyright 2012 by Katherine BooAll rights reserved.Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division ofRandom House, Inc., New York.RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATABoo, Katherine.Behind the beautiful forevers : life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity / Katherine Boo.p.cm.eISBN: 978-0-679-64395-11. Urban poor—India—Mumbai. I. Title.HV4140.M 86B66 11019555
For two Sunilsand what they’ve taught me about not giving up
CoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationPROLOGUEbetween rosesundercitizensPART ONE1. Annawadi2. Asha3. Sunil4. ManjuPART TWOthe business of burning5.6.7.8.PART THREEGhost HouseThe Hole She Called a WindowThe Come-ApartThe Mastera little wildness9. Marquee Effect10. Parrots, Caught and Sold11. Proper SleepPART FOURup and out12. Nine Nights of Dance13. Something Shining14. The Trial15. Ice16. Black and White17. A School, a Hospital,a Cricket FieldAUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSAbout the Author
July 17, 2008—MumbaiMidnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbaipolice were coming for Abdul and his father. In a slum hut by the international airport,Abdul’s parents came to a decision with an uncharacteristic economy of words. Thefather, a sick man, would wait inside the trash-strewn, tin-roofed shack where the familyof eleven resided. He’d go quietly when arrested. Abdul, the household earner, was theone who had to flee.Abdul’s opinion of this plan had not been solicited, typically. Already he was mulebrained with panic. He was sixteen years old, or maybe nineteen—his parents werehopeless with dates. Allah, in His impenetrable wisdom, had cut him small and jumpy. Acoward: Abdul said it of himself. He knew nothing about eluding policemen. What heknew about, mainly, was trash. For nearly all the waking hours of nearly all the yearshe could remember, he’d been buying and selling to recyclers the things that richerpeople threw away.Now Abdul grasped the need to disappear, but beyond that his imagination flagged.He took off running, then came back home. The only place he could think to hide was inhis garbage.He cracked the door of the family hut and looked out. His home sat midway down arow of hand-built, spatchcock dwellings; the lopsided shed where he stowed his trashwas just next door. To reach this shed unseen would deprive his neighbors of thepleasure of turning him in to the police.He didn’t like the moon, though: full and stupid bright, illuminating a dusty open lotin front of his home. Across the lot were the shacks of two dozen other families, andAbdul feared he wasn’t the only person peering out from behind the cover of a plywooddoor. Some people in this slum wished his family ill because of the old Hindu–Muslimresentments. Others resented his family for the modern reason, economic envy. Doingwaste work that many Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large familyabove subsistence.The open lot was quiet, at least—freakishly so. A kind of beachfront for a vast pool ofsewage that marked the slum’s eastern border, the place was bedlam most nights:people fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending goats, playing cricket, waiting forwater at a public tap, lining up outside a little brothel, or sleeping off the effects of thegrave-digging liquor dispensed from a hut two doors down from Abdul’s own. Thepressures that built up in crowded huts on narrow slumlanes had only this place, themaidan, to escape. But after the fight, and the burning of the woman called the One Leg,
people had retreated to their huts.Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo, and the usual belly-down splay ofalcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small, unspookable boyfrom Nepal. He was sitting, arms around knees, in a spangly blue haze by the sewagelake—the reflected neon signage of a luxury hotel across the water. Abdul didn’t mind ifthe Nepali boy saw him go into hiding. This kid, Adarsh, was no spy for the police. Hejust liked to stay out late, to avoid his mother and her nightly rages.It was as safe a moment as Abdul was going to get. He bolted for the trash shed andclosed the door behind him.Inside was carbon-black, frantic with rats, and yet relieving. His storeroom—120square feet, piled high to a leaky roof with the things in this world Abdul knew how tohandle. Empty water and whiskey bottles, mildewed newspapers, used tamponapplicators, wadded aluminum foil, umbrellas stripped to the ribs by monsoons, brokenshoelaces, yellowed Q-tips, snarled cassette tape, torn plastic casings that once heldimitation Barbies. Somewhere in the darkness, there was a Berbee or Barblie itself,maimed in one of the experiments to which children who had many toys seemed tosubject those toys no longer favored. Abdul had become expert, over the years, atminimizing distraction. He placed all such dolls in his trash pile tits-down.Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea sofiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form. He had deep-set eyes andsunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry—the type that claimed less than its fairshare of space when threading through people-choked slumlanes. Almost everythingabout him was recessed save the pop-out ears and the hair that curled upward, girlish,whenever he wiped his forehead of sweat.A modest, missable presence was a useful thing in Annawadi, the sumpy plug of slumin which he lived. Here, in the thriving western suburbs of the Indian financial capital,three thousand people had packed into, or on top of, 335 huts. It was a continualcoming-and-going of migrants from all over India—Hindus mainly, from all manner ofcastes and subcastes. His neighbors represented beliefs and cultures so various thatAbdul, one of the slum’s three dozen Muslims, could not begin to understand them. Hesimply recognized Annawadi as a place booby-trapped with contentions, new andancient, over which he was determined not to trip. For Annawadi was alsomagnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich people’s garbage.Abdul and his neighbors were squatting on land that belonged to the Airports Authorityof India. Only a coconut-tree-lined thoroughfare separated the slum from the entrance tothe international terminal. Serving the airport clientele, and encircling Annawadi, werefive extravagant hotels: four ornate, marbly megaliths and one sleek blue-glass Hyatt,from the top-floor windows of which Annawadi and several adjacent squattersettlements looked like villages that had been airdropped into gaps between elegantmodernities.“Everything around us is roses” is how Abdul’s younger brother, Mirchi, put it. “Andwe’re the shit in between.”
In the new century, as India’s economy grew faster than any other but China’s, pinkcondominiums and glass office towers had shot up near the international airport. Onecorporate office was named, simply, “More.” More cranes for making more buildings,the tallest of which interfered with the landing of more and more planes: It was asmogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the overcity, from whichwads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums.Every morning, thousands of waste-pickers fanned out across the airport area insearch of vendible excess—a few pounds of the eight thousand tons of garbage thatMumbai was extruding daily. These scavengers darted after crumpled cigarette packstossed from cars with tinted windows. They dredged sewers and raided dumpsters forempty bottles of water and beer. Each evening, they returned down the slum road withgunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profitminded Santas.Abdul would be waiting at his rusty scale. In the hierarchy of the undercity’s wastebusiness, the teenager was a notch above the scavengers: a trader who appraised andbought what they found. His profit came from selling the refuse in bulk to smallrecycling plants a few miles away.Abdul’s mother was the haggler in the family, raining vibrant abuse upon scavengerswho asked too much for their trash. For Abdul, words came stiff and slow. Where heexcelled was in the sorting—the crucial, exacting process of categorizing the purchasedwaste into one of sixty kinds of paper, plastic, metal, and the like, in order to sell it.Of course he would be fast. He’d been sorting since he was about six years old,because tuberculosis and garbage work had wrecked his father’s lungs. Abdul’s motorskills had developed around his labor.“You didn’t have the mind for school, anyway,” his father had recently observed.Abdul wasn’t sure he’d had enough schooling to make a judgment either way. In theearly years, he’d sat in a classroom where nothing much happened. Then there had beenonly work. Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned his snot black. Workmore boring than dirty. Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life. Most days,that prospect weighed on him like a sentence. Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt likea hope.The smell of the one leg’s burning was fainter in the shed, given the competing stink oftrash and the fear-sweat that befouled Abdul’s clothing. He stripped, hiding his pantsand shirt behind a brittle stack of newspapers near the door.His best idea was to climb to the top of his eight-foot tangle of garbage, then burrowin against the back wall, as far as possible from the door. He was agile, and in daylightcould scale this keenly balanced mound in fifteen seconds. But a misstep in the darkwould cause a landslide of bottles and cans, which would broadcast his whereaboutswidely, since the walls between huts were thin and shared.To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly arrivedfrom a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day.Moving left, Abdul felt around the blackness for a mass of blue polyurethane bags. Dirt
magnets, those bags. He hated sorting them. But he recalled tossing the bundled bagsonto a pile of soggy cardboard—the stuff of a silent climb.He found the bags and flattened boxes by the side wall, the one that divided his shedfrom his home. Hoisting himself up, he waited. The cardboard compressed, the ratsmade rearrangements, but nothing metal clattered to the floor. Now he could use theside wall for balance as he considered his next step.Someone was shuffling on the other side of the wall. His father, most likely. He’d beout of his nightclothes now, wearing the polyester shirt that hung loose on his shoulders,probably studying a palmful of tobacco. The man had been playing with his tobacco allevening, fingering it into circles, triangles, circles again. It was what he did when hedidn’t know what he was doing.A few more steps, some unhelpful clanking, and Abdul had gained the back wall. Helay down. Now he regretted not having his pants. Mosquitoes. The edges of tornclamshell packaging, slicing into the backs of his thighs.The burn-smell lingering in the air was bitter, more kerosene and melted sandal thanflesh. Had Abdul happened across it in one of the slumlanes, he wouldn’t have doubledover. It was orange blossoms compared with the rotting hotel food dumped nightly atAnnawadi, which sustained three hundred shit-caked pigs. The problem in his stomachcame from knowing what, and who, the smell was.Abdul had known the One Leg since the day, eight years back, that his family hadarrived in Annawadi. He’d had no choice but to know her, since only a sheet had dividedher shack from his own. Even then, her smell had troubled him. Despite her poverty, sheperfumed herself somehow. Abdul’s mother, who smelled of breast milk and friedonions, disapproved.In the sheet days, as now, Abdul believed his mother, Zehrunisa, to be right aboutmost things. She was tender and playful with her children, and her only great flaw, inthe opinion of Abdul, her eldest son, was the language she used when haggling.Although profane bargaining was the norm in the waste business, he felt his motheracceded to that norm with too much relish.“Stupid pimp with the brain of a lemon!” she’d say in mock outrage. “You think mybabies will go hungry without your cans? I ought to take down your pants and slice offwhat little is inside!”This, from a woman who’d been raised in some nowhere of a village to be burqa-clad,devout.Abdul considered himself “old-fashioned, 90 percent,” and censured his mother freely.“And what would your father say, to hear you cursing in the street?”“He would say the worst,” Zehrunisa replied one day, “but he was the one who sentme off to marry a sick man. Had I sat quietly in the house, the way my mother did, allthese children would have starved.”Abdul didn’t dare voice the great flaw of his father, Karam Husain: too sick to sortmuch garbage, not sick enough to stay off his wife. The Wahhabi sect in which he’d beenraised opposed birth control, and of Zehrunisa’s ten births, nine children had survived.Zehrunisa consoled herself, each pregnancy, that she was producing a workforce for
the future. Abdul was the workforce of the present, though, and new brothers and sistersincreased his anxiety. He made errors, paid scavengers dearly for sacks of worthlessthings.“Slow down,” his father had told him gently. “Use your nose, mouth, and ears, not justyour scales.” Tap the metal scrap with a nail. Its ring will tell you what it’s made of.Chew the plastic to identify its grade. If it’s hard plastic, snap it in half and inhale. Afresh smell indicates good-quality polyurethane.Abdul had learned. One year, there was enough to eat. Another year, there was moreof a home to live in. The sheet was replaced by a divider made of scraps of aluminumand, later, a wall of reject bricks, which established his home as the sturdiest dwelling inthe row. The feelings that washed over him when he considered the brick divider wereseveral: pride; fear that the quality of the bricks was so poor the wall would crumble;sensory relief. There was now a three-inch barrier between him and the One Leg, whotook lovers while her husband was sorting garbage elsewhere.In recent months, Abdul had had occasion to register her only when she clinked paston her metal crutches, heading for the market or the public toilet. The One Leg’scrutches seemed to be too short, because when she walked, her butt stuck out—did someswitchy thing that made people laugh. The lipstick provided further hilarity. She drawson that face just to squat at the shit-hole? Some days the lips were orange, other dayspurple-red, as if she’d climbed the jamun-fruit tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed itclean.The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runtleg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single offerthey got: poor, unattractive, hardworking, Muslim, old—“half-dead, but who elsewanted her,” as her mother had once said with a frown. The unlikely husband renamedher Fatima, and from their mismating had come three scrawny girls. The sickliestdaughter had drowned in a bucket, at home. Fatima did not seem to grieve, which gotpeople talking. After a few days she reemerged from her hut, still switchy-hipped andstaring at men with her gold-flecked, unlowering eyes.There was too much wanting at Annawadi lately, or so it seemed to Abdul. As Indiabegan to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’sdivinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention. Annawadians now spoke ofbetter lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the futurewould look nothing like the past.Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing astarched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of waiters whospent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks ontables. He wanted a clean job like that. “Watch me!” he’d once snapped at their mother.“I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!”The dream of Raja Kamble, a sickly toilet-cleaner who lived on the lane behindAbdul’s, was of medical rebirth. A new valve to fix his heart and he’d survive to finishraising his children. Fifteen-year-old Meena, whose hut was around the corner, craved ataste of the freedom and adventure she’d seen on TV serials, instead of an arranged
marriage and domestic submission. Sunil, an undersized twelve-year-old scavenger,wanted to eat enough to start growing. Asha, a fighter-cock of a woman who lived bythe public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first femaleslumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her teenageddaughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become Annawadi’s firstfemale college graduate.The most preposterous of these dreamers was the One Leg. Everyone thought so. Herabiding interest was in extramarital sex, though not for pocket change alone. That, herneighbors would have understood. But the One Leg also wanted to transcend theaffliction by which others had named her. She wanted to be respected and reckonedattractive. Annawadians considered such desires inappropriate for a cripple.What Abdul wanted was this: a wife, innocent of words like pimp and sisterfucker, whodidn’t much mind how he smelled; and eventually a home somewhere, anywhere, thatwas not Annawadi. Like most people in the slum, and in the world, for that matter, hebelieved his own dreams properly aligned to his capacities.The police were in Annawadi, coming across the maidan toward his home. It had to bethe police. No slumdweller spoke as confidently as this.Abdul’s family knew many of the officers at the local station, just enough to fear themall. When they learned that a family in the slum was making money, they visited everyother day to extort some. The worst of the lot had been Constable Pawar, who hadbrutalized little Deepa, a homeless girl who sold flowers by the Hyatt. But most of themwould gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread.Abdul had been bracing for this moment when the officers crossed his family’sthreshold—for the sounds of small children screaming, of steel vessels violentlyupended. But the two officers were perfectly calm, even friendly, as they relayed thesalient facts. The One Leg had survived and had made an accusation from her hospitalbed: that Abdul, his older sister, and their father had beaten her and set her on fire.Later, Abdul would recall the officers’ words penetrating the storeroom wall with afever-dream slowness. So his sister Kehkashan was being accused, too. For this, hewished the One Leg dead. Then he wished he hadn’t wished it. If the One Leg died, hisfamily would be even more screwed.To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing oranother. Abdul sometimes bought pieces of metal that scavengers had stolen. He ran abusiness, such as it was, without a license. Simply living in Annawadi was illegal, sincethe airport authority wanted squatters like himself off its land. But he and his family hadnot burned the One Leg. She had set herself on fire.Abdul’s father was professing the family’s innocence in his breathy, weak-lunged voiceas the officers led him out of the house. “So where is your son?” one of them demandedloudly as they stood outside the storeroom door. The officer’s volume was not in thisinstance a show of power. He was trying to be heard over Abdul’s mother, wailing.Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief waysof starting conversations. But now her children’s sobbing intensified her own. The little
Husains’ love for their father was simpler than Abdul’s love for him, and they wouldremember the night the police came to take him away.Time passed. Wails subsided. “He’ll be back in half an hour,” his mother was tellingthe children in a high-pitched singsong, one of her lying tones. Abdul took heart in thewords be back. After arresting his father, the police had apparently left Annawadi.Abdul couldn’t rule out the possibility that the officers would return to search for him.But from what he knew of the energy levels of Mumbai policemen, it was more likelythat they would call it a night. That gave him three or four more hours of darkness inwhich to plan an escape more sensible than a skulk to the hut next door.He didn’t feel incapable of daring. One of his private vanities was that all the garbagesorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in halflike Bruce Lee. “So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously,shared this conviction. Abdul had bumbled away. The brick belief was something hewanted to harbor, not to test.His brother Mirchi, two years younger, was braver by a stretch, and wouldn’t havehidden in the storeroom. Mirchi liked the Bollywood movies in which bare-chestedoutlaws jumped out of high windows and ran across the roofs of moving trains, whilethe policemen in pursuit fired and failed to hit their marks. Abdul took all dangers, in allfilms, overseriously. He was still living down the night he’d accompanied another boy toa shed a mile away, where pirated videos played. The movie had been about a mansionwith a monster in its basement—an orange-furred creature that fed on human flesh.When it ended, he’d had to pay the proprietor twenty rupees to let him sleep on thefloor, because his legs were too stiff with fear to walk home.As ashamed as he felt when other boys witnessed his fearfulness, Abdul thought itirrational to be anything else. While sorting newspapers or cans, tasks that were amatter more of touch than of sight, he studied his neighbors instead. The habit killedtime and gave him theories, one of which came to prevail over the others. It seemed tohim that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well theydid it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the trainthat hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.And while he regretted not being smarter, he believed he had a quality nearly asvaluable for the circumstances in which he lived. He was chaukanna, alert.“My eyes can see in all directions” was another way he put it. He believed he couldanticipate calamity while there was still time to get out of the way. The One Leg’sburning was the first time he’d been blindsided.What time was it? A neighbor named Cynthia was in the maidan, shouting, “Whyhaven’t the police arrested the rest of this family?” Cynthia was close to Fatima the OneLeg, and had despised Abdul’s family ever since her own family garbage business failed.“Let’s march on the police station, make the officers come and take them,” she called outto the other residents. From inside Abdul’s home came only silence.After a while, mercifully, Cynthia shut up. There didn’t seem to be a groundswell ofpublic support for the protest march, just irritation at Cynthia for waking everyone up.
Abdul felt the night’s tension finally thinning, until steel pots began banging all aroundhim. Startling up, he was confused.Golden light was seeping through the cracks in a door. Not the door of his storeroom.A door it took a minute to place. Pants back on, he seemed to be on the floor of the hutof a young Muslim cook who lived across the maidan. It was morning. The clangoraround him was Annawadians in adjacent huts, making breakfast.When and why had he crossed the maidan to this hut? Panic had ripped a hole in hismemory, and Abdul would never be certain of the final hours of this night. The onlyclear thing was that in the gravest situation of his life, a moment demanding courageand enterprise, he had stayed in Annawadi and fallen asleep.At once, he knew his course of action: to find his mother. Having proved himselfuseless as a fugitive, he needed her to tell him what to do.“Go fast,” said Zehrunisa Husain, upon issuing her instructions. “Fast as you can!”Abdul grabbed a fresh shirt and flew. Across the clearing, down a zigzag lane of huts,out onto a rubbled road. Garbage and water buffalo, slum-side. Glimmerglass Hyatt onthe other. Fumbling with shirt buttons as he ran. After two hundred yards he gained thewide thoroughfare that led to the airport, which was bordered by blooming gardens,pretties of a city he barely knew.Butterflies, even: He blew past them and hooked into the airport. Arrivals down.Departures up. He went a third way, running beside a long stretch of blue-and-whitealuminum fencing, behind which jackhammers blasted, excavating the foundations of aglamorous new terminal. Abdul had occasionally tried to monetize the terminal’ssecurity perimeter. Two aluminum panels, swiped and sold, and a garbage boy couldrest for a year.He kept moving, made a hard right at a field of black and yellow taxis gleaming in aviolent morning sun. Another right, into a shady curve of driveway, a leafy boughhanging low across it. One more right and he was inside the Sahar Police Station.Zehrunisa had read her son’s face: This boy was too anxious to hide from the police.Her own fear, upon waking, was that the officers would beat her husband aspunishment for Abdul’s escape. It was the eldest son’s duty to protect a sick father fromthat.Abdul would do his duty, and almost, almost gladly. Hiding was what guilty peopledid; being innocent, he wanted the fact stamped on his forehead. So what else to do butsubmit himself to the stamping authorities—to the law, to justice, concepts in which hislimited history had given him no cause to believe? He would try to believe in them now.A police officer in epauletted khaki was splodged behind a gray metal desk. SeeingAbdul, he rose up, surprised. His lips, under his mustache, were fat and fishlike, andAbdul would remember them later—the way they parted a little before he smiled.
Let it keep, the moment when Officer Fish Lips met Abdul in the police station. Rewind,see Abdul running backward, away from the station and the airport, toward home. Seethe flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink-flowered tunic shrink to nothing but amatch-book on the floor. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucouslove song, her delicate features unscathed. Keep rewinding, back seven more months,and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. It was about as hopeful a season as therehad ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a countrythat holds one-third of the planet’s poor. A country dizzy now with development andcirculating money.Dawn came gusty, as it often did in January, the month of treed kites and head colds.Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul wasasleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. His mother steppedcarefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul’sear. “Wake up, fool!” she said exuberantly. “You think your work is dreaming?”Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family’s most profitable daysoccurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January’s income beingpivotal to the Husains’ latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to makethe curses routine.Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was herown. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The palesun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far sideof the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors’ huts, some heldtogether by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Childrenin school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps. A languidline extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats’ eyes wereheavy with sleep. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the greatpursuit of the tiny market niche got under way.One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where sitesupervisors chose day laborers. Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, tobe hawked in Airport Road traffic. Older women sewed patches onto pink-and-bluecotton quilts for a company that paid by the piece. In a small, sweltering plasticmolding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads intoornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors—smiling ducks and pink cats with jewelsaround their necks that they couldn’t imagine anyone, anywhere, buying. And Abdulcrouched on the maidan, beginning to sort two weeks’ worth of purchased trash, astained shirt hitching up his knobby spine.
His general approach toward his neighbors was this: “The better I know you, the moreI will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves.” Butdeep in his own work, as he would be this morning, he could imagine his fellowAnnawadians laboring companionably alongside him.Annawadi sat two hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new Indiaand old India collided and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously atthe bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack ofthree hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums ofMumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage andsickness looked like life.The slum had been settled in 1991 by a band of laborers trucked in from the southernIndian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport. The workcomplete, they decided to stay near the airport and its tantalizing constructionpossibilities. In an area with little unclaimed space, a sodden, snake-filled bit of brushland across the street from the international
Behind the beautiful forevers : life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity / Katherine Boo. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-679-64395-1 1. Urban poor—India—Mumbai. I. Title. HV4140.M86B66 2
