Blood Sport Beneath the City

What do we know of the poor? The question is connected to how we—by which I mean the relatively rich—write about them. Poverty first became a focus for literary investigation in the industrial cities of the nineteenth century, when its sights, sounds, and smells moved too close to middle-class houses to continue being ignored by the people who lived inside. “We had but to go a hundred yards off and see for ourselves, but we never did,” wrote William Thackeray of his friend Henry Mayhew’s newspaper series on London street life, which in book form became London Labour and the London Poor. By traveling “into the poor man’s country” and returning with tales of “terror and wonder,” the novelist believed that Mayhew had revealed to the rich the “wonderous and complicated misery” of the poor for the first time.

This explorer’s approach, in which the poor are a foreign territory to be penetrated, was widely adopted in the last century when socially concerned writers not only spent time among the poor but also tried to live as poorly, so that they might close the gap with their subjects and underpin their observations with firsthand experience. The writer’s immiseration was sometimes brief. George Orwell spent less than a month in Wigan for the book that became The Road to Wigan Pier, and only some of that time in what must have been that coal-and-cotton town’s filthiest lodging house, which he had determinedly sought out. Nonetheless, the experience provided some of the book’s most memorable images: the chamber pot that was kept under the kitchen table, the landlord’s dirty hand that left thumbprints on the bread. Like Mayhew, Orwell returned with stories of wonder and terror, but where in his book did the poor speak or establish their personalities?

The only voice to be heard was the author’s. The distinct aspirations and fears of the people he happened upon couldn’t fit a book that was split between a polemic and a travel account, even in the hands of a writer as gifted as Orwell. Starting with Dickens, that individual complexity had become the province of the novel. In the 160 and more years since the Artful Dodger and Jo the Crossing Sweeper first appeared, it has tended to be compassionate fiction rather than the inquiring reporter that has fixed the poor in our memory as something more than a condition or a cause—as people as diversely and richly human as ourselves.

One of the remarkable achievements of Katherine Boo’s study of life in a Mumbai slum is to bring poor people so much closer to us, as close as they might be in fiction. The story unfolds in the third person and the “I” of the author never intrudes until the book’s postscript. Characters develop and connect to each other in a chronology that moves back and forth across a four-year period. None of this would be so surprising if the author were a novelist turning her talents to some off-duty reportage—bending the precise truth a little as well, perhaps—but Boo is a reporter who won a Pulitzer when she worked on The Washington Post (for a series on the abuse and neglect inside homes for the mentally ill) and since 2001 has written, mainly on American impoverishment, for The New Yorker.

Verifiable information matters to her: stuff that’s true in its details. She spent more than four years with the residents of Annawadi, a slum near the Mumbai airport, documenting their experience in written notes, video recordings, and photographs, and consulted more than three thousand public records, many of them obtained only after her persistent petitioning of government agencies. She assures us in her postscript that every name is real and every event has either been personally witnessed or assembled from interviews with several other witnesses. Nothing has been disguised or adjusted. There are no pseudonyms, composite characters, or incidents that have been shifted from one time and place to another. (Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier was never so pure.¹)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers takes its title from a slogan for a brand of floor tiles, repeated in advertisements that line the road leading to Mumbai’s airport. Behind this wall of ads lies Annawadi, a slum or what Boo terms an “undercity,” where three thousand people are packed into around three hundred huts held together by duct tape and rope and overlooked by five luxurious airport hotels. Annawadi is by no means Mumbai’s most famous slum—that title belongs to Dharavi, with its one million inhabitants and organized tourist excursions—but it can hold its head up in any competition for squalor and stink. Every night, the airport hotels dump rotting food to feed the slum’s hundreds of feral pigs. A vast lake of sewage laps against the slum’s one public space, a noxious beachfront that Boo records as “bedlam” on most evenings, filled with people

fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending goats, playing cricket, waiting for water at a public tap, lining up outside a little brothel, or sleeping off the effects of the [local] grave-digging liquor….

Diseases flourish, especially those that clog the lungs, weaken the heart, and erupt in the digestive system. Maggots are quick to penetrate any break in the skin.

Twenty years before Boo first went there in November 2007, Annawadi had been an anonymous and neglected piece of scrubland that was considered too wet to build on or do much with, even in a city with limited room for expansion and a never-ending inflow of migrants. Then in the early 1990s a band of laborers traveled north from Tamil Nadu to work on some runway repairs and decided that, even with its snakes and waterlogged ground, somewhere so close to the airport and its “tantalizing construction possibilities” might be not a bad place to settle. As it turned out, few of the Tamils stayed; Mumbai’s governing party, the anti-migrant Siv Sena, displaced them with native Maharashtrians to expand the party’s voting base.

But the Tamils had been right: it wasn’t a bad place to make money. Residents of Annawadi began to earn their living from what the airport’s customers threw away—cigarette packets, tins, bottles, magazines, scrap metal, anything of the smallest resale value—and by the winter of 2007–2008 they were throwing away more than ever before. India’s economy, second only to China in its growth rate, had produced, in Boo’s words, “a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the overcity, from which wads of possibility had tumbled down into the slums.”

India’s stock market reached a new high. Business travelers and society weddings added to the tourist trade to fill flights and hotels, while the pre-Olympic construction boom in Beijing inflated scrap metal prices around the world. Every morning, scavengers would fan out from Annawadi across the airport lands, to return in the evening with garbage-stuffed gunny bags over their shoulders “like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.”

All of this was good news for Abdul, a young Muslim who when the narrative begins is sixteen or nineteen (“his parents were hopeless with dates”). A pinched, ill-favored boy with a face disfigured by rat bites, Abdul deals in the waste that scavengers bring to him, first sorting it and then selling it to recycling plants a few miles away in the Mumbai suburbs. Abdul excels at sorting, a skill he began to acquire at age six and expects to do for the rest of his life, but the increasing sophistication of waste matter makes his work more difficult. Bottle caps, for instance:

Some had plastic interior linings, which had to be stripped out before the caps could be assigned to the aluminum pile. Rich people’s garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic. How was he to classify a loofah? The owners of the recycling plants demanded waste that was all one thing, pure.

Generally, Abdul’s future looks brighter than most. His hard work has paid the deposit on a plot of land in a new settlement further out of the city, where his family will have Muslims from North India like themselves as neighbors. Meanwhile, he can afford to feel fortunate in a slum where some people are so poor that they trap rats and frogs and fry them for their dinner while others eat the scrub grass that grows at the sewage lake’s edge. Boo writes that these deeply unfortunate people “gave those slum dwellers who didn’t fry rats and eat weeds, like Abdul, a felt sense of their upward mobility.”

This proves to be misplaced. Abdul’s life falls apart after a row breaks out with his neighbor over some messy improvements he is making to the family hut. The book’s central narrative turns on this incident, which, to quote Boo, begins “the chain of contingency that would damage two families forever.” The neighbor is a self-dramatizing woman known as Fatima the One Leg who swings about sexily on her crutches to seduce men other than her husband, hoping “to transcend the affliction by which others had named her.” Now, in a fit of self-pity and rage, she deliberately sets fire to herself. Badly burned and dying in a hospital, she falsely accuses Abdul and his father of inciting her suicide. A great web of legal, police, and petty political corruption then enfolds the family as father and son await the trials that eventually set them free—too late to save what remains of Abdul’s business.

Corruption has recently become a popular cause for middle-class protest in India, a concern fed by some high-profile instances of big business corrupting politicians but also at a less dramatic level by the bribes the middle class regularly pays public servants in the ordinary course of daily life. Last year the social activist Anna Hazare and his supporters used Gandhian hunger-strike tactics to secure a promise from the Indian government that it would introduce rigorous anticorruption laws and set up an ombudsman to hear and decide public complaints.

The corruption that prevails in Annawadi, however, seems unlikely to be checked by legislation. Viewed from the standpoint of the sewage lake, the anticorruption campaign seems a pious irrelevance. Almost any contact with the police or the health, legal, and educational systems brings with it a demand for under-the-table money. A police doctor tells Abdul he’ll certify his age as seventeen if he pays two thousand rupees, otherwise he’ll put his age down as twenty (for Abdul’s prospects in dealing with the law, the younger he is the better).

Abdul sat up, angry. He didn’t have two thousand rupees, and what was it with this rich doctor, asking a boy in detention for cash? The doctor held up his hands, rueful. “Yes, it’s rubbish, asking poor boys like you, but the government doesn’t pay us enough money to raise our children. We’re forced to take bribes….” He smiled at Abdul. “Nowadays, we’d do almost anything for money.”

The doctor relents, but another government servant, a “special executive officer” employed to take witness statements, is more persistent. The more she can build up the charges against Abdul and his father, the better chance she has of persuading them to pay her to soften the charges to keep themselves out of jail. Thanks to Abdul’s earnings as a garbage sorter, the two make a particularly attractive target, though in truth any Annawadian who has a little money can be milked by the police, whenever it takes a policeman’s fancy. To live in Annawadi, after all, is to be illegal at a fundamental level—you are squatting on airport land—and the police will use any excuse to demand a bribe or deliver a beating. During Abdul’s pretrial detention the police visit his mother every day, “licking at us like dogs,” she says, “sucking what is left of our blood.” Boo describes how moneymaking has made the local police station “a hectic bazaar” rather than a state institution “where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear.”

The poor, in other words, are a source of profit. The bribes extorted from them supplement the paltry salaries of public servants—doctors, teachers, and government lawyers as well as the police. More indirectly, in more complex forms of corruption, funds intended for the improvement of the poor go instead to the rich. India’s central government, for example, has an expensive program targeted at the 300 million children it defines as educationally disadvantaged: mainly girls, child laborers, and the disabled. The program receives international funding in which Annawadi shares, having (in the eyes of the central government) a network of twenty-four kindergarten schools that have been set up by a local woman who runs a nonprofit organization. But the schools are a fiction. The checks that come to the nonprofit’s account are drawn in cash, which is delivered to the senior official in the state’s education department who invented the scam. Boo writes:

Although public funds for education had increased with India’s new wealth, the funds mainly served to circulate money through the political elite. Politicians and city officials helped relatives and friends start nonprofits to secure the government money. It was of little concern to them whether the schools were actually running.

Scandals such as this are widely rumored in India and sometimes reported in its press and television. The tendency is to see them as a blurry generality: “Oh, in a place like India corruption is a way of life.” Boo, however, particularizes human behavior with such marvelous skill that her characters become much more than emblems or exemplars of a general condition.

The linch pin of the schools scam, for example, is a former kindergarten teacher called Asha whose dream is “to ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class.” Asha spends her time cultivating the political connections that have established her as the slum’s chief fixer, while her daughter Manju does enough teaching in the family hut to maintain the idea that a school exists. A nobler character than her mother, of whom she disapproves, Manju wants to be Annawadi’s first female college graduate. Hence, in her shack thirty feet away from the stinking lake, she puzzles over the plot of Mrs. Dalloway and the characters in The Way of the World. (“Millamant, Mirabell, Petulant—have you ever heard such names?” she wonders of her brother.)

Both works of literature are on the syllabus at her lowly all-girls college in the form of synopses; only upper-class and Anglophone students at India’s better universities get to read the actual novel by Woolf or the play by Congreve. But by memorizing (she calls it “by-hearting”) a few facts and opinions from her crib sheet, Manju will get a degree that suggests competence in English, “a credential bespeaking worldliness and superior education,” in Boo’s words, and a well-known springboard out of the slums. Education—any kind of education at all—is what parents in Annawadi want for their children, and some can afford the fees charged by the briskly growing number of private schools; more than a hundred have opened in the airport district over the past five years, all of them thought to be an improvement on the free schools slackly run by the state. As for the revenue streaming from her fictitious educational empire, Asha says:

Of course it’s corrupt…. But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people did all the papers—when the big people say that it’s right?

And in this way Asha becomes a member of the overcity: “a respectable woman in the land of make-believe.”

During the course of researching his third documentary account of India in the late 1980s, V.S. Naipaul determined to see the inside of a Mumbai slum but settled instead for a taxi ride around its perimeter. “It had been hard enough to drive past the area,” he wrote, complaining of the smell of excrement. “It was harder to imagine what it was like living there.”² Many things about Annawadi are hard to imagine, including levels of desperation and terror that would daunt even a writer like Naipaul, for whom the degradations of Indian life have rarely come as a surprise.

Fatima the One Leg has a two-year-old daughter, Medina, who catches tuberculosis and becomes both a health risk and a financial liability to her family. She drowns in a bucket at home. Boo implies that her mother murdered her: “Sickly children…were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.” Then there is the accident that Abdul witnesses on one of his trips to the recycling plant, where the fierce machinery is owned and run by men in starched white kurtas (shirts) “to announce the owners’ distance from the filth of their trade.”

A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “Sa’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.”

Three vignettes, then, from a Mumbai slum: a mother plunges her child head first into a water-filled bucket; a boy slices off his hand and in terror apologizes to his boss for the inconvenience; a girl sits not far from the sewage and the shit-coated pigs trying to make sense of Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps this is what Thackeray meant by the “wonderous and complicated misery” of the poor. Naturally, people want to get out. Their escape-fever accounts for the education, the corruption, and the toiling; it even accounts for the presence of Virginia Woolf. But what hand will fate deal those who stay behind?

Two of Boo’s characters end their wretchedness with rat poison. But not Abdul. Amid his tribulations, Abdul has an epiphany of moral improvement. “He wanted to be better than what he was made of,” Boo writes. “In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.” Abdul’s ambition is beautifully but almost mournfully described, for, as Boo says, “in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be….”

According to the World Bank, about a third of the world’s poor live in India. In 2008, when the bank made its calculation, that meant that about 456 million Indians, equivalent to 42 percent of the population, had to subsist on less than $1.25 a day. What proportion of Annawadi’s people are poor by this definition is hard to know; all Boo tells us is that in 2008 almost no one in this slum could be considered poor by official Indian benchmarks (what these are, she neglects to say), adding that as Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since the country’s economic liberalization in 1991, they were “thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism.”

The author’s anger is manifest in the irony of those words, but this vivid, perceptive book does very little moralizing. Boo’s talents as a scrupulous reporter and imaginative writer have memorably rendered a place that swarms with life—a ferment of struggle and predicament. And while her perceptions enlarge our understanding of India, and of what poverty might mean in other countries, her subjects engage our sympathy rather than demand our pity. After all, the question that drew Boo to Annawadi in the first place wasn’t so much “How can we, the rich, allow this to continue?” as “Why do they, the poor, put up with it?” They needn’t: the poor outnumber the rich in Mumbai and many other of the world’s metropolises, and they could scare the rich much more than they do. As Boo asks, “Why don’t places like Airport Road, with their cheek-by-jowl slums and luxury hotels, look like the insurrectionist video game Metal Slug 3? Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?”

What she discovered was that, though the poor might complain about the greed and self-interest of the rich, they complained about their neighbors much more. Poor individuals blamed other poor individuals for their predicament rather than expressing solidarity and taking their protests to the streets. As group identities based on caste, religion, and language began to wither, “anger and hope was being privatized, like so much else in Mumbai.” And not just in Mumbai, but also in Nairobi, Santiago, Washington, and New York.

In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

“Relative” may be an important qualification, given last year’s rioting and looting in London and the continuing disorder in Athens. In both places, the mobs that took to the streets would have been envied by the residents of Annawadi for their comfort and prosperity. In Annawadi, livings need to be made. Who here can spare the time to storm the barricades?