Annawadi, "by heart": on Katherine Boo and Behind the Beautiful Forevers

[Did a version of this review-cum-interview for The Sunday Guardian]

One is almost conditioned these days, while reading a book (or watching a film) about the Indian poor, to expect clichés, generalisations, facile commentaries and quick-fix solutions. And so, around 20 pages into Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers – a non-fiction chronicle set in Mumbai’s Annawadi slum – I felt a very particular sort of trepidation. It’s what happens when you’re starting to be seriously invigorated by a book but also thinking, “This is too good to last.”

Surely, at some point, these carefully observed vignettes would devolve into a pat story about a kid pulling himself into a better world through pluck and initiative? Or perhaps there would be some gratuitous sentimentalising – a banality about how happy these children were, how their smiles were warmer than the smiles of more fortunate people elsewhere?

It doesn’t happen (and to be honest, it wasn’t until the last page that I sighed with relief). This intimate, novelistic work manages not to strike that fatal wrong note, and it achieves this while telling the interlinked stories of many different people, all of whom “know” that there are three main ways out of poverty: entrepreneurial initiative; politics and corruption (the two things being inseparable); and education. The first is the path chosen by a teenaged garbage trader named Abdul, the eldest son of the large (and, by Annawadi standards, well-off) Hussain family. On a different route is the 39-year-old Asha, who is in a power struggle to become the unofficial slum boss (“chosen by local politicians and police officers to run the settlement according to the authorities’ interests”). Her college-going daughter Manju “by-hearts” her way through mystifying texts by Virginia Woolf and Congreve, but conscientiously teaches other children in her hut during her spare time. Meanwhile a resourceful 12-year-old named Sunil reckons that he must become a better scavenger if he wants to “jump-start the system”.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

In various ways, the lives of these residents of the “undercity” (a phrase that reminded me of Gorky’s The Lower Depths and one of the many films based on it, Chetan Anand’s 1946 Neecha Nagar) intersect with the privileged world outside. The threat of demolition hangs over the slum and the future must be thought about, but there is also the matter of securing the here and now, seizing each moment as it presents itself. Thus, even as Asha’s son Rahul boasts to his friends about his temporary job at the Intercontinental Hotel (“we laid this thick white carpet – you stepped on it and sank down”), he is alert enough to spot – and make a beeline for – a plastic kite stuck in a nearby tree; he might be able to sell it for two rupees.

I didn’t much care for this book’s precious-sounding title when I first heard it, but it’s easier to appreciate when you know the context: a wall advertisement for stylish floor tiles that hides the slum from the view of cars heading to the nearby international airport. There are only a couple of fleeting references to this artificial boundary – Boo doesn’t turn it into a heavy-handed symbol. More importantly, she doesn’t just take us “behind” the Beautiful Forever sign (in which case we might still have had only a brief aerial view of Annawadi, a snapshot of poverty porn) – she takes us to ground level. It’s the perspective a movie buff might remember from the chase sequences in Black Friday and Slumdog Millionaire) – but this isn’t a short-lived pursuit, this is life unfolding at its own unhurried pace. And the triumph of this book is to catch the many complexities of the Annawadians in such a way that the most complacent reader can no longer hide behind comforting “us” vs “them” distinctions.

To achieve this, Boo – who is married to the writer-academic Sunil Khilnani – knew that she needed to make a very long-term commitment of time and energy. When I meet her, the first thing I learn is that she had all sorts of misgivings. “I feared being a laughing stock,” she says, “I was embarrassed to talk about it with other people because it felt like such a cliché: white woman in an Indian slum, hanging around sewage lakes.” And this coming from someone who has impeccable credentials in writing about underprivileged people: she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a Washington Post series about group homes for mentally disadvantaged people, and a National Magazine Award in 2003 for a New Yorker feature about “marriage classes” in a poor Oklahoma community. “As a journalist, you know there are some things you can do well,” she says, “I knew I wouldn’t be any good interviewing politicians, but here’s something I could put my heart into.”

Photo credit: JORDAN TIERNEY

Growing up, she had learnt from her parents – who were very involved with the Civil Rights Movement – that much of what got written about the poor was simplistic. “So much reporting involved people hooking up with an NGO, which would pick a success story and get them to write about it. The way the world looked in a newspaper was not the way the world really looks to people who are making choices every day.” Her own first piece – for a shoestring magazine called the Washington Monthly, which she later edited – was about how, when a fire broke out in a New Orleans housing project, everyone made a fine show of outrage and the residents were given fire detectors; “but when you went back a few months later, the things were still in their boxes. In moments of crisis, people would come in, do their work and leave – but what was going on in ordinary times wasn’t being chronicled.”

One reason why the prettifying of poverty occurs in so much literature and reportage, she points out, is that many reporters are content to slip in and out of a place – “and naturally, in that situation, there is much excitement, people laugh and point and tell you about themselves, and if you leave immediately you only come away with that happy picture.” She didn’t want to be the tourist-reporter collecting sound-bytes as souvenirs. (“The ‘real story’ doesn’t emerge from my sticking a tape recorder into a poor kid’s face and asking him about the philosophy that keeps him going.”) The way to do it was to spend so much time with the Annawadians that she could go from being the weird white woman – a conspicuous, warning presence – to becoming part of the furniture, someone in whose presence people could be themselves. And so, aided by translators (three of them, at different points in her research), Boo made the slum her second home for nearly four years, filling notebooks and tapes with conversations and observations.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

Remarkably, given the free-flowing nature of her research (“for me the process of reporting is a giving up of control – you have to let the day happen and adjust to it”), Behind the Beautiful Forevers pivots around a dramatic event: the self-immolation of a one-legged woman named Fatima, querulous neighbour to the Hussains. This tragedy cast a long shadow over the family's lives; Abdul and his father were arrested for being complicit in Fatima’s death, and the case dragged on. Since all this began eight months into Boo’s time in Annawadi, she had to refocus her narrative. “I had no idea going in that this would happen, or that I would be following the trial or investigating death. But when those things happen, you can’t say: let that be.” Later, when another youngster died in suspicious circumstances, she became deeply involved again. This also means that the ghosts of many other stories lie between these pages; some of the peripheral figures in the finished book - such as Raja Kamble, a once-respected man fallen on bad times and in need of a new heart valve - are people whom she could easily have written about at much greater length. "There was so much other material - and of course the final reader doesn't see the many blind alleys that I encountered."

That the story is told in the third person (Boo keeps herself firmly out of it) comes as a surprise given the level of her involvement. There have been excellent reportage-driven works in recent times – Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man come to mind – where the writer is very much part of the narrative, and this can be very effective if it’s well-executed: for instance, A Free Man gains from the reader’s sense that Sethi the narrator is growing as a person as he tries to understand the life of his protagonist, the “small man” Mohammed Ashraf; that he is subtly changed by the things he is writing about.

But while Boo is an admirer of both books, she says this approach wouldn’t have worked for her. “I would have been conscious that every word or sentence I used up on myself was something I was taking away from the Annawadians.”

This does raise questions for a reader, though. In many passages – records of conversations and encounters – it’s clear that Boo was present, and the writing is a descriptive account of what she saw and heard (thus, Abdul says something sharply to his mother and “A rich silence followed”). But there were other times where she had to reconstruct what had happened through the not-completely-reliable accounts of witnesses. “We investigated the hell out of Fatima’s death,” she says, “Even though I was already close to the Hussains, we didn’t just presume they were innocent. We interviewed dozens of people, made sure the stories matched, fact-checked compulsively.”

“And the other thing I’ve always tried to do in my work is that if I cannot establish something, I put that in the narrative too. You have to be upfront with the reader, you can’t bluff your way through it.”

Being completely upfront also means that all names in the book – including those of corrupt or incompetent policemen and corporators – are real, and naturally this was risky. “I did feel threatened,” she said, “and there was one night with the police that was not a good night. In retrospect I realised the danger. But in general, my curiosity is greater than my fear. I don’t feel afraid till much later, because I get so involved in trying to figure things out – that’s part of the losing control that comes with reportage.”

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There has been much talk recently about the increase in narrative non-fiction in India, but some of the best books in this category don’t create “narratives” in the most specific sense of that word. These are not stories with a definite beginning, a definite middle and a neat summing up: Sethi’s and Faleiro’s books, for instance, both end with their subjects (a labourer and a bar-dancer respectively) moving out of the reader’s line of vision, to a place where even the sympathetic reporter-writer can no longer reach them, their eventual fate uncertain. Much of the books’ power lies in their refusal to peremptorily tell the “India story”: even when small details point to larger truths (about the state of a society, a nation, the world, or the human spirit), it’s done quietly, in the manner of what the critic Manny Farber called Termite Art (“immersion in a small area ... concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorising it”), and without any pretence that this is all there is to be said.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

To an even greater extent than those books, Behind the Beautiful Forevers left me with the impression of being an ongoing, uncompleted story (and given the story behind its writing, how could it be otherwise?). One sees at the end that many different possibilities lie ahead for Abdul and his family, for Asha and Manju, for Sunil and the other children – and which of these possibilities will come to pass depends on a combination of several factors, including the one that flies in the face of every glib narrative: blind, meaningless luck.

It’s important to Boo that her readers recognise this, instead of buying into the comforting notion that the difference between rich and poor people is purely a measure of innate intelligence, talent or the “will to make it”. “We construct such reassuring stories for ourselves,” she sighs, “Even people who were born into lives of privilege, sitting on the wealth of generations, are convinced that they have motored their own successes. And one way of doing this is to think of the poor as a separate species.”

Even literally. “Where’s your Dalmatian?” a friend asked her after reading part of the manuscript, meaning: if you don’t give the reader a sweet, fluffy person to pet, why will they care? “But if you can only relate to these people as stereotypes, I’m not going to make it easy for you,” Boo says. “They are every bit as complex as you or me, and they are smarter than you realise. This isn’t an alien world where you lift the curtain and see wondrous new things. I see so much of myself in the people I write about.”

Indeed, by the time you reach the last page, the under-city and the over-city have melted away – what’s left is a long continuum leading from one way of life to another, and it’s possible to see the people of this book, Boo and her readers included, as occupying various positions along that line. Behind the Beautiful Forevers may begin as a very specific story about a scared young man hiding in a little hut to evade the police, but it ends as a powerful reflecting mirror.

A shout-out for Beautiful Thing

When you look at my life,” [Leela] taught me, “don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road ... Every life has its benefits. I make money and money gives me something my mother never had. Azaadi. Freedom. And if I have to dance for men so I can have it, okay then, I will dance for men.”

When you have your own book of narrative non-fiction coming out soon, it can be demoralising to encounter something as good as Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars – and so, as I read the first few pages of this illuminating book about the life and struggles of a spirited young bar dancer, my admiration was tempered by a sinking feeling of envy. But a couple of chapters in, the admiration had won out. This book is everything one might have expected after reading Sonia’s outstanding journalistic features on bar dancers and domestic workers (links to some of those old profiles here).

I’m referring to the author by her first name in this post because this isn’t a formal review and because I know Sonia quite well – but also because “Sonia” or “Sonia-ji” is an integral character in this book. She’s a friend and confidante to Leela, and what I admired most was how Sonia maintains the reporter’s distance and records incidents with a seemingly cool eye while also allowing us to see how close she is to this girl and her story. Beautiful Thing has all the vitality that you’d expect from a really good novel, in the way it brings alive Leela’s world – the Mira Road building she lives in, populated by bar dancers; the Night Lovers bar where she works; the overcrowded red-light district of Kamatipura; even a hill shrine where Sonia accompanies her – and the people who move in and out of it. It has a dramatic arc too: the 2005 ban on dance bars brings a swift end to Leela’s hard-won (if ambiguous) “azaadi”, putting her and many other uneducated girls in a position of dependence and potential exploitation, and raising some very pointed questions about the nature of moral policing and “social cleansing” in a country like India.

I also liked that Sonia has the discernment to completely hand the podium to her characters when required: there are many passages in this book where a lengthy paragraph or two is entirely in quote-marks – Leela, or her beautiful friend Priya or her self-absorbed mother Apsara or someone else, speaking continuously, and the author not interrupting with her own observations (the way a feature writer is usually expected to, to inject “colour” or “detail” into a story). There’s a recognition in these passages - the sign of a secure, confident writer - that what the characters are saying is gripping enough, that it doesn’t need unnecessary embellishing.

At the Delhi launch of Beautiful Thing, Sonia mentioned that one thing she always wanted to do as a writer was to explore every possible side of a character’s personality – to present the complete person, as far as possible. “I didn’t want to depict a bar-girl as being only a victim, or a customer as being only exploitative.” This book’s world is a multi-dimensional one and Leela is a bundle of contradictions: we see her as feisty and independent at times, emotionally vulnerable at other times; sweet-natured on the one hand, caustic on the other; telling herself that she’s the “luckiest girl in the world” because her (married) lover is taking her to Lonavla for a weekend, while secretly terrified that he’ll leave without her because she hasn’t finished packing.

Compelling as she is, though, one is never allowed to forget that hers is only one of thousands of similar stories, and the book doesn’t provide any false comfort. As a character offhandedly says near the end, “Leela may want something else. But who will permit Leela what she wants?” The question is unanswerable, even though the final image is that of a brave, smiling girl, looking her destiny firmly in the eye.

Snippets: Sarpanch Sahib / Samit does Leo / Twitterature / Known Turf

For a few months now I’ve been doing a books column made up of short, 200-300 word items (mini-reviews, observations about publishing trends and so on) for the new Sunday Guardian paper. Haven’t put up most of that material here because I’m used to having long, indepth stuff on Jabberwock (and regular readers of this blog will know I’ve never been a fan of the 200-word “review”, to put it mildly!). But short pieces can serve their own purpose and in any case it’s impossible to write a long review for every book I read; if I did, the volume of my reading would automatically be halved. So I’ll occasionally collect some of those pieces and put them up as “compilation” posts. Here’s one.

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“The history of women in south Asian politics is beset with contradictions,” writes Manjima Bhattacharjya, editor of Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India, pointing out that while the region has had strong female prime ministers and presidents, the participation of women in grassroots politics has still been meagre. The book, sponsored by The Hunger Project, is a collection of encounters with brave women who are trying to make a difference; writers and journalists like Manju Kapur and Sonia Faleiro traveled to remote villages to speak with these ladies about their career as panchayat members, and the result is a sometimes depressing but often inspiring insight into how social change slowly, painfully comes about in even the most backward areas and societies. [Full disclosure: my wife Abhilasha was one of the contributors.]

The book launch of Sarpanch Sahib was one of the most poignant events of its kind I’ve seen. All seven of the lady politicians had traveled to Delhi, and since most of them didn’t understand English, the panel discussion was (somewhat awkwardly) bilingual. It was another reminder of how removed the world of mainstream publishing is from the distant reaches of this country. Right now this well-intentioned book is available only in English, which is a pity; I hope it gets translated into languages that its subjects can understand, and I also hope there’s a market for a follow-up.

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Imagine how much better James Cameron’s grandly mushy film Titanic would have been if the Leonardo Dicaprio character Jack had secretly turned out to be...a scaly, monstrous alien with extra limbs sticking out of his back in the “King of the World” scene at the ship’s prow.

I can think of a few writers who would have spun a whole book around this idea, but the prolific Samit Basu is content to make it a throwaway sub-plot in his hugely entertaining Young Adults title for Scholastic, Terror on the Titanic. Billed as the first of the “Morningstar Agency Adventures”, this is the story of a young, jungle-reared Anglo-Indian, Nathaniel Brown (Nathu for short – he also happens to be the son of the man whose story Rudyard Kipling leeched for The Jungle Book), hired to track down a stolen jewel making its way across the Atlantic on the famous ship. Basu brings his trademark wit and expansive imagination to this unusual historical fantasy, and even manages to get in a few philosophical observations about what “aliens” really are and how they get treated by “regular” folk.

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My mixed feelings about Twitterature, a Penguin title “written” by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, begin with the packaging. The book has a minimalist cover: no image, just the familiar Penguin orange and white colours that one normally associates with their austere “Classics” series. This is something of an inside joke, no doubt, for the cover blurb says “The classics are so last century” and the back-jacket includes the following tweets. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “WTF is Polonius doing behind the curtain???” And from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “OH MY GOD I’M IN HELL.”

You get the idea - this is a collection of the world’s greatest literary works, retold Twitter style. From Alice in Wonderland (“At a tea-party with a crack-head hat man. He’s a schizoid”) to Frankenstein (“It’s alive! I’d better beat it over the head repeatedly with a fire extinguisher”) to Crime and Punishment (“Will try to keep the long, introspective monologues to a minimum”), you’ll find it all here. The question, as ever, is: do we really need to pay to read a collection of tweets, especially when equally funny material is readily available on the Net? When people routinely complain about blogs being turned into books, how do you justify this? Penguin should have started an official Twitter page for this idea, rather than publishing it.

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One of the best “blogger” books of the last few months is Annie Zaidi’s Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. I’ve known Zaidi for some time through her blog and have long admired her work as a journalist as well as the quality of her writing. Over the years, she has traveled to far-flung places across India, meeting and writing about people who have been victims of discrimination in one way or the other – people for whom constant hunger, injustice and helplessness is a way of life. Her best work has a humbling effect: it reminds me of how much I take for granted.

The most notable thing about her book is how adeptly it balances meaningful, informative reportage with personal experience – something that narrative non-fiction writing in India often struggles to do. (Tilt too far in one direction and you’re in danger of navel-gazing; go to the other extreme and you have a litany of facts and figures without any real sense of the human face behind it.) Zaidi writes about bandits in the Chambal, continuing casteism in the Punjab, and the impoverished weavers of Benares; about malnourished children, covert sex-selection methods, religious and communal identity; and she makes these subjects immediate and compelling. Known Turf is pleasingly free-flowing. Sure, there is an attempt at structure – it’s divided into sections that deal with specific subjects – but at the same time it makes place for the casual aside, the detour into personal anecdote...or even just a chapter-long reflection on the vital role that tea plays in the life of an itinerant reporter.

More doggie thoughts

This post by Sonia struck a chord; she’s said many of the things I frequently think about. For starters, this depressingly familiar business of people getting pets because it’s fashionable (or because their idiot kids bawl “Papa papa, puppy chahiye”), only to discover that it isn’t the same thing as having a stuffed toy lying about the house, and that there are serious responsibilities attached. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard about pets being abandoned because their owners couldn’t invest the time and attention (let alone love) that they needed. In our colony there’s a young Labrador with a very glossy black coat who is let out of the house gate, unattended, for an hour or so each evening, because no one can be bothered to walk him: he bounds about near the park looking perplexed, his size belying the fact that he’s a puppy, trying to make friends with the local strays who naturally snarl at him. There’s always the danger that he’ll be hit by a passing car, and one gets the sense that his humans don’t care much either way if he doesn’t return someday.

Anyone who really cares for animals (as opposed to feeling a vague affection for the pets they happen to have about the house as a form of interior decoration) will know that dogs who are well looked after and well-loved come to acquire a very particular set of characteristics – there’s a softness in the eyes that suggests a sense of security, a feeling that nothing really bad can happen in their little world; it’s understood that frenetic tail-wagging is the correct response to the sight of any new human. At the other extreme, there’s the perpetual wariness, the suggestion of fear hardened into aggression, on the face of the stray dog who knows that he’s liable to be kicked or have a stone thrown at him any second. And somewhere in between, in some ways worst of all, is the confused, cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and water and look after him in a detached sort of way, but where affection is in very short supply: a dog who isn’t allowed anywhere near the beds or sofas, who spends most of the day tied up on a short leash and who was quite possibly smacked hard the first time he chewed on a chair leg. One of my most cringe-inducing memories is visiting a former colleague’s house and seeing a Pomeranian that looked nervous, even frightened, when I put out a hand to pet him, as if he had no experience of that sort of thing. There was no softness in those eyes.

My sensitivity to these things has heightened since Foxie happened. I’ve never been this close to a dog before, though my mom has had many over the years (and has always accorded them higher status than the human beings around her). Cats were a different matter, of course; when Sandy disappeared 15 years ago I decided that I’d be careful not to get too close to a pet again, but you can’t plan these things beyond a point. Foxie wormed her way into our lives and though the initial days were more about the strong sense of responsibility we felt towards her than a deep attachment, this changed as she gradually developed a very special personality of her own. Today, she’s no different from a daughter for us. And now, whenever I see a scruffy, uncared-for, snarling mongrel on the road, it occurs to me that but for a tiny quirk of fate Foxie could have been that dog. And then she wouldn’t be the sweet, gentle, good-natured and trusting pup we know but something entirely different. Knowing how many strays there are on the roads – all of whom could, if their circumstances had been otherwise, made wonderful, loving pets – makes me feel ill-disposed towards people who pay large sums of money for “breeds”. And who, as Sonia points out, don’t even bother to do the basic groundwork.

P.S. And what about this habit that some pious people have of feeding a black dog once or thrice a week – on specified days, I think it is – because their resident goddess/astrologer has told them it’s good for their punya or karma or some such thing? Another addition to the long list of admirable traits in the religious and the superstitious.