Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum. Katherine Boo by Katherine BooMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Reviewing this book is not something that came easily to me, because this book is somewhat different from what I had expected. Picking up a book on India almost means that one will either be reading about the rags to riches stories, detailed emotional stories of the underclass, or some other stories that will arouse strong emotions in the reader. Not this book.
What is beautiful about this book is that it does not milk you for your sympathy, it does not wrench your heart, nor make you cry and weep over the lives of the 'residents' of Annuwadi. Instead it presents to the reader a novel of the every day lives of the undercity dwellers - the "life, death and hope" of them as individuals, and as a loose community who lived together not because they chose to. And so rather than crying your heart out about the tragic lives that they lead, we finish the book gaining new perspective and new understanding.
We feel like we have learned about the stories and the lives of the many different individuals in the book, and about Annuwadi. We feel like we might have more than an inkling of what every day is like for the residents there. We feel like we might have known the inner workings of the bureaucracy surrounding the fast developing Mumbai. Katherine manages to achieve this because she did not write a novel about one protagonist and the happenings around his/her life, instead she wrote about the many people of Annuwadi. She gave voices to different individuals - to Abdul, the garbage sorter who keeps the family business running because he’s really good at his job; to Manju, the college going daughter of the female slumlord Asha; to Sunhil, a scavenger who has to keep going to keep him and his sister alive, and many others.
And not once did Katherine allow herself to come into character, not once did she hint at any form of sympathy towards them, because the dwellers are not the poor and pathetic Indian caricatures that readers may have in their mind. So while we read about the corruption that happened to the Annuwadians time and again, the injustice that befalls them, the terrible living conditions they face, we come to realize that this is par for the course for the Annuwadians.
When we realize this, I suppose the bigger emotion is the hope that each individual Annuwadian have for tomorrow. That despite all of that, they carry on, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. And this “hope”, is seldom the stereotypical big hopes and dreams that we are used to, mostly it is a hope for something more immediate – putting food on the table, being able to give lessons to the children, making sure that the child is safe from danger.
Yes the book might not satisfy in the way we expect –it lacks the emotional arc that we might have become used to. Yes the book does indeed portray the world outside Annuwadi as somewhat of a ‘dark evil capitalist’ world. But this book is really not about those things. It is not about pitting the Annuwadians against the rising modern Mumbai, but instead it is a stunning portrait of the lives of the people living behind the wall filled with the advertising for “Beautiful Forevers” - a somewhat poignant dividing wall of modern Mumbai airport, and the modern Mumbai slums.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment