Behind the Beautiful Forevers (34 page)

Being present for events or reporting them soon afterward was crucial, since as years passed, some slumdwellers recalibrated their narratives out of fear of angering the authorities. (Their fear was not irrational: Sahar police officers sometimes threatened slumdwellers who spoke to me.) Other Annawadians rearranged narratives for psychological solace: giving themselves, in retrospect, more control over an experience than they had had at the time. It was considered inauspicious and counterproductive to dwell on unhappy memories, and Abdul spoke for many of his neighbors when he protested one day, “Are you dim-witted, Katherine? I told you already three times and you put it in your computer. I have forgotten it now. I want it to
stay
forgotten. So will you please not ask me again?”

Still, from November 2007 to March 2011, he and the other Annawadians worked extremely hard to help me portray their lives and dilemmas. They did so even though they understood that I would show their flaws as well as their virtues, and with the knowledge that they wouldn’t like or agree with everything in the book that resulted.

I feel confident in saying they didn’t participate in this project out of personal affection. When I wasn’t dredging up bad memories, they liked me fine. I liked them more than fine. But they put up with me largely because they shared some of my concerns about the distribution of opportunity in a fast-changing country that they loved. Manju Waghekar, for instance, spoke frankly about corruption in the hope, however faint, that doing so would help create a fairer system for other children. Such choices, given the socioeconomic vulnerability of those who made them, were simply courageous.

Just as the story of Annawadi is not representative of a country as huge and diverse as India, it is not a neat encapsulation of the state of poverty and opportunity in the twenty-first-century world. In every community, the details differ, and matter. Still, in Annawadi, I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.

In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weak government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capability.

The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of
young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is a shrug. How does that happen? How—to use Abdul’s formulation—do children intent on being ice become water? A cliché about India holds that the loss of life matters less here than in other countries, because of the Hindu faith in reincarnation, and because of the vast scale of the population. In my reporting, I found that young people felt the loss of life acutely. What appeared to be indifference to other people’s suffering had little to do with reincarnation, and less to do with being born brutish. I believe it had a good deal to do with conditions that had sabotaged their innate capacity for moral action.

In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that 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—all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faced with dilemmas not unlike the one Abdul confronted, stone slab in hand, one July afternoon when his life exploded. If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

My deepest debt is to the residents of Annawadi. I am also grateful for the support and insight of the following people and institutions:

Bharati Chaturvedi, Vijaya Chauhan, Benjamin Dreyer, Naresh Fernandes, Severina Fernandes, Mahendra Gamare, Shailesh Gandhi, Matthew Geczy, David Jackson, James John, Kumar Ketkar, Cressida Leyshon, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Nandini Mehta, Sharmistha Mohanty, Sumit Mullick, Shobha Murthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Alka Bhagvaan Nikale, Brijesh Patel, Gautam Patel, Jeet Narayan Patel, Rajendra Prasad Patel, Anna Pitoniak, Vikram Raghavan, Lindsey Schwoeri, Mike and Mark Seifert, Altamas Shaikh, Gary Smith and the American Academy in Berlin, Hilda Suarez, Arvind Subramanian, M. Jordan Tierney, and Madhulika and Yogendra Yadav.

Binky Urban and Kate Medina for believing, against considerable evidence, that I could do this.

David Remnick for his commitment to work that is slow to do and not necessarily appealing to advertisers.

David Finkel and Anne Hull for their sustaining counsel at every stage of this project.

Unnati Tripathi for her genius and bravery.

Mrinmayee Ranade for her teaching, her optimism, and her perceptiveness about the domestic lives of ordinary women.

Luca Giuliani, Joachim Nettelbeck, and the staff of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for providing the haven where I recovered from the reporting and wrote the first draft of this book.

Lorraine Adams, Jodie Allen, Evan Camfield, Elizabeth Dance, Ramachandra Guha, Anne Kornhauser, Molly McGrath, Amy Waldman, and especially Dorothy Wickenden for—among other things—smart and crucial reads that made this book better than it would have been.

My family, who years ago invested in the question of how to do justice to the lives and imaginations of Abdul Husain and his neighbors, and who guided me, editorially and emotionally, through this project: my late father, Clinton Boo; John and Nick Boo; Tom Boo and Heleen Welvaart; Catherine Tashjean; Asha Sarabhai; Kyla Wyatt Leonor; Mary Richardson; Matt Buhr-Vogl, who helped me see the connections; Jack Boo, canniest twelve-year-old editor ever; two Mary Boos—my fierce, brilliant sister and my mother, who remains my most trusted reader and inspiration; and Sunil Khilnani, my love, my better world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Boo, a staff writer for
The New Yorker
, has spent the last twenty years reporting from within poor communities, considering how societies distribute opportunity and how individuals get out of poverty. Her reporting has been honored by a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Boo learned to report at the
Washington City Paper
. She was also an editor of
The Washington Monthly
and, for nearly a decade, a reporter and editor at
The Washington Post
. This is her first book.