Behind the beautiful forevers [life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity]

Katherine Boo

Book - 2012

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House c2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Katherine Boo (-)
Edition
1st ed
Item Description
Subtitle from cover.
Physical Description
256 p. ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781400067558
  • Prologue: between roses
  • Part 1. undercitizens
  • 1. Annawadi
  • 2. Asha
  • 3. Sunil
  • 4. Manju
  • Part 2. the business of burning
  • 5. Ghost House
  • 6. The Hole She Called a Window
  • 7. The Come-Apart
  • 8. The Master
  • Part 3. a little wildness
  • 9. . Marquee Effect
  • 10. Parrots, Caught and Sold
  • 11. Proper Sleep
  • Part 4. up and out
  • 12. Nine Nights of Dance
  • 13. Something Shining
  • 14. The Trial
  • 15. Ice
  • 16. Black and White
  • 17. A School, a Hospital, a Cricket Field
  • Author's Note
  • Acknowledgments
Review by New York Times Review

In "The Drowned and the Saved," Primo Levi describes an experience that fatally undermined many of his fellow condemned at Auschwitz. Entering the death camp, he had hoped, he wrote, "at least for the solidarity of one's companions in misfortune." Instead, there were "a thousand sealed-off monads, and between them a desperate covert and continuous struggle." This was what Levi called the "Gray Zone," where the "network of human relationships" "could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors," and where "the enemy was all around but also inside." It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Levi's struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's airport - the setting of Katherine Boo's extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family. After all, these plucky "slumdogs" may be - in at least one recent fantasy - India's next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi. Certainly, as noted by Boo - a staff writer at The New Yorker who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, when she was a journalist at The Washington Post - they are not considered poor by "official" Indian benchmarks; they are "among roughly 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991," when the central government "embraced economic liberalization," "part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism," in which a self-propelling economic system is geared to reward motivated and resourceful individuals with personal wealth. Indeed, hope is a more common intoxicant in Annawadi than the discarded bottles of Eraz-ex (the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out) inhaled by Abdul's scavenger friends. The slum dwellers speak "of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past" Yet, as Boo details, "for every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge." Many of the slum dwellers, including Abdul, gain their sense of upward mobility by contrasting their lot with that of their less fortunate neighbors, "miserable souls" who "trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner" or "ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge." Migrants fleeing a crisis-ridden agricultural sector cause an oversupply of cheap labor in Mumbai, so the boy whose hand is sliced off by a shredding machine turns, "with his blood-spurting stump," to assure his boss that he won't report the accident. A 2-year-old girl drowns suspiciously in a pail, and a father empties a pot of boiling lentils over his sick baby. As Boo explains, "sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care." "Young girls in the slums," she adds, "died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn't afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth." Adults, too, drop like flies. One of Abdul's friends ends up as a corpse with his eyes gouged out. injured men bleed to death, unattended, by the road to the airport. Maggots breed in the infected sores of the scavengers Boo hangs out with. "Gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die." These continual human losses are taken mostly in a matter-of-fact way in Annawadi. For Abdul and his friends have "accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all." Those deaths might even get the survivors into trouble. So when the one-legged Fatima, Abdul's querulous neighbor, sets herself on fire, a small crowd gathers but does nothing: "The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boys waited to see if Fatima's face would come off." Trying to take Fatima to the hospital, her husband finds himself shunned by autorickshaw drivers, who are worried about "the potential damage to seat covers." As for the nearby policemen, they embody pure terror in the eyes of Annawadians. They won't balk at raping a homeless girl, and would "gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread." The police actually encourage Fatima to blame Abdul's family so that officers can extort money from them. A government officer threatens to collect false witness statements unless she is paid off. Neither India's hollowed-out democracy nor its mean-minded new capitalism, which cannot do without a helot class, seems able to relieve this social-Darwinist brutishness. Far from being a testimony to the audacity of hope, the dauntless human spirit and that kind of thing, Annawadi turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi's words, "to preserve and consolidate" their "established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege." Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, "improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people." Describing this undercity blood sport, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" (the ironic title is taken from the "Beautiful Forever" advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity - one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector's report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book's narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo's soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism ("Glimmerglass Hyatt") and bright metaphor ("Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas"). But "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author's note, the spectacle of Mumbai's "profound and juxtaposed inequality" provoked a line of questioning: "What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government's economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don't more of our unequal societies implode?" Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out "Mrs. Dalloway" while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents). You wonder, intermittently, about the book's omniscient narrator. Perhaps wisely, Boo has absented herself from her narrative. The story of how a white American journalist overcame the suspicion of her subjects (and the outright hostility of the police), or dealt with the many ethical conundrums created by close contact between the first and fourth worlds, belongs to another book. Instead of the faux-naïf explainer or the intrepid adventurer in Asian badlands, you get a reflective sensibility, subtly informing every page with previous experiences of deprivation and striving, and a gentle skepticism about ideological claims. Boo can see how democracy, routinely lauded in the West as India's great advantage over authoritarian China, can be turned into yet another insider network of patronage in which the powerful flourish: how periodic elections can be absorbed into "a national game of make-believe, in which many of India's old problems - poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor - were being aggressively addressed," even as "exploitation of the weak by the less weak continued with minimal interference." She can also perceive why many welloff Indians have grown impatient with, even contemptuous of, democracy and, like their counterparts elsewhere, want to eliminate rather than enhance the socialwelfarist obligations of government. For these Indians, Boo points out, "private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way." Boo deftly steers clear of the many banal notions about corruption in India unleashed recently by a quasi-Gandhian protest movement supported by affluent Indians. She shows how corruption, far from being a malignant external growth, is integral to India's political, economic and social system. "Among powerful Indians," she writes, "the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade." And for the "poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained." FULLY inhabiting India's troubled present, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" can only hint at a less oppressive past - a "peaceful age" that to Abdul sounds like something out of myth, a time when "poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly." This may seem too romantic a picture of Oriental fatalism. It is true, nevertheless, that migrants from the rural hinterland, drawn to Mumbai for hundreds of years - as long as the city, as constructed by British free-traders and their native collaborators, has existed - were never as desolate and defenseless as they are now. So much of the city's most popular exports - cinema and music - originated in the past from the attempt by rural migrants to recreate, in the big alienating city, the traditions of their lost community. But unlike Mumbai's previous generation of migrants, Annawadians cannot have any soothing dreams of a return to village life and its communal solidarities. Boo makes this clear in a brisk digression to a rural region of western India where thousands of farmers, forced out of a subsistence economy into a globalized one, have killed themselves in the previous decade. Here, many citizens have not only "stopped believing the government's promises about improving their fortunes." As Boo explains: "Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they'd helped revive a 40-yearold movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail bombs and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India's 627 districts." The Maoists seem a weirdly anachronistic intrusion in the "great success narrative of capitalism." But for them, as much as for the corporations and governments dispossessing the Indians in the countryside, life in the contemporary world has turned into a zero-sum game. Not surprisingly, Abdul's mother, too, has "raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she'd made him understand that he had to rise." As Boo shows in wrenching detail, however, Abdul's training turns out to be incomplete. Falsely accused of murdering his neighbor, and fully exposed to a "malign" justice system, Abdul learns that "his mother hadn't prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone." The ostensible "rise" of India has attracted its share of literary and journalistic buccaneers in recent years. Unlike China (unlovably aloof, even menacing), India, with its eager English speakers and periodic elections, is easier to slot into a Western narrative of progress. Thus, most recent books about the country, un-selfconsciously suffused with the clichés of the age, speak of how free-market capitalism has ignited a general explosion of opportunity, fostering hope among the most destitute of Indians. Boo describes what happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the age of globalization, governments remain dysfunctional and corrupt, and, with most citizens locked into a fantasy of personal wealth and consumption, hope, too, is privatized, sundered from any notions of collective well-being. In this sense, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is not just about India's delusory new culture of aspiration. For as Boo writes, "what was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too" - in Nairobi and 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." "The poor," she explains further, "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." Meanwhile, only "the faintest ripple" is created "in the fabric of the society at large," for in places like Mumbai, "the gates of the rich . . . remained unbreached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace." In its own quiet way, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory. Transcending its geographical setting, the book also provides a bracing antidote to the ideological opiates of recent decades - those that made the worldwide proliferation of gray zones appear part of a "great success narrative." 'For every two people in Annawadi inching up,' Boo writes, 'there was one in a catastrophic plunge.' Pankaj Mishra's new book, "From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia," will be published in August.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 5, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review

While the distance between rich and poor is growing in the U.S., the gap between the haves and have-nots in India is staggering to behold. This first book by a New Yorker staff writer (and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post) jolts the reader's consciousness with the opposing realities of poverty and wealth in a searing visit to the Annawaldi settlement, a flimflam slum that has recently sprung up in the western suburbs of the gigantic city of Mumbai, perched tentatively along the modern highway leading to the airport and almost within a stone's throw of new, luxurious hotels. We first meet Abdul, whose daily grind is to collect trash and sell it; in doing so, he has lifted his large family above subsistence. Boo takes us all around the community, introducing us to a slew of disadvantaged individuals who, nevertheless, draw on their inner strength to not only face the dreary day but also ponder a day to come that will, perhaps, be a little brighter. Sympathetic yet objective and eloquently rendered.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A Mumbai slum offers rare insight into the lives and socioeconomic and political realities for some of the disadvantaged riding the coattails (or not) of India's economic miracle in this deeply researched and brilliantly written account by New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Boo. Divided into four parts, the narrative brings vividly to the page life as it is led today in Annawadi, a squalid and overcrowded migrant settlement of some 3,000 people squatting since 1991 on a half-acre of land owned by the Sahar International Airport. (Boo derives her title from a richly ironic real-world image: a brightly colored ad for floor tiles repeating "Beautiful Forever" across a wall shutting out Annawadi from the view of travelers leaving the airport.) Among her subjects is the fascinating Abdul, a sensitive and cautiously hopeful Muslim teenager tirelessly trading in the trash paid for by recycling firms. Crucially, Boo's commanding ability to convey an interior world comes balanced by concern for the structural realities of India's economic liberalization (begun the same year as Annawadi's settlement), and her account excels at integrating the party politics and policy strategies behind eruptions of deep-seated religious, caste, and gender divides. Boo's rigorous inquiry and transcendent prose leave an indelible impression of human beings behind the shibboleths of the New India. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Boo's (The New Yorker) first book. She takes a look at the stark lives of the inhabitants of Annawadi, a slum across from Mumbai's Sahar Airport, to reveal the wrenching inequality and urban poverty still endemic in India's democracy. Using recorded and videotaped conversations, interviews, documents, and the assistance of interlocutors, Boo profiles the lives of some of the slum dwellers from November 2007 to March 2011. There is Abdul, a young adult scavenger with a profitable trade in recyclables. The one-legged Fatima's home is divided from Abdul's by merely a sheet. Readers follow the treacherous paths of these and other lives. A fateful chain of events leads to a criminal case against Abdul and his family. Boo presents glimpses of the corrupt police who feed on those without political power or education. She claims she witnessed most of the events described in the book. VERDICT A tour de force, this book is powerful yet far from harrowing. Highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/11.]-Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

New Yorker staff writer Boo creates an intimate, unforgettable portrait of India's urban poor. Mumbai's sparkling new airport and surrounding luxury hotels welcome visitors to the globalized, privatized, competitive India. Across the highway, on top of tons of garbage and next to a vast pool of sewage, lies the slum of Annawadi, one of many such places that house the millions of poor of Mumbai. For more than three years, Boo lived among and learned from the residents, observing their struggles and quarrels, listening to their dreams and despair, recording it all. She came away with a detailed portrait of individuals daring to aspire but too often denied a chance--their lives viewed as an embarrassment to the modernized wealthy. The author poignantly details these many lives: Abdul, a quiet buyer of recyclable trash who wished for nothing more than what he had; Zehrunisa, Abdul's mother, a Muslim matriarch among hostile Hindu neighbors; Asha, the ambitious slum leader who used her connections and body in a vain attempt to escape from Annawadi; Manju, her beautiful, intelligent daughter whose hopes laid in the new India of opportunity; Sunil, the master scavenger, a little boy who would not grow; Meena, who drank rat poison rather than become a teenage bride in a remote village; Kalu, the charming garbage thief who was murdered and left by the side of the road. Boo brilliantly brings to life the residents of Annawadi, allowing the reader to know them and admire the fierce intelligence that allows them to survive in a world not made for them. The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1. Annawadi 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, shirt buttons opening as he flies back toward his home. See the flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink- flowered tunic shrink to nothing but a matchbook on the floor. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucous love 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 there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet's poor. A country dizzy now with development and circulating 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 was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul's ear. "Wake up, fool!" she said exuberantly. "You think your work is dreaming?" Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family's most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January's income being pivotal to the family's latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine. Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors' huts, some held together by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Children in school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps. A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats' eyes were heavy with sleep. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the small market niche got under way. One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where site supervisors chose day laborers. Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, to be hawked in Airport Road traffic. Older women sewed patches onto pink-and-blue cotton quilts for a company that paid by the piece. In a tiny, sweltering plastic- molding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads into ornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors-smiling ducks and pink cats with jewels around their necks that they couldn't imagine anyone, anywhere, buying. And Abdul crouched on the maidan, beginning to sort two weeks' worth of purchased trash, a stained shirt hitching up his knobby spine. His general approach toward his neighbors was this: "The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves." But deep in his own work, as he would be this morning, he could imagine his fellow Annawadians laboring companionably alongside him. ANNAWADI SAT TWO hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India collided with old India and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously at the bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack of three hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life. The slum had been settled in 1991 by a band of laborers trucked in from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport. When the runway work was complete, they decided to stay near the airport and its tantalizing construction possibilities. In an area with little unclaimed space, a sodden, snake-filled bit of brushland across the street from the international terminal seemed the least-bad place to live. Other poor people considered the spot too wet to be habitable, but the Tamils set to work, hacking down the brush that harbored the snakes, digging up dirt in drier places and packing it into the mud. After a month, their bamboo poles stopped flopping over when they were stuck in the ground. Draping empty cement sacks over the poles for cover, they had a settlement. Residents of neighboring slums provided its name: Annawadi-the land of annas, a respectful Tamil word for older brothers. Less respectful terms for Tamil migrants were in wider currency. But other poor citizens had seen the Tamils sweat to summon solid land from a bog, and that labor had earned a certain deference. Seventeen years later, almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks. Rather, the Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when, around the same moment as the small slum's founding, the central government embraced economic liberalization. The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding. True, only six of the slum's three thousand residents had permanent jobs. (The rest, like 85 percent of Indian workers, were part of the informal, unorganized economy.) True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slumdwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds, like Abdul, a felt sense of their upward mobility. The airport district was spewing waste that winter, the peak season for tourism, business travel, and society weddings, whose lack of restraint in 2008 reflected a stock market at an all-time high. Better still for Abdul, a frenzy of Chinese construction in advance of the summer's Beijing Olympics had inflated the price of scrap metal worldwide. It was a fine time to be a Mumbai garbage-trader, not that that was the term passersby used for Abdul. Some called him garbage, and left it at that. This morning, culling screws and hobnails from his pile, he tried to keep an eye on Annawadi's goats, who liked the smell of the dregs in his bottles and the taste of the paste beneath the labels. Abdul didn't ordinarily mind them nosing around, but these days they were fonts of liquid shit-a menace. The goats belonged to a Muslim man who ran a brothel from his hut and considered his whores a pack of malingerers. In an attempt to diversify, he had been raising the animals to sell for sacrifice at Eid, the festival marking the end of Ramadan. The goats had proved as troublesome as the girls, though. Twelve of the herd of twenty-two had died, and the survivors were in intestinal distress. The brothelkeeper blamed black magic on the part of the Tamils who ran the local liquor still. Others suspected the goats' drinking source, the sewage lake. Late at night, the contractors modernizing the airport dumped things in the lake. Annawadians also dumped things there: most recently, the decomposing carcasses of twelve goats. Whatever was in that soup, the pigs and dogs that slept in its shallows emerged with bellies stained blue. Some creatures survived the lake, though, and not only the malarial mosquitoes. As the morning went on, a fisherman waded through the water, one hand pushing aside cigarette packs and blue plastic bags, the other dimpling the surface with a net. He would take his catch to the Marol market to be ground into fish oil, a health product for which demand had surged now that it was valued in the West. Rising to shake out a cramp in his calf, Abdul was surprised to find the sky as brown as flywings, the sun signaling through the haze of pollution the arrival of afternoon. When sorting, he routinely lost track of the hour. His little sisters were playing with the One Leg's daughters on a makeshift wheelchair, a cracked plastic lawn chair flanked by rusted bicycle wheels. Mirchi, already home from ninth grade, was sprawled in the doorway of the family hut, an unread math book on his lap. Mirchi was impatiently awaiting his best friend, Rahul, a Hindu boy who lived a few huts away, and who had become an Annawadi celebrity. This month, Rahul had done what Mirchi dreamed of: broken the barrier between the slum world and the rich world. Rahul's mother, Asha, a kindergarten teacher with mysterious connections to local politicians and the police, had managed to secure him several nights of temp work at the Intercontinental Hotel, across the sewage lake. Rahul-a pie-faced, snaggle-toothed ninth grader-had seen the overcity opulence firsthand. And here he came, wearing an ensemble purchased from the profits of this stroke of fortune: cargo shorts that rode low on his hips, a shiny oval belt buckle of promising recyclable weight, a black knit cap pulled down to his eyes. "Hip-hop style," Rahul termed it. The previous day had been the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, a national holiday on which elite Indians once considered it poor taste to throw an extravagant party. But Rahul had worked a manic event at the Intercontinental, and knew Mirchi would appreciate the details. "Mirchi, I cannot lie to you," Rahul said, grinning. "On my side of the hall there were five hundred women in only half-clothes-like they forgot to put on the bottom half before they left the house!" "Aaagh, where was I?" said Mirchi. "Tell me. Anyone famous?" "Everyone famous! A Bollywood party. Some of the stars were in the VIP area, behind a rope, but John Abraham came out to near where I was. He had this thick black coat, and he was smoking cigarettes right in front of me. And Bipasha Basu was supposedly there, but I couldn't be sure it was really her or just some other item girl, because if the manager sees you looking at the guests, he'll fire you, take your whole pay-they told us that twenty times before the party started, like we were weak in the head. You have to focus on the tables and the rug. Then when you see a dirty plate or a napkin you have to snatch it and take it to the trash bin in the back. Oh, that room was looking nice. First we laid this thick white carpet-you stood on it and sank right down. Then they lit white candles and made it dark like a disco, and on this one table the chef put two huge dolphins made out of flavored ice. One dolphin had cherries for eyes-" "Bastard, forget the fish, tell me about the girls," Mirchi protested. "They want you to look when they dress like that." "Seriously, you can't look. Not even at the rich people's toilets. Security will chuck you out. The toilets for the workers were nice, though. You have a choice between Indian- or American-style." Rahul, who had a patriotic streak, had peed in the Indian one, an open drain in the floor. Other boys joined Rahul outside the Husains' hut. Annawadians liked to talk about the hotels and the depraved things that likely went on inside. One drug-addled scavenger talked to the hotels: "I know you're trying to kill me, you sisterfucking Hyatt!" But Rahul's accounts had special value, since he didn't lie, or at least not more than one sentence out of twenty. This, along with a cheerful disposition, made him a boy whose privileges other boys did not resent. Rahul gamely conceded he was a nothing compared with the Intercontinental's regular workers. Many of the waiters were college- educated, tall, and light-skinned, with cellphones so shiny their owners could fix their hair in the reflections. Some of the waiters had mocked Rahul's long, blue-painted thumbnail, which was high masculine style at Annawadi. When he cut the nail off, they'd teased him about how he talked. The Annawadians' deferential term for a rich man, sa'ab, was not the proper term in the city's moneyed quarters, he reported to his friends. "The waiters say it makes you sound D- class-like a thug, a tapori," he said. "The right word is sir." "Sirrrrrrr," someone said, rolling the r's, then everyone started saying it, laughing. The boys stood close together, though there was plenty of space in the maidan. For people who slept in close quarters, his foot in my mouth, my foot in hers, the feel of skin against skin got to be a habit. Abdul stepped around them, upending an armful of torn paper luggage tags on the maidan and scrambling after the tags that blew away. The other boys paid him no notice. Abdul didn't talk much, and when he did, it was as if he'd spent weeks privately working over some little idea. He might have had a friend or two if he'd known how to tell a good story. Once, working on this shortcoming, he'd floated a tale about having been inside the Intercontinental himself-how a Bollywood movie called Welcome had been filming there, and how he'd seen Katrina Kaif dressed all in white. It had been a feeble fiction. Rahul had seen through it immediately. But Rahul's latest report would allow Abdul's future lies to be better informed. A Nepali boy asked Rahul about the women in the hotels. Through slats in the hotel fences, he had seen some of them smoking-"not one cigarette, but many"-while they waited for their drivers to pull up to the entrance. "Which village do they come from, these women?" "Listen, idiot," Rahul said affectionately. "The white people come from all different countries. You're a real hick if you don't know this basic thing." "Which countries? America?" Rahul couldn't say. "But there are so many Indian guests in the hotels, too, I guarantee you." Indians who were "healthy-sized"-big and fat, as opposed to stunted, like the Nepali boy and many other children here. Rahul's first job had been the Intercontinental's New Year's Eve party. The New Year's bashes at Mumbai's luxury hotels were renowned, and scavengers had often returned to Annawadi bearing discarded brochures. Celebrate 2008 in high style at Le Royal Meridien Hotel! Take a stroll down the streets of Paris splurging with art, music & food. Get scintillated with live performances. Book your boarding passes and Bon Voyage! 12,000 rupees per couple, with champagne. The advertisements were printed on glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees, or four U.S. cents, per kilo. Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year's rituals of the rich. "Moronic," he had concluded. "Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night." "The hotel people get strange when they drink," he told his friends. "Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero- good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier- that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I'm not going to act like such a loser." Excerpted from Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.