There are some books which you know are good, but you also know that they are so tangential to what you do on a day-to-day basis that unless you set apart solid time, you won’t get around to reading them. And so you avoid thinking about them, and even when you see such a book lying on a colleague’s table, the bookworm in you starves itself by ignoring the book. Such are the woes of those of us who go to work every day.

And yet, sometimes, there comes a day when the book returns to you, and you end up reading it in spite of yourself. And you realize that it was worth it. That’s how Behind the Beautiful Forevers turned out to be. <Warning: multiple plot spoilers ahead.>

Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s BTBF is the real story of a few families and street children living in Annawadi, a nondescript slum near the Mumbai airport. Among them are ragpickers and slumlord-hopefuls, animal lovers and teachers. There are children grown too old too quickly by poverty, there are friends who know that to help someone is to invite disaster upon oneself and to share is to starve, and there are opportunists who know the multiple sources of money in an impoverished slum.

When a handicapped woman attempts suicide, only to regret it immediately, and then dies in hospital, her neighbours are arrested and incarcerated for murder. The subsequent trials take their toll on the Husain family not only because of the loss of income of days spent in jails, but also because of the uncertainty of whether the father, son and daughter would ever be released from prison. The family takes an impossibly bold and apparently reckless stance of not paying anyone despite repeated offers from various quarters to “help” them be declared innocent of a crime they did not commit.

When Abdul muses that Kasab, one of the perpetrators of the terrorist attack at the Taj in South Mumbai, has at least the saving grace of being tried for a crime he did commit, it reeks of resignation at a political and judicial system so convoluted that it is effectively unable to determine innocence and guilt: the only color it recognizes is that of money, the only command it follows is that of power. When Abdul and his family are acquitted, seemingly more by chance than by design, there is no particular victory to be celebrated, only a permission to go on living that was nearly too late in coming.

BTBF also reminded me of a mildly unsettling realisation that I had been conscious of since I started travelling on work, coming into contact with staff at airports, hotels, taxis and offices: to be nice to such people is not an act of generosity on your part, it is a privilege granted to you. It is only the rich who can afford to be nice, to lavish money on tips, to pleasantly wait two more minutes as the room is readied, to smile at the housemaid. For the ragpickers who “earn to eat,” niceness is a luxury they can neither afford nor gain from. (If this sounds moralising, let me flatter myself that the years have made me wiser!)

For what is Boo’s first full-length book, BTBF is very well-written. What I liked best was the impeccable flow of the narrative that gives hardly a hint of the copious amounts of research and file-chasing behind the facts. Unlike the exclamatory tone adopted by many first time visitors to Mumbai and its slums, and unlike the patronising optimism of Slumdog Millionaire, BTBF possesses a clearheaded voice, unassuming but sympathetic, pragmatically limited in its sentimentality and hopefulness. After all, the lives of Akbar and Sunil and Asha and Manju are not going to change in a day. At the same time, this also makes the purpose of such a book unclear. Yes, it lays bare the stark reality of life in a slum next to the gleaming airport, but there is no call to action. Then again, who is to say what the right action is?

Despite being a work of non-fiction, BTBF also bears similarity to City of Joy, a novel by Dominique Lapierre on life in the underbelly of Kolkata in the 1970s. The book traces the lives of people as diverse as a rickshaw-puller, a Polish priest and an American doctor, all linked by their lives in Anand Nagar (the “city of joy”), a slum in Kolkata. Lapierre’s description of the rickshaw-puller Hasari Pal’s life left such an impression on the class nine student who read the book (yours truly) that she could never be at ease in the cycle-rickshaws of Gurgaon, years later. Indeed, during that stifling summer, the one-hour walk from office to home was preferable to the discomfort of seeing an invariably reed-thin man sweat for me. It tore my heart whenever he bargained to transport the three of us for an additional ten rupees on his own rickshaw, rather than let one of us take a second rickshaw. But I digress.

~*~

P.S.: I had meant this post to be only a review of BTBF, but felt that it had to do justice to how I ended up reading a book I had deliberately kept off my regrettably short reading list. Many thanks to the protagonist of the first two paragraphs.