What happens when you don't love your neighbour

Sailen Routray

Katherine Boo (August 12, 1964 - Present)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

At the centre of the non-fictional account of the book Behind the beautiful forevers (from now on BTBF) lie an event, a trial, and a question. The event is the self-immolation by Fatima, a resident of the Annawadi slum in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri, nestling on the edges of a sewage lake near the city airport. 

The trial involves Karam Husain, his right-minded son Abdul Hakim Husain, and his dutiful daughter Kehkashan, and concerns Fatima’s false accusations against the Husain family. 

And the question is this – in the relentless pursuit of neoliberal development where does the quest for justice stand, and what effects does an unjust society have upon ethical imagination of its members?

In many ways BTBF is the story of vicissitudes in the lives of two families that are for all practical purposes headed by two women; Asha and Zehrunisa (the wife of Karam Husain). Asha’s family belongs to the kunbi caste, and has migrated from the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Zehrunisa’s family is from Uttar Pradesh, and comes from poor, conservative Muslim stock. 

Asha’s husband is a hopeless drunkard, and Asha manages to raise the family fortunes by a mix of guile, petty corruption and politicking. She is also an active member of the local sakha of the Shiv Sena. Zehrunisa’s family, at the beginning of the narrative, stands poised on the brink of a rise. 

Propelled by international demand for scrap, high rates of economic growth in India, and the skills of her son Abdul in sorting and dealing with garbage, the family has a flourishing trade in scrap and garbage, and has managed to put the deposit on a piece of land in a development scheme in a distant Mumbai suburb.

Then the fortune of the Hassan family turns. Their one-legged neighbor Fatima, insanely jealous with their schemes of home-improvement, tries to frame them by burning herself a little and accusing them of the deed. But this goes completely out of hand and she burns herself grievously. 

Karam, Abdul and Kehkashan get arrested because of her accusations, and a large part of the narrative is about the family’s travails with the criminal justice system. The book shows with mind numbing clarity (with the goings on in the Sahar Police Station as a case) the marketplace that the Indian criminal justice system has become.

But this is also a story of childhood and innocence; of Sonu who never steals, wakes up at the crack of dawn, and studies in the night after a day’s hard labour as a garbage picker; of Abdul who wants to be the 'good ice' and not the 'fetid water' that he sees all around him in Mumbai; of Noori (Fatima’s eight-year-old daughter) who does not lie about the details surrounding her mother’s death. 

But such innocence does not seem to travel well into adulthood, and life in this Mumbai ‘undercity’ seems all about competition, envy and private hopes and griefs. The neoliberal remaking of the city seems to have made the poor into classic economic agents where neighbour’s envy is owner’s pride, and the miseries of one’s fellow human beings seem to provide the gloss for the shine of one’s fortune.

What is lost in the process is a sense of public good, of an ethical space in which collective griefs and hopes can be articulated without being subsumed within narratives of hurt and offence.

This book does not ‘soar above’ the lives of its protagonists. With meticulous research and documentation it occupies the crevices between the hopes, fears and desires of the people of Annawadi, and gives us understanding and insight that are to be gained by observing intimately a small social space with passion, commitment, and empathy.

Bibliographic Details: Katherine Boo. Behind the beautiful forevers: life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton. 254 pages + xxii (Hardcover). Rs. 499.

Note: A different version of this review essay was first published in the newsmagazine 'Hard News' in 2012.