BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo

Annawadi is a slum on the fringes of Mumbai airport, home to about 3000 people in a small space, next to a sewage lake. You don't want to be living there. Every day gives meaning to the phrase the 'survival of the fittest'. Or the strongest, the fastest, the wiliest, the best network maker, the strategist. Here in the West, we really know nothing about the skills and innate instincts for survival. Which makes this book even more extraordinary, researched, compiled and written by an American journalist who knew nothing of the local languages, very little about India and its peoples. She had however, worked in and reported on a number of poor communities in the US, but absolutely nothing prepared her for the shock that is India following her marriage to an Indian.

Yet over the course of a few years from 2008-2012 she grew relationships, developed networks and trust, found herself an excellent and intuitive interpreter. This book are the stories and lives of just a tiny handful of people who live in the slum. The author writes a little about how she came to write this book, telling her own story of immersion in the slum community that resulted in this book.

The book itself, however, is not about the author, she makes no appearance in it at all. What makes the book so extraordinary is that she narrates the stories of the slum and the people in the form of a novel. She has got inside their heads, their souls, so we learn about what motivates them, their dreams, their hopes. We feel the anger, the dismay, the despair when things don't go as planned for Abdul, Fatima, Asha, Manju and others.  This book goes way beyond fact telling as one would expect from a non-fiction book, and yet the stories and relationships she weaves feel so authentic.

This book also exposes the very seedy and horrible underbelly of modern day India, that really no one really wants to acknowledge. The corruption is sickening, and yet an integral part of how the system works in India. I look on online and see the variety of tours us Westerners can do of the Mumbai slums. It makes me feel ill to even contemplate such a thing - more money being made out of the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. The reviews on line are great, the sell of the tours is very attractive, but having lived in India for a period of time, daily walking or driving past where the poorest of the poor live, having read this book, having seen the negative reactions of Indians to realistic movies such as Slumdog Millionaire, I know in my heart that paying money to be taken on a tour of what will only be the cleanest and brightest places of a slum, where very little of the money you pay goes to your young well spoken tour guide and others involved in your tour, is not a good thing to be doing at all.