In her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Boo explores the lives of several disparate personalities in a poor—yet far from hopeless—squatter settlement.
“The beautiful forever” of your title refers to the wall along the airport road that divides the haves from the have-nots. How did that resonate with you?
The kids looking for trash [to sell for recycling] on that “beautiful forever” wall is an unforgettable image. People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don’t have anything to do with each other. But when banks were failing in Manhattan, the price of garbage collapsed in Annawadi and these people were thrown into hardship. We’re all connected, in good and bad ways.
You vividly describe a very polluted and degraded environment. How did you adjust to it?
I have a few friends who do immersion journalism, and we talk about the earned fact. It’s one thing to walk in and say, “Okay, it’s dirty,” and another thing to be in an environment where you’re choking and sick and thinking—how would I go about making my living? You feel admiration and a kind of wonder for what it takes to get out of poverty when the environment itself is trying to keep you in your place. The sewage lake—I swam in that. My feet were stained for days. You have a different understanding of what that’s like once you’ve had, literally and metaphorically, a dip in it.
The book’s central tragedy involves two families sharing a common wall and minority religion who end up hurting each other profoundly. But you note that in a place where people have every incentive not to be good, so many people are.
We have this conceit that suffering is ennobling. For myself, suffering doesn’t make me a good person; it makes me selfish. Why do we think that people who have less should find it edifying? The amazing thing is that a person like Abdul, this falsely accused garbage sorter, is actually thinking about what it means to be good and what’s the honorable thing to do.
Have you had any word from him since finishing research for the book?
Yes. I guess it was three months ago that I was there, and Abdul had just gotten married—to a woman who doesn’t mind how he smells. So he’s happy.
