The undercity rises?

At the end of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo writes of the death of two horses in Annawadi, the Mumbai slum around which Boo's narrative is woven.

The horses, we learn, are kept by one Robert, the "Zebra Man," who also has zebras and other animals in his keeping.

Every summer, on a Sunday in June, an illegal horse racing event is held on the "gleaming Western Express Highway," a highway, one figures from Boo's book, that divides the part of Mumbai nestled close to Sahar International Airport into two worlds: the "over" and the "under" cities. 

Robert, a deposed slumlord of the "undercity" of Annawadi, makes money by running his horses in this "overcity" race.

Robert's horses are harnessed to a carriage with a pretty facade. However, behind the illusory "forever" of a fresh coating of paint, the carriage is ill-maintained. So, during the course of the race, the wheels come loose and the horses fall from the overpass to their death.

What follows the death of the rickety, underfed, yet exploited horses, elicits the writer's irony. A small group of animal rights activists rally around the horse-tragedy and demand that Robert be prosecuted. The event garners media coverage as well, and Annawadians, strangers to receiving a driblet of civic concern over the death, mutilation, sickness, wrongful imprisonment, and the terror of a cruel police force, are genuinely "bemused" by the attention paid to the dead horses.

The activists manage to take the case of cruelty and injustice (meted out to animals in Annawadi) to the Mumbai police Commissioner and Robert and his wife are eventually "charged under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act for failing to provide adequate food, water, and shelter to their four-legged charges."

Boo notes that with the promise of a conviction "the forces of justice" will have "finally come to Annawadi." 

But, it's just the horses whose death is avenged by the due process of the judiciary.

Karam, his son Abdul, and his daughter, Kehkanesha, long-time Muslim residents of Annawadi, on the other hand, suffer torture in police custody, endless extortion from both the police and petty local officials and pre-trial incarceration, on the basis of fake murder charges leveled at them by Fatima, the "one-legged" enigma and pariah of Annawadi.

Fatima had set herself on fire in a fit of extreme envy against her next-door Muslim neighbors. As Boo unfolds, she begrudged their relative affluence over time and wanted to ruin them. What better way than to set herself on fire and cry "murder?"

Fatima's trick goes overboard as nobody helps douse her third-degree burns and her stint in the local state (free) hospital worsens her condition.

She dies, but not before an official gets her to accuse the Karam's of having set her on fire. 

The family of Karam isn't affluent by any long shot; nobody in Annawadi is. But they are scavengers and had come into some money as a result of diligent scavenging on the part of Abdul of the right kind of trash--plastic and metal. In the market of global capitalism, the price of plastic and metal trash had soared.

The Fatima's next door, which is really the other side of a think wall separating one shanty from another, could not reap the harvest of this market. 

While swift justice befalls the dead horses, the lives of Annawadi's human denizens get emptied by the day of any hope for justice whether earthly or otherwise.

The dead and mutilated bodies of two of the scavenging children, Kalu and Sanjay, remain less than mere statistics, because the police don't keep records of the poor dead in the city of Mumbai. They are to be dispensed like trash.

What goes through the minds of the Annawadi boys like Abdul, upon seeing the spectacle of justice meted out to the horses of Annawadi is expressed in frilless prose by Boo:

They weren't thinking about the uninvestigated deaths of Kalu and Sanjay. Annawadi boys broadly 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. The boys were simply puzzled by the fuss, since they considered Robert's horses the luckiest and most lovingly tended creatures in the slum.

Yet, as Boo implies in her book, the Annawadians too can, if they wanted to, avenge the deaths and injustices that rain on them on a daily basis. Their particular enemy is the local police. The police of modern India isn't a state infrastructure that provides protection to all Indian citizens; it's a private army whose services have to be bought by those who can afford to. 

Boo's modern, or as she insists on the label "globalized," India, is a privatized nation much like modern-day Haiti is. The poor of Annawadi, like the poor of Haiti,can't buy the services of the police, the local government or the judiciary, but they can resist the tyranny of the system through unity.

The horses got justice because the activists persisted through unity. Disunity is the bane, one feels of Annawadians. In the "Author's Note" segment of the book, Boo ponders on why the slums of Annawadi-like places in India don't look the insurrectional video game Metal Slug 3 (there is a video parlor run by a Tamil man in Annawadi; the Annawadi boys play games like Metal Slug 3 regularly). Boo's answer is disunity and at the core of Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the telling of the story of this abysmal disunity.

Here is a sampling of that core:

At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now;the quashing of voter applications of the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborer's pay. Abdul was one of the many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together [...] Instead powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another [...] In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife createst only the faintest ripples in the fabric of society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. 

I think Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a book on contemporary India, not simply a book on Indian poverty.

Indian Dream

A book I want to read.

I hear it's about Mumbai, but having read an excerpt, I believe it to be about contemporary India, or the India that is a maddening contradiction in being both incredibly "rich" (second only to China in its growth rate) and mind-numbingly poor.

What is striking to me is Boo's ability to capture the Mumbai underbelly's version of upward mobility.

The residents of Annawadi, a decrepit slum sandwiched between islands of affluence in the city, live their life believing in the narrative of a freshly minted Indian dream (a counterpart of the American dream). They live, as one resident claims, like "shit", surrounded by "roses."

They don't like living in the "shit" but they're not angry at the rich for their condition. Unlike the angry poor of an older India I grew up witnessing on celluloid and in political upheavals tinted with Marxist (anti-rich) sloganeering, the new breed of urban poor seem to have tremendous faith in their ability to "make it" in the new India.

Annawadians, as Boo calls them, as though Annawadi is a sovereign territory within the landmass of Mumbai, have distinct dreams:

There was too much wanting at Annawadi lately, or so it seemed to Abdul. As India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention. Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past. 

Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables. He wanted a clean job like that. “Watch me!” he’d once snapped at their mother. “I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!” 

The dream of Raja Kamble, a sickly toilet-cleaner who lived on the lane behind Abdul’s, was of medical rebirth. A new valve to fix his heart and he’d survive to finish raising his children. Fifteen-year-old Meena, whose hut was around the corner, craved a taste of the freedom and adventure she’d seen on TV serials, instead of an arranged marriage and domestic submission. Sunil, an undersized twelve-year-old scavenger, wanted to eat enough to start growing. Asha, a fightercock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her teenaged daughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become Annawadi’s first female college graduate.

Mirchi's dream is startlingly refreshing. Were Mirchi to be growing up in the 70s and 80s, in the regime of Indira Gandhi, he wouldn't thus glorify the job of a waiter and aspire to a job that entails inserting "toothpicks into pieces of cheese," as it would be against his self-respect and dignity to do. Respect was a big word in the lexicon of the poor in Socialist India. But today's poor, symbolized by Mirchi, want to get inside the luxury hotels, if not as a guest, then at least as a lowly wait-staff (poor Mirchi doesn't know that the wait-staff are also made to clean the shit left behind by the rich sojourners).

I feel like Raja's dream is touching, as are the girls', Meena and Manju's. Asha is clearly seeking empowerment in wanting to be a ruthless slumlord.

But they all want to move up the economic ladder. That is a normal desire the world over. However, when one reads about the life in Annawadi, it becomes hard to conceive of such a movement. 

The ideology of India's (free) market economy has succeeded, it seems, in ensuring that if not wealth, then at least the dream of making more and living better, has trickled down to the wretchedest of the wretched in India. 

I think they're in for a huge disappointment, though if one were to follow the logic of India's free-market economy guru numero uno Nandan Nilekani argument, the Mirchi's, the Asha's and the Manju's of today are India's human capital that needs to be thoroughly mined. To be sure, the station of Mirchi's life will be better if he were to get inside the Hyatt from the shit pond on whose edge he and his family are living (in a card board hut). But how is he to get there with all the other masses of slum boys eyeing the same prize post? More importantly, will he really get there, or will he perish or get criminalized through police brutality as a child. 

Boo writes of extreme police brutality in Annawadi. The police have a ball extorting, bullying, terrorizing and raping the Annawadians and they aren't accountable for their acts. 

Mirchi and his family (of eight siblings), for instance are hiding from the police because the police suspect them of having burnt to death the one-legged woman. Their neighbors, who are primarily Hindus, have managed to scapegoat Mirchi's family because they are the only Muslims in Annawadi.

Yet nobody had liked the one-legged woman as she had the reputation of being an immoral slut who slept around with men for pleasure. Anybody could have been responsible for her death. The One-legged woman herself could have put an end to her life, unable to endure the ostracism.

The poor of Annawadi, especially the children whose minds have been invaded by dreams of future well-being, are perilously perched to sink into the bottom most level of the shit pond they are so desirous of escaping from. 

Yet, they dream of rising from the pits to the status of working-class.

I liked the one-legged woman's dream the best:

Her abiding interest was in extramarital sex, though not for pocket change alone. That, her neighbors would have understood. But the One Leg also wanted to transcend the affliction by which others had named her. She wanted to be respected and reckoned attractive. Annawadians considered such desires inappropriate for a cripple.

Ah, here is someone who wanted to be raised to visibility that only the "respectable" have in India.

Sadly, because her dream stood out and was thought of as "preposterous," she had to go.

Irony: It is permissible, even socially applauded, to become a toothpick-thrusting waiter in a five-star hotel, but it's daring and impossible for a disreputable woman to want to be respected.

India, after all, hasn't fundamentally changed.