Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

The walls near the Mumbai Airport that hide the slums have “Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever” written across them as a means of helping those who are whisked by imagine a present and future that is at odds with the gritty reality that is only a few feet away.  Katherine Boo traveled behind those walls to the shacks of Annawadi, a half-acre slum with 3000 inhabitants, to connect with the polyglot peoples that are squatting on fetid ground next to a lake filled with human and industrial waste. Those who thrive here are garbage pickers who turn the trash of the airport environs into cash through recycling.  They also drink, there is a lot of prostitution and use of the available drugs – a local version of wite-out and various alcoholic beverages, and the children spend time in sham schools that people run to get government money, but they actually have no idea how to run a true school nor any interest in doing that (with the exception of one girl who teaches, in part, to spite her mother – show her mother how things should be done). 

Through interpreters, Boo tracks what led up to and what resulted from a particularly violent moment – when one of the denizens, a one-legged woman who entertains men in her hut while her husband is away at work, douses herself in kerosene and sets herself on fire in order to call attention to what she calls mistreatment by a family that shares a wall with her hut.  Her hope is that this will empower her and ruin them.  This plot device holds our interest as we try to puzzle things out and get to know two main families and a host of other interesting characters in this – I don’t know what to call it – Shanty Town? 

When I traveled to Nicaragua with the express interest of connecting with various poor people, wherever we went it was possible to see people precariously perched on every available scrap of land.  They would build shacks of tin and wood and whatever else was around.  From these shacks, kids dressed in the whitest shirts I have ever seen would emerge and to go to school (I learned that a process that involved leaving the shirts in garbage bags to bake under the sun was critical to the whitening process).  Though we talked to peasants and to people who had been helped by microloans to achieve a better standard of living, and though we went to institutions that worked with the poorest of the poor, we did not really connect with the people who were squatting on land, though they were all around us. 

Boo connected with shack people (on a different continent and in a different culture – but in shacks for similar reasons).  She observed them and reported on them.  The resulting historical novel is part detective novel, part crime reporting, part social and political commentary (Boo herself is commenting – though generally doing it by quoting or paraphrasing the residents of Annawadi), and part anthropology a la Margaret Mead.  It is also a bit like psychoanalysis. 

In the author notes, Boo acknowledges that the people she was interacting with had a language that was well suited to describing garbage – sorting it and making gradations in it.  They did not have a finely honed language to describe their internal experiences.  This language developed across time as a result of their interactions.  So the scientific paradox emerges that something can’t be observed without changing it.  As true as that may be of subatomic particles, it is certainly true of anthropology and psychoanalysis.  So part of the dilemma, for the analyst and the anthropologist, is how best to engage with the people with whom we work.

Boo describes an interaction between a resident – one of the heroes of her story – and an almost imaginary person – the teacher in a prison where the resident is incarcerated and then visits three days a week while on probation awaiting trial.  The teacher tells stories of morality that the resident takes to heart and embellishes and works hard to live up to.  The resident imagines that the teacher wants to know how he is doing and will be proud when he hears about all that the resident has done to live up to the precepts the teacher has offered.  While this story is important in its own right, psychoanalytically we can wonder if this is a variation of the resident’s experience of Boo – as someone who is interested in him, but perhaps feels to him almost imaginary – as if she (Boo is a blond haired woman from the west) is not completely a real part of his life, but is also certainly a very important figure that he wants to impress. 

Freud’s engagement with the world through his writing changed it profoundly.  We live in a very different place than we would otherwise be in as a result of his helping us – not just individually – but culturally – think differently about the thoughts that we have – sexual thoughts and aggressive thoughts primarily, but he lead us more generally to wonder about our subjectivity – and what unconscious forces influence the way that we think.  On the whole I think the world is a better place for that – whole categories of mental illness have been eradicated in industrial and post-industrial countries. 

South Pacific Stick Navigation Chart 

Museum of Natural History, NYC

Margaret Mead, who was also a very public figure, worked not just to understand the tribes that she engaged with, but to educate people about them more generally.  In the South Pacific wing of the Natural History Museum in New York City, the reluctant son and I discovered on our recent trip that she wanted us to think more carefully and respectfully about the peoples that we engage with – and to learn from “primitive” people without burdening them with our hang-ups: She specifically was concerned that we not introduce our death anxiety and birth aversion to peoples who seamlessly integrated both of these events into their lived lives.

Boo has a political message here – and it is at heart a very Roussean one.  Her position is that in our natural state people are good.  Bad things – injustices, even evil is – I think – in Boo’s world something that is traceable to corrupt and corrupting societal and ultimately governmental influences.  She sees us – and cites impressive evidence of this – as being essentially moral creatures even when in the most dire circumstances.  She notes that the children were the most reliable witnesses to what had taken place – their observations seemed least washed with self interest and other distorting factors – and they tended to agree with each other across lines that divide adults – things like Muslim vs Hindu and relatively wealthy versus abjectly impoverished.  As her witnesses aged – and as they got further from an event – self-interest became more and more evident in their reporting.

The heart of goodness, from Boo’s perspective, is a social network – a web that binds people together.  This is threatened when whatever it is that sustains us – what sustains us economically – is threatened.  She sees this as being inevitable in a global society with increasingly mobile capital – it is inevitable that we will see both an improvement in general living standards and intermittent and painful disruptions in personal well-being.  The opportunity is for governments to help cushion the impact of these disruptions. 

Ultimately, then, this becomes political, moral and economic reporting.  But I am aware that describing the book at this level undermines the level on which it works best – as a good story, which it certainly is.  Boo starts with the event – the self-immolation.  She then goes back in time and helps us realize how it came to be.  And then she moves forward in time to see the consequences of that (and the global economic contraction) on a small group of families and individuals that she has helped us care deeply about.  We get to know these individuals and this micro culture.  We get a sense of how it works.  We resonate with the people she describes – they are not just glimpsed from a bus or taxi in passing on the way to someplace that feels like many other places – but are intimate and surprisingly non-exotic people – people we can identify with.

Openly embracing this culture – living in and among these individuals over the course of four or five years is a herculean task for someone who is used to the creature comforts of the first world.  I remember at the end of our 5 days in Nicaragua, as we were processing our experience, an administrator pointing to the exit sign in the hotel where we were staying – a sign like the signs in almost all of the buildings we had been in.  In white lettering on a green background, it said (in Spanish) ruta de evacuacion, with an arrow.  He said that had seen these signs the whole time and each time had been reassured that there was an escape route from this country that felt so foreign and scary to him.  While his reaction was extreme, I think we all resonated to some extent with his experience.

Boo thanks the people who provided the haven for her to recover from the reporting.  In so far as this book – to return to the question of whether we, as reporters, can be as free of self-serving bias as the children, and the question of how to best scientifically report on what we observe – in so far as Boo has self-serving biases, she has invested a great deal in exploring them – and I salute her for that.  I also believe, however, her discovery of goodness in Annawadi, analogous as it is to psychoanalysts discovery of the inherent good in the people we work with – whether the infants that Stern observes or the adult patient who, despite horrific treatment, works to engage humanely with those around him or her – this discovery is worth the investment she has made.  Bringing it to our attention, in the way that she does, has the potential to help us think more charitably about those it would be much easier to leave sealed safely behind walls that promise a vague and better future – one that allows us to stay disconnected.  

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