Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity (Hardcover)

The book title is clunky. It doesnt exactly trip off the tongue. When ordering my copy from Infibeam I typed Beyond instead of Behind in the search field. The search engine promptly amended it, though. The title comes from an advertising hoarding for Italian floor tiles that used to be on the since demolished wall behind which the by now world-renowned slum abutting the Mumbai airport, Annawadi, exists. Though clunkily named, the book is far from clunky. It reads like a Charles Dickens novel set in present-day Mumbai, though fiction it most definitely is not. Katherine Boo has done an exceptional job of making us feel albeit at second hand what it is like to exist like a virtual nobody at the bottom of the social pyramid of Heartbreak City with the most tenuous temp work link with the life in the legitimate metropolis and with all the cards in the deck stacked against the sub sister. No names have been changed to protect anyones privacy or to ward off the peril of getting sued for defamation. The book is a piece of pure reportage devoid of judgemental subtext an admirable feat rarely achieved in chronicling life, high or low. Being an outsider may have helped Boo to reach this state of equanimity while telling the story. It certainly seems to have lent a down-to-earth perspective to the narrative.

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