In the 1950s, the comedian Eddie Lawrence invented the Old Philosopher, a character who recited imagined calamities and asked, “Is that what’s bothering you, Bunkie?” As I read about the misfortunes chronicled in "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," I found myself thinking, Is that what’s bothering you, Pallavi? Except these calamities are all too real.

Katherine Boo writes very well. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and she’s won a MacArthur “Genius” grant. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is her anthropological-by-anecdote study of Annawadi, an “undercity” – a temporary colony in makeshift shelters – of 3,000 squatters under the flight path of the Mumbai airport. It sits in the shadows of the “Glimmerglass Hyatt” and other luxury hotels, symbols of India’s newfound prosperity.

As Boo explains in an author’s note, "Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation – the idea that India's rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life." And nowhere is daily life more chaotic or less predictable than in Annawadi. This book is not an academic cost/benefit analysis of modernization or an examination of the plight of the “average” Indian. It is the story of a half-dozen families living unimaginably brutalizing existences. There are stories of both courage and cowardice, filled with the personal complexities that permeate people’s lives. It is a grim subject, which Boo handles admirably in a brilliantly composed and eminently readable book – one that packs as much literary power as a great work of fiction.

Annawadi is a hard place. Neighborhoods like the South Side of Chicago or North Philly may define poverty for most Americans, but Annawadi is different in kind from those communities – as harsh as the Dickensian slums of 19th-century London. No matter how dire things appear when we first meet Boo’s subjects, their reality is worse. Boo uses lucid, sober and elegant prose, along with novel-like narrative arcs and character development, to tell their stories. Death, disease and alcoholism are everywhere. One woman walks aimlessly through Annawadi for weeks after her son’s suicide, asking everyone she passes if they could tell her why her son had taken his life. A man explains that because he has advanced TB, “Lately if I don’t drink, I don’t have the strength to lift anything.”

Here’s Boo’s wonderful (and awful) take on monsoon season:
“On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August. At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food though mounds of wet, devalued garbage, s***ting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stomped the mud from their feet and said, ‘My stomach is on fire, my chest.’ ‘All up and down this leg, all night.’”

And yet there is hope too. Indeed, much like Dickens’ urban subcultures, Annawadi is a complex social landscape, where residents jockey to improve their position. Many are captivated with the opportunities of modern India and are on the make (or hope to be). There is even a brothel, run from his hut by a Muslim man who considers his whores a pack of malingerers. There are also goats that belong to him and have the run of the place.

And, of course, this being India, there is corruption. Boo does a great job of illustrating its pervasiveness. Even the Catholic orphanage is run by a crooked nun. When Westerners visit, she recruits kids to beg for rupees from the rich white women. She pockets some of the money and shares the rest with local politicians and underpaid police dependent on graft to make a living. One of the children Boo focuses on, Sunil, refused to play the game and was banished from the orphanage, where he had occasionally gotten food and shelter.

Most Annawadi residents do menial jobs, are unemployed or do something imaginatively entrepreneurial to get by. At least one – a woman named Asha – has decided that governmental sleaze has created an opportunistic path to respect and relative affluence. Asha is an intelligent woman capable of penetrating insight into people. But she also has profound wounds from her upbringing in rural India, where the limits of caste, gender and destitution are even more unforgiving and unrelenting than they are in Annawadi. The resentment triggered by those memories enables her to act amorally, without remorse or empathy. In a discussion with her daughter about how a nonprofit trust she controlled could be used to steal money intended to educate unschooled children, she says, “Of course it’s corrupt. But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people . . . say that it’s right?”

Boo’s message is that notwithstanding the myth of economic growth through chaotic unpredictability, as the Indian economic miracle unsteadily lurches forward, it is accompanied by an ongoing search for solid ground on which citizens can seek the promised rewards. As Boo tells the story of Sunil – the boy banished from the orphanage – she notes that he had experimented with becoming a “road boy,” essentially a street urchin and thief. But he decided that was too risky; he would stick with being a scavenger who dumpster-dives for a living, seeking to recycle other people’s trash and providing one of Boo’s best metaphors: “Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.”

Sunil found his “territory” on a narrow ledge behind some dumpsters by the airport, where taxi drivers throw litter over fences adorned with repeated ads for floor tiles that promise to be “forever beautiful forever beautiful forever beautiful . . . .” From his precarious perch on the ledge behind the beautiful forevers, Sunil retrieves cans, bottles and whatever else he can salvage, providing Boo with another metaphor for the Indian economy, which she chooses to imbue with hope at the end of her tale.

Then there’s Manju, Asha’s daughter, who is almost too perfectly emblematic of Boo’s vision of modern India. Manju is attending college – she wants to be a teacher – and no longer fits in anywhere. Her classmates think she’s peculiar because she’s from a slum, while her neighbors think it is weird that she is pursuing an education. She doesn’t understand why anybody would want to talk to her, and few do. But her biggest fear is that her mother will marry her off, in which case she “would die doing the things she was doing now: sweeping the dirt that had blown in from outside, mopping, then sweeping the new dirt that had blown in while she mopped.” Manju is nonetheless deferential to her mother, even agreeing to falsify documents as the secretary of her nonprofit trust.

A recurring focus of the book is on the Husain family, especially their oldest son, Abdul. As Boo recounts their background and the details of their daily lives, we learn about Abdul’s expertise at evaluating scavengers’ rubbish, a vital skill that enables him to act as a middleman between scavengers and corporate recyclers. We also learn about the imprisonment, torture and trial of Abdul, his father and his sister on trumped-up charges of . . . well, they don’t know what exactly, but the allegations seem to have something to do with inciting their next-door neighbor to kill herself by self-immolation. The neighbor had an ongoing feud with various members of the Husain family over seemingly trivial matters; her dramatic suicide may have been triggered because a Husain home-improvement project financed by Abdul’s earnings caused rubble to fall into rice she was cooking for dinner.

After being tortured and held in the local police station for months, Abdul was released to a juvenile facility (ironically because his mother was able to acquire false documentation that he was younger than he was). The trial of Abdul’s father and sister was held in a “high speed court” in Sewri, a South Mumbai neighborhood that is a one-hour bus-and-train ride from Annawadi, but it feels to the Husains as if it were another world, oceans away. I won’t reveal the outcome, but the fiasco illustrates the dictum laid down by Abdul’s father at the beginning of the first chapter: “Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, ‘What a navigator I am!’ And then the wind blows you east.”

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity