Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [107]
Ten years ago, I fell in love with an Indian man and gained a country. He urged me not to take it at face value.
When I met my husband, I’d been reporting for years from within poor communities in the United States, considering what it takes to get out of poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. When I came to India, an increasingly affluent and powerful nation that still housed one-third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet, parallel questions persisted.
I quickly grew impatient with poignant snapshots of Indian squalor: the ribby children with flies in their eyes and other emblems of abjectness that one can’t help but see within five minutes of walking into a slum. For me—and, I would argue, for the parents of most impoverished children, in any country—the more important line of inquiry is something that takes longer to discern. What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor?
And another set of questions nagged, about profound and juxtaposed inequality—the signature fact of so many modern cities. (The scholars who map levels of disparity between wealthy and impoverished citizens consider New York and Washington, D.C., almost as unequal as Nairobi and Santiago.) Some people consider such juxtapositions of wealth and poverty a moral problem. What fascinates me is why they’re not more of a practical one. After all, there are more poor people than rich people in the world’s Mumbais. Why don’t places like Airport Road, with their cheek-by-jowl slums and luxury hotels, look like the insurrectionist video game Metal Slug 3? Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?
I wanted to read the book that would begin to answer some of my questions, because I felt I couldn’t write it, not being Indian, not knowing the languages, lacking a lifetime of immersion in the context. I also doubted my ability to handle monsoon and slum conditions after years of lousy health. I made the decision to try in the course of an absurdly long night at home alone in Washington, D.C. Tripping over an unabridged dictionary, I found myself on the floor with a punctured lung and three broken ribs in a spreading pool of Diet Dr Pepper, unable to slither to a phone. In the hours that passed, I arrived at a certain clarity. Having proved myself ill-suited to safe cohabitation with an unabridged dictionary, I had little to lose by pursuing my interests in another quarter—a place beyond my so-called expertise, where the risk of failure would be great but the interactions somewhat more meaningful.
I had felt a shortage in nonfiction about India: of deeply reported accounts showing how ordinary low-income people—particularly women and children—were negotiating the age of global markets. I’d read accounts of people who were remaking themselves and triumphing in software India, accounts that sometimes elided early privileges of caste, family wealth, and private education. I’d read stories of saintly slumdwellers trapped in a monochromatically miserable place—that is, until saviors (often white Westerners) galloped in to save them. I’d read tales of gangsters and drug lords who spouted language Salman Rushdie would envy.
The slumdwellers I’d already come to know in India were neither mythic nor pathetic. They were certainly not passive. Across the country, in communities decidedly short on saviors, they were improvising, often ingeniously, in pursuit of the new economic possibilities of the twenty-first century. Official statistics offered some indication of how such families were faring. But in India, like many places in the world, including my own country, statistics about the poor sometimes have a tenuous relation to lived experience.
To me, becoming attached to a country involves