Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [108]
The events recounted in the preceding pages are real, as are all the names. From the day in November 2007 that I walked into Annawadi and met Asha and Manju until March 2011, when I completed my reporting, I documented the experiences of residents with written notes, video recordings, audiotapes, and photographs. Several children of the slum, having mastered my Flip Video camera, also documented events recounted in this book. Devo Kadam, one of Manju’s former pupils, was an especially passionate documentarian.
I also used more than three thousand public records, many of them obtained after years of petitioning government agencies under India’s landmark Right to Information Act. The official documents—from agencies that included the Mumbai Police, the state public health department, the state and central education bureaucracies, electoral offices, city ward offices, public hospitals, morgues, and the courts—were crucial in two ways. They validated, in detail, many aspects of the story told in these pages. They also revealed the means by which government corruption and indifference erase from the public record the experiences of poor citizens.
When I describe the thoughts of individuals in the preceding pages, those thoughts have been related to me and my translators, or to others in our presence. When I sought to grasp, retrospectively, a person’s thinking at a given moment, or when I had to do repeated interviews in order to understand the complexity of someone’s views—very often the case—I used paraphrase. Abdul and Sunil, for instance, had previously spoken little about their lives and feelings, even to their own families. I came to my understanding of their thoughts by pressing them in repeated (they would say endless) conversations and fact-checking interviews, often while they worked.
Although I was mindful of the risk of overinterpretation, it felt more distortive to devote my attention to the handful of Annawadians who possessed a verbal dexterity that might have provided more colorful quotes. Among overworked people, many of whom spent the bulk of their days working silently with waste, everyday language tended to be transactional. It did not immediately convey the deep, idiosyncratic intelligences that emerged forcefully over the course of nearly four years.
When I settle into a place, listening and watching, I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.
While I spent time in other slums for comparative purposes, I chose to focus on Annawadi for two reasons: because of the sense of possibility there, as wealth encroached on every side, and because its scale was small enough to allow door-to-door household surveys—the vagrant-sociology approach. The surveys helped me start to differentiate between isolated problems and widely shared ones, like the disenfranchisement of Annawadi’s migrants and hijras.
My reporting wasn’t pretty, especially at first. To Annawadians, I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle, given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping and running afoul of the police. However, residents had concerns more pressing than my presence. After a month or two of curiosity, they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives.
The gifted and generous Mrinmayee Ranade made this