Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a really special book. It's classified as non-fiction because of the extraordinary reporting and research that Boo did but it reads like a novel.
The narrative follows the lives of several families living in a shantytown outside the airport in Mumbai, India. I've never been to India but it a lot of the Caribbean I always wonder as I'm whisked from the airport to the resort, "who lives there, what are their lives like?" and this book answers that.
The poverty described here is not American poverty - it's not poverty with McDonalds or Cable TV - it's poverty with mud, and sheets that separate families, and polluted water as the local lake, and people who collect and sell garbage to support families of 10. All of this is the shadow of luxury hotels and with the imminent threat of the government bulldozing their homes.
There are several characters who Boo follows most closely, a young man who is supporting his family by finding and selling garbage, a one-legged woman who lives next door, the neighborhood politician who is trying to bridge herself into middle class politics, and her daughter who is going to college. It was hard to remember that these are all real people and not characters Boo made up.
Definitely recommend this book although it is a heavy subject. Kudos to Boo's reporting and attention to detail that brought this "undercity" to life.
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