Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012)

I didn't purposely set out to read books about India this month, but this is third one I have read with that setting, following the novels Family Matters and The Lowlands. This one is fictionalized non-fiction, in other words a true account written in a novelistic style. It concentrates mainly on a few families who live in a shantytown within sight of luxury hotels and the elegant Mumbai airport. Abdul, the enterprising teenager who is the primary breadwinner of his large family, spends his days finding, sorting, and selling trash items to a recycling plant. He sees a glimmer of hope for a better life until a terrible tragedy causes him and his father and sister to be falsely accused and jailed. Another slum resident, Asha, strives to reach the middle class through shady dealings, bribery, and influence peddling. Others, when their futures seem too bleak, elect suicide, the favored method being the taking of rat poison.

Boo pictures a society rife with racial, religious, class, and caste tensions and with widespread corruption. The police and even the doctors in the hospitals expect bribes. The free schools are substandard and even sometimes just schools on paper and not in actuality. Philanthropic donations of supplies and money are diverted from their intended recipients and profit the bureaucrats charged with administering them. While the upper and upper-middle classes of India enjoy unprecedented prosperity, the lower classes sometimes see no honest way to raise themselves from abject poverty.

One thing I find particularly disturbing here is the picture of the discord and economic envy present between poor people who are all essentially in the same situation. Instead of blaming outside causes for their condition, they blame each other. Boo writes, " But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together....Instead they blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another." She goes on to comment, "What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too....Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional....The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached....The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace."

Does any of that sound familiar? Here in our grand country do we not see many who are relatively poor blaming even poorer people for their misfortunes? Do we not see many becoming cynical and hateful about others of differing races and religions? Do we not see some of the poorest understandably viewing crime as their only way out?

A reader could read this fact-based story in a dispassionate manner as an account of the dire situation among the poor in modern-day India, or he could view it as a parable for all countries, such as ours, of the results of the disproportionate accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, aided by a government intent on maintaining the status quo.

End of sermon. This is a book well worth your time. It is written in an engaging manner and appears to be backed by extensive research and interviews with actual people. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2012.