“Everything around us is roses” is how Abdul’s younger brother, Mirchi, put it. “And we’re the shit in between.”
Mirchi refers to the rapid development of downtown Mumbai happening all around the slums, leaving the poorest citizens to starve and struggle in the shadow of multi-billion dollar hotel complexes. His comment also emphasizes a broader national narrative that poverty in India has been addressed and that the millions of citizens who are still living in slums have overcome the tribulations of poverty and have benefitted from globalization and India's tech boom; this is a narrative pushed by India's elite and public officials, when the fact is that still, many of India's citizens live in crushing poverty, and the tech boom and subsidized agricultural advancements actually widen the wealth gap and contribute to the suffering of many.
“Use your nose, mouth, and ears, not just your scales.” Tap the metal scrap with a nail. Its ring will tell you what it’s made of. Chew the plastic to identify its grade. If it’s hard plastic, snap it in half and inhale. A fresh smell indicates good-quality polyurethane.
In this quote, Karam Husain advises his son Abdul on how to use his senses and his body to assess the value of garbage. This quote demonstrates the way which garbage pickers and garbage sorters must sacrifice their own wellbeing to make a living. Karam is a perfect example of someone whose health suffers for a lifetime in garbage work; his lungs are weak from decades of breathing in burning plastics, chewing plastics, and using his "nose, mouth, and ears" to determine the monetary value of garbage.
He minded being unpitiable only at mealtime. At the orphanage, when rich white women visited, Sunil had refused to beg for rupees. Instead he’d harbored the idea that one of the women might single him out, reward his dignified restraint. For years, he had waited for this discriminating visitor to meet his eye; he planned to introduce himself as “Sunny,” a name a foreigner might like. Eventually, he’d come to realize the improbability of his hope, and his general indistinction in the mass of need. But by then, the habit of not asking anyone for anything had become a part of who he was.
Here, Boo delves into the private mind of Sunil, a young garbage picker, and describes his rehearsed fantasy of encountering a charitable foreigner who recognizes the honor in his refusal to beg. This short anecdote helps the reader to understand the psychology of Sunil's withdrawn behavior, the way his aversion to begging began as an act of pride and eventually became simply a habit.
The airport people had erected tall, gleaming aluminum fences on the side of the slum that most drivers passed before turning into the international terminal. Drivers approaching the terminal from the other direction would see only a concrete wall covered with sunshine-yellow advertisements. The ads were for Italianate floor tiles, and the corporate slogan ran the wall’s length: BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER. Sunil regularly walked atop the Beautiful Forever wall, surveying for trash, but Airport Road was unhelpfully clean.
This passage explains the origin of the book's title, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. This revelation of the title's origin subverts the flowery language with which it is rendered and takes a phrase that sounds extremely general and figurative and grounds it in a specific place and context. The figurative meaning of the word behind becomes literal in the sense that the town of Annawadi is literally directly behind the advertisement. The ironic revelation of the title's origin stings with cynicism and blazing critique of the capitalist institutions overrunning Mumbai and widening the wealth gap into a gaping chasm. The product being described as "Beautiful Forever" is a frivolous luxury—marble countertops—and the majority of the community that lies behind the advertisement lives without the most basic of needs. Later in the book, the Italianate tiles come back into play when the Husains try to refurbish their hut, and the tiles become not just an aesthetic addition but also a more hygienic option as a cutting board, because they don't have fissures in which bacteria can become trapped.
As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.
Here, Boo delineates the escape routes out of poverty, as they are perceived by the people who live in Annawadi. But even these routes offer no sure guarantees; for example, the Husains found their entrepreneurial niche, but corruption, also one of the so-called "ways out," ultimately led to their downfall and re-entrance into poverty.
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
This cynical revelation, attributed to Abdul through the voice of Boo, relates the Indian criminal justice system to the garbage industry; the analogy, by extension, demonstrates how the corruption in the justice system reduces the people whose fates it determines to nothing more than trash, like "a kilo of polyurethane bags."
Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing—the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.
This quote communicates the gravity of Zehrunisa and the Husains' circumstances while also zooming in to the specific emotional character of the scene. By recounting the seemingly insurmountable set of obstacles that Zehrunisa faces, Boo then shows that instead of thinking about those obstacles, which she has, in this moment, no control over, Zehrunisa chooses instead to mourn the loss of something more practical and manageable, her beautiful quilt. This scene also demonstrates the sense of loyalty the Husains maintain for their small Muslim community in Annawadi; despite the fact that Fatima weaponized her body to try to ruin the Husains' lives, they still accept the responsibility of washing her corpse before she is interred.
The fields on which he worked belonged to a rich politician who paid his laborers a thousand rupees, or twenty-one dollars, a month. While the politician’s crop yield and profit increased with the new chemicals, the freight of the canisters and the noxious inhalations made the laborers’ work, never easy, blisteringly hard. At the end of a recent workday, one of Anil’s co-workers had set down his canister, climbed a tree at the edge of the farm, and hanged himself. His family received no government compensation for the loss.
The description of the working conditions of poor farmers in rural India indicts not only the Indian government for subsidizing agricultural technology that kills farmers, and not only the wealthy landowners, many of whom are politicians themselves, for sanctioning such work conditions on their farms, but also implicates American companies like Dow Chemical for contributing to the conditions that have driven thousands upon thousands of Indian farmers to suicide.
Sunil thought that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly—the kind that could be ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he’d come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.
After the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay, Abdul and Sunil share their thoughts on mortality and their value, as slumdwellers and garbage pickers, to the authorities of Mumbai. Abdul sinks into more philosophical reflections after his time in Dongri jail and his encounters with the Master, and shares with Sunil that he considers the lives of other people when he sees them passing in the street, or laying on the sidewalk. Here, Sunil considers his own mortality while he steals a nickel pipe fitting to later sell for food for himself and his sister; he realizes that he may not be worth anything to the officers and investigators and people of the overcity, but he still values his own life, and that makes it worth living.
Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation—the idea that their country’s rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life. In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.
In this excerpt, Boo describes a national mythology in India that attributes the inventiveness of its citizens to the unpredictability of life in India, in a way excusing the shortcomings of Indian government and policy, suggesting that the unpredictability and unreliability of resources has, in fact, contributed to their national successes.
