Summary
Part Four begins in the fall of 2008, on the eve of Navratri, a festival consisting of nine nights of dance. The festival also happens to coincide with election season, so Asha is able to procure funds from the Shiv Sena campaign coffers in order to throw a lavish festival for Annawadi; the parties make sure to throw money at the slums near election seasons because the slums make up a huge voting bloc. Asha, at this point in time, is the official slumlord of Annawadi with the full confidence and support of the Corporator. She has stopped trying to hide her late-night rendezvous with male clients from her family and fully embraces the power and benefits of her position.
Manju and Meena continue to confide in each other. Fatima's suicide has stayed with them and made them consider their own circumstances and obstacles, and their respective possibilities and improbabilities of escaping them. From Meena's perspective, Manju has a pretty sweet life. Her family doesn't beat her, she goes to school, and her mother is on her way to being a powerful politician who advocates for her own daughter's future. Meena, on the other hand, feels totally trapped by her dismal circumstances. Her father and brothers constantly beat her. Her arranged marriage is approaching, and she is only fifteen. One of her brother's friends falls in love with her, and she talks to him on the phone. Meena enjoys the forbidden romance and it gives her a sense of agency in her life, but every time her brothers catch her on the phone, they beat her.
Navratri promises a brief respite for the young women of Annawadi. With Asha in charge, it also promises to be more lavish than previous, disappointing years. But Meena grows weary from the constant abuses of her brothers and father. As her wedding approaches, she discusses suicide with Manju, casually mentioning that if she were to kill herself, she would eat poison rather than burn herself like Fatima. She says she wouldn't want to be remembered like that, smoldering. Manju scolds her and tells her to chase the bad thoughts out of her head. On the first night of Navratri, Manju finds Meena sitting on her family's stoop, looking particularly distant. Meena shows Manju an empty vial of rat poison. When Manju goes into Meena's family's hut and pleads with her mother to take action, Meena's mother shrugs her off, assuring her that Meena didn't actually eat the poison. Manju recruits the help of other women in the village to induce vomiting. After trying several different cocktails of saltwater and detergent, Meena finally vomits a green jet of rat poison. She says she feels better. But later that evening, it becomes clear that poison was in her body for too long. She is brought to Cooper hospital where she dies within hours.
Chapter 13 focuses on Sunil as he navigates the world of garbage picking amidst a global recession. To make matters worse, a group of jihadists from Pakistan landed on the shore of Mumbai and murdered workers and tourists in five-star hotels in South Mumbai, thus marking Mumbai as a dangerous destination and diminishing potential work opportunities during the approaching tourist season. Sunil turns to thievery like his late friend Kalu, stealing pieces of metal with more value than entire kilos of trash. The trash market has plummeted with the global recession, and the price of a kilo of newspapers or bottles, or various other sorted trash goods, has fallen by more than half. Despite Sonu's scoldings, Sunil feels the need to steal metal in order to take care of himself and his sister, who has fallen ill with worms.
In Chapter 14, Boo describes the environment and process of the Mumbai "fast-track" court, where Karam and Kehkashan's case is tried. Despite his justified cynicism regarding the Indian justice system, Karam believes that the courts may be the one place where their case may actually be heard, and where truth still counts for something. With little money left to pay off officials, the Husains refuse all last-minute attempts at extortion from witnesses and investigators, instead hoping that their lawyer will represent them sufficiently and that some of their neighbors would opt to tell the truth on the witness stand.
The prosecution brings three key witnesses to the stand, all of whom have personal ties to Fatima: Priya, a young confidante of Fatima's; Abdul, Fatima's husband; and Cynthia, Fatima's best friend who has harbored resentment for the Husains long before Fatima's burning. A combination logistical hiccups and nerves influence the witnesses' testimonies and they turn out not to be as damning as the prosecution had hoped. Priya tells the truth: that she wasn't there for the burning and that Fatima was prone to confrontation and conflict. Fatima's husband relates what he knows are fabrications, that the Husains threatened to stone Fatima to death. Cynthia's testimony is twisted by the stenographer, who doesn't understand slum Hindi; as a result, the official record states that Cynthia admitted to lying about witnessing the burning (which actually happens to be true).
Abdul's trial is scheduled for a juvenile court, separate from his father and sister's. He tries to maintain a virtuous life while living outside of Dongri correctional facility, refusing to buy stolen goods even though it cuts into the family's profits by fifteen percent. Abdul starts praying at mosques and trying to spread virtue amongst his peers, even while weighing their garbage on his scales, but none of his efforts to live well slow down the stream of police officers and witnesses shaking down their family for more money. The justice system essentially puts the Husains out of business.
They have to sell their storage shed in order to pay for the lawyer. After a promising series of hearings, their original judge is reassigned to a different district, and their entire case is transferred to a new judge who has to piece together the case through shoddy, inaccurate transcripts. The state's investigator makes one last-ditch attempt to extort money from the Husains by telling them that Fatima's husband is willing to reverse his testimony in exchange for two lakhs, equivalent to almost four thousand dollars. This is an absurd amount of money for the Husains, but even if they were able to pay it, Karam knows that Fatima's husband doesn't have the power to have the case thrown out. At this point, the Husains are putting all their hope in the possibility that their innocence will shine through to the new judge in the court documents.
By 2009, Mumbai officials make earnest moves to raze the slums around the city, and, recognizing the futility of trying to stop them and the potential profit of gaming the system, Asha decides to help middle-class Mumbai residents buy slum plots and forge paperwork to prove that they have lived in Annawadi since 1995. Her neighbors find this scheme particularly egregious because she is cheating lifelong Annawadians out of secure housing once the slum is actually destroyed by the airport authority.
Asha doesn't balk at the whispered criticism of her neighbors, but she does lament the day her sole political benefactor, Subhash Sawant, is finally removed from office for fraud. A Congress Party corporator replaces him and enlists Asha's help in trying to capture the slum votes. However, Asha's ultimate stroke of luck comes not from a political benefactor, but from a man named Bhimrao Gaikwad from the Maharashtra Department of Education. He includes her in his scheme to defraud a large-scale government effort to provide education for child laborers and children with disabilities. The scheme brings in more money than Asha has ever seen. She buys a computer for Manju, and a red motorbike for Rahul. The future looks bright for Asha and her family, but for the rest of Annawadi, their once-trusted slumlord no longer cares whether or not they are able to vote. She has her own fortune to attend to.
By the summertime, the election results are tallied. Reform loses out to the status quo, and the progressive promises made to Mumbai's slumdwellers are swiftly abandoned. After decades of foreboding, bulldozers finally roll over the perimeters of Mumbai's slums. Many of the relocation apartments promised to lifetime residents of the slums are instead bestowed on crafty middle-class investors, leaving actual slum dwellers to sleep outside on the pavement. In a bizarre media frenzy, animal rights activists become interested in the conditions of Annawadi not for the people who live there, but for Robert's horses, which he painted to look like zebras. The horses, hitched to a broken wagon, are spooked one day by the bustling crowds and charge off the side of a bridge. News cameras catch the whole incident, and Robert and his wife are eventually charged with animal cruelty.
In the criminal trial of Karam and Kehkashan, after a drawn-out and often incomprehensible process of witness testimony and cross-examination, they are found not guilty and are allowed to return to what remains of their home. Though they are no longer burdened by the prospect of years in prison, their business is ruined, their livelihoods crumbled under the pressure of legal fees and extortion. Abdul's trial has yet to be set, and after several years of awaiting a trial date in juvenile court, Abdul has resigned to the idea that he will never be vindicated. He returns to Dongri thrice weekly, assuring the nebulous authorities that he remains under their thumb.
Analysis
In the final part of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo emphasizes the ongoing nature of the threads she follows throughout the work. There is no neat conclusion to the stories of the people in Annawadi, nor is there a satisfying reconciliation of the injustices perpetuated by the Indian government. Instead, Boo ends the narrative by describing the outcomes and consequences of a national election. Some of the consequences are immediate, but have long-term implications. The slums, which are heavily valued immediately prior to elections because of the volume of voting adults who live in them, are immediately sold out to businesses after the elections. People's homes are razed to make way for parking lots, luxury hotels, and more landing strips for planes carrying tourists with disposable income.
The concluding segment of Behind the Beautiful Forevers is rife with cruel irony. One of the most glaring examples occurs when Robert, the former slumlord, becomes a media focus for mistreating his horses. Boo writes, "activists from a group called the Plant & Animals Welfare Society, or PAWS, brought in the media and representatives of the city’s Animal Welfare League for a 'raid' on Robert’s horse shed. Several horses were determined to be malnourished. Cuts and sores were found on painted zebras. The Animal Welfare League spirited the neediest of the beasts to a therapeutic horse farm. 'Horses Rescued!' was the headline of the following day" (235-236). Of course, the cuts and sores found on the horses pale in comparison to the illness, malnourishment, crushing poverty, and violence endured by the human residents of Annawadi, but a narrative for saving horses is much more succinct and satisfying for a news outlet and requires infinitely less institutional upheaval. Boo writes, "the forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys" (236).
At the center of this entire narrative lies a conflict between two disenfranchised families, but Boo concisely boils down the ways in which the overarching systems of power benefit from internal conflict amongst the poor and disenfranchised. When the oppressed fight amongst themselves, they are unable to focus on the structures that keep them oppressed. Boo writes, "powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process" (237). She expands on this idea by connecting it to broader power structures:
In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace. (237)
It becomes clear during Karam and Kehkashan's trial that their fate, which occupies a prominent space in the collective consciousness of Annawadi, matters nothing to the judge and the members of the overcity. Boo writes, "At the end of a particularly tedious hearing, the judge rose for lunch and sighed to the prosecutor and defender, 'Ah, fighting over petty, stupid, personal things—these women. All that and it reached such a level they made it a case.' It was becoming apparent that the outcome of the trial mattered only to the people of Annawadi" (205-206). This imbalance is further emphasized when the second judge declares the Husains innocent; he does so with a casual, lighthearted flair, as if he made the decision entirely on a whim. Boo says in an interview that she was "heartened when prominent officials engaged in the policy implications of the book" but fully understands that the problems she exposes will not simply wash away once people outside of India are made aware of them. By avoiding a tidy series of conclusions to the narratives she's explored, Boo demonstrates that there is much more work that has to be done in order to effect real, positive change for the poorest people in India.
