Summary
Chapter One of Part One begins seven months prior to the action of the prologue in January, 2008. Zehrunisa rudely awakes Abdul with a series of beratements, because she superstitiously believes that her mistreatment of her son positively correlates to the profits he reaps in reselling their garbage to recycling plants. She's been berating him more often because January profits are vital to the Husains' plan to buy a plot of land outside of the city in a community of Muslims. In Annawadi, they not only have to deal with the anxiety of being squatters, worried that at any moment the Airports Authority could force them off the land; they also have to endure the suspicion and prejudice of many of their Hindu neighbors for being Muslim.
Boo describes morning in Annawadi as "the gentle-going hour in which [Abdul] hated Annawadi least" (4). Laborers wake up and split off towards their various assignments. There are construction workers, artisans, and factory workers. Many Annawadians scavenge for garbage and recyclables to sell to a wholesaler like Abdul. Abdul begins his day by inspecting, separating, and sorting recyclables. Some of the materials require treatment, like aluminum bottle caps with rubber lining. The rubber must be stripped from the tiny cap before it is sorted as pure aluminum. Boo writes, "Rich people’s garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors" (13).
Boo explains that Annawadi was settled in 1991 "by a band of laborers trucked in from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport." "Annawadi," she writes, "the land of annas, a respectful Tamil word for older brothers. Less respectful terms for Tamil migrants were in wider currency. But other poor citizens had seen the Tamils sweat to summon solid land from a bog, and that labor had earned a certain deference" (5-6). Almost two decades later, thousands of people from all over South Asia call Annawadi home.
As Abdul readies himself for a day of sorting trash, his younger brother Mirchi excitedly plies his best friend Rahul for details about his new temp job as a service worker at the swanky Intercontinental Hotel. Rahul's mother, Asha, helped secure him the job with her unspecified connections to Shiv Sena, a political party made up mostly of Hindus born in Maharashtra, whose "current galvanizing cause was purging Mumbai of migrants from India's poor northern states" (12). The supremacist elements of Shiv Sena and its discriminatory views towards Muslims don't stop Mirchi and Rahul from being best friends; in fact, Mirchi often jokes about the party's politics, making light of the extreme gravity of its intentions.
At the Intercontinental Hotel, Mirchi watches international businesspeople and Bollywood stars rub elbows, but he doesn't dare stare too long, he says, "because if the manager sees you looking at the guests, he’ll fire you, take your whole pay" (8). Mirchi presses him for more details about the women in attendance and their revealing outfits. Boo writes that Mirchi's "cheerful disposition" and tendency to tell the truth and avoid embellishment prevents the other boys in Annawadi from resenting his privilege. It's Mirchi's dream to work in the newly burgeoning high-end hospitality industry in Mumbai, but Abdul worries that his brother will be discriminated against for being a Muslim.
Chapter Two of Part One focuses on Asha, Rahul's mother, whose dream of replacing Robert Pires as the slumlord of Annawadi has recently been coming closer to reality due to her relationship with the Corporator of Ward 76, where Annawadi is located. Before Asha lived in Mumbai, in an attempt to consolidate a majority in Annawadi and disempower the Tamil founders of the slum, Shiv Sena tasked Robert Pires with bringing in more Maharashtrians. Asha and her family are among the Maharashtrians who made the move. But Annawadi remains a revolving door of itinerant workers, making it difficult to maintain a majority for any significant stretch of time. Much to the dismay of Shiv Sena organizers, the North Indian migrant workers whom they tried so hard to keep out now once again make up a large bloc of Annawadi residents.
By January of 2007, Robert Pires seems to have abandoned his ambitions for power and influence and replaced them with worship and atonement. He prays both to Christian and Hindu shrines and distributes food to the needy children in Annawadi. Asha hones in on his sudden changes of heart as an opportunity for her. With Robert proving ineffectual as a "slumlord," his guilt finally having caught up with him, the Corporator seeks a strong, reliable replacement. Asha perfectly fits the bill. The Corporator sets her up with a well-paying temp job as a kindergarten teacher, where she can spend most of her classroom time on her phone, attending to Annawadi-related business.
As Asha's status rises in Annawadi, she gains supplicants. When she returns home from work, a line of people await her at her door to ask for favors or give thanks. While she receives the residents one-by-one, her daughter Manju eavesdrops from the kitchen, preparing the evening meal. Manju is the only young person in Annawadi recieving a college education; for Asha, Manju is both an immense source of pride and somewhat of a disappointment in the way that she cannot comprehend the poverty that Asha experienced as a child. Asha somewhat resents the level of privilege that her work affords Manju, especially when Manju disapproves of her schemes and involvement in corruption.
Boo describes the stream of supplicants that enter Asha's hut, which she recently renovated with plaster walls and orange ceramic tiles. Compared to the surrounding homes, hers is one of high status and relative luxury. The first of her supplicants is an elderly woman for whom Asha secured permanent work three years prior. The woman brings Asha her blessings and a green sari as a gift. Next, a recently out-of-work exotic dancer comes in and explains her predicament to Asha: she currently supports herself and her family by serving as a private concubine for a police officer, but the only place she can have sex with him is in her family's hut. Her family reacts so poorly that the officer threatens to find a different woman, thus threatening her and her family's ability to buy food and maintain shelter. Asha advises the dancer to explain to her family the long-term benefits of having a patron like the police officer, and more importantly, the immediate consequences of losing his business.
Finally, a man named Raja Kamble enters Asha's living room. Asha and Raja are old friends, in the sense that they arrived at Annawadi at the same time and their children grew up together. Raja grew up even poorer than Asha, but upon moving to Annawadi he finds a patron who gives him "his own surname, a bride, and the grail of every poor person in Mumbai: a permanent job" (24). Mr. Kamble provides a good, plentiful life for his family with his plumbing job, but his fortunes plummet one day when he collapses in the middle of a workday. The sanitation department fires him, saying that he can return if he gets a new heart valve and clearance from a physician. The surgery itself is affordable, but the surgeons charge an under-the-table fee to perform it; Mr. Kamble cannot find a surgeon who will do it for less than 50,000 rupees. He manages to raise 20,000 rupees in donations from local businesses, but asks Asha to initiate a fraudulent business loan for him, in which she and the Corporator would take a cut. This kind of practice is not unusual for Asha, however, she doesn't sense that it will be financially worth it for her; she tells Mr. Kamble to go to the temple and pray about it, which is her code for, "come up with a better offer." Both Mr. Kamble and Manju are shocked by Asha's callousness.
Chapter Three of Part One focuses on Sunil, a Hindu bhaiya, or Northern migrant, who Abdul has somewhat taken under his wing. Sunil lives in Annawadi with his father and little sister. His father is a drunk, and Sunil spent many years of his childhood in an orphanage run by nuns after Asha found his little sister roaming around Mumbai. When Sunil turns eleven, he is cast out of the orphanage because of the head nun's belief that boys over the age of eleven are uncontrollable. He returns to Annawadi but finds that as an older boy, he cannot rely on the charity of other families for his nourishment. He becomes anxious that his growth is seriously stunted. He begins to scavenge for trash to sell, but the competition is fierce and sometimes threatening. He realizes that he must be strategic about his methods for gathering trash, so he starts watching laborers around the airport and noticing how they litter. They throw their trash over the wall and into a sluice several hundred feet below. Sunil follows their trash down and uses the benefit of his tiny frame to reach into small crannies and bag it up.
Sunil is approached by an older boy named Kalu, who rather than collecting garbage steals raw materials from construction sites and other similar industrial locations. Kalu is charismatic and well-loved by the other boys in Annawadi for his ability to impersonate Bollywood stars and Annawadi characters. Kalu asks Sunil to help him recover some stolen iron bars from a bush around the airport. Sunil accepts and they successfully recover the metal, splitting the profits between himself, Kalu, and the police officer who tipped Kalu off about the metal. When Sunil receives his share, he goes to a movie theater and sees I Am Legend, starring Will Smith. He doesn't understand the plot (by Boo's description, there don't seem to be subtitles), and when Kalu asks him to assist with another small heist, he refuses, because he doesn't feel like the disposable income is worth the risk. Abdul is relieved by Sunil's decision.
Chapter Four of Part One focuses on Manju, Asha's daughter who attends an all-girls college in Mumbai. Manju's days are packed with obligations; she attends college in the morning, teaches English to the children of Annawadi in the afternoons (a school for which her mother fraudulently acquired government funding), and with whatever time she has to spare, she does housework and assists Asha with her political schemes.
The chapter opens on the eve of a campaign event for the Corporator of Ward 76, the man for whom Asha aspires to act as a slumlord over Annawadi. The Corporator faces allegations of electoral fraud—he created counterfeit documents in order to run in an election reserved only for low-caste candidates. In an effort to save face, he is visiting slums around his ward to rally the support of his actual low-caste constituents. Asha recruits Manju to cook for the event, forcing her to abandon her schoolwork and other important obligations. After all their work, the Corporator never shows up.
Manju reads Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Way of the World, a play by William Congreve. Or rather, she memorizes plot summaries of each of the works in order to regurgitate them on exams, because her school discourages reading the original text. She then rehearses the plot summaries she's memorized to her class of girls twelve years and under. Boo points out the importance of Manju's lessons to the Annawadian girls, because in many cases, it will be the only even semi-formal education they ever receive.
Analysis
In Part One of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo cleverly sets the stage by stepping away from the nuclear family around which the primary conflict of the narrative forms. The Husains, especially Abdul, remain a significant peripheral presence in the secondary subjects' lives, thus expanding the scope of the story while maintaining a center of gravity for the overall narrative. In the case of Sunil, Abdul serves as an unofficial mentor, steering him away from theft and keeping the young scavenger in the garbage collecting business. Sunil doesn't understand why Abdul constantly seems nervous and anxious, because he lives in relative comfort with the money from his family business. When Kalu recruits Sunil to help him lift some steel rods from a construction site, Sunil has his first taste of disposable income. He treats himself to a movie at a movie theater and a large meal. But when Kalu approaches him for another job a few weeks later, Sunil declines, and Boo observes that "it had something to do with the fact that, on the most profitable day of his life, he’d failed to reach the state of exhilaration that other boys called 'the full enjoy'" (49).
Sunil's chapter explores notions of quality of life in Annawadi, a notion that eludes many adults in the slum. Sunil understands that if he steals scrap metal, he will have access to funds that will allow him more freedom for things like recreational activities; however, after taking in a movie by himself, he realizes that he doesn't even really enjoy the small luxuries afforded to him by the extra income, so he decides not to chase it. Boo describes the American film he sees without explicitly naming it, but it is clear from the description that Sunil sees I Am Legend. Boo describes the film from the perspective of someone who can only interpret the images without understanding the dialogue. Sunil comes away with a very different specific impression of the film; he's preoccupied with the fact that Will Smith's character has to strangle his dog at the end, but doesn't understand the larger picture. Boo draws a parallel between this anecdote of Sunil focusing on a small detail of the film to the way he, barely a teenager, must fend for himself in Annawadi, able only to focus on the obstacles that lie directly in front of him.
Boo demonstrates how this "tunnel vision" correlates to a person's economic status. For example, Manju, despite having barely any free time, is able to devote a large part of her day to college, which as a pursuit is inherently oriented towards the future. Manju pursues a degree in order to be competitive in the job market. Abdul remains in the periphery of Manju's chapter in the sense that he "considered Manju the most-everything girl in Annawadi" (70): beautiful, smart, and devoted to her family. Boo deftly ties Sunil into Manju's chapter in the same breath as Abdul, commenting on Abdul's confusion as to why Sunil doesn't seem to like Manju very much. He used to tune into her classes in the town square, but has since abandoned them, deeming them useless for his day-to-day life.
In the "Undercitizens" section of the book, Boo reveals the meaning of the book's title. Without context, the phrase Behind the Beautiful Forevers lends itself to a purely figurative interpretation. It almost sounds like a cliché with such universal and grand words like beautiful and forever. At first glance, the title seems to be gesturing towards an extremely broad experience. However, in Sunil's chapter, Boo reveals to the reader the true origin of the title:
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. (36-37)
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.
