Summary
Part Three of Behind the Beautiful Forevers begins from the perspective of Asha's family, particularly Asha and her daughter Manju. Asha and her family travel thirteen hours to Vidarbha, to the village where Asha is from, where livings are made with back-breaking manual labor. The relatives who greet Asha are severely hunched from decades of farm work; one of the eldest women is so stooped that she walks on all fours. The whole region is characterized by agricultural depression. Generational farms capitulate under staggering loans. Farmers are worked to death by wealthy landowners, many of them politicians with corporate interests. The number of suicides among farmers in Vidarbha is reported by the Indian government as being on average 1,000 per year, but activists estimate that the rate is much higher even than that.
The Indian government has, for years, promised these farming communities relief, but conditions continue to worsen and no relief comes. Technological advancements do not make work easier but instead simply change the nature of the toil. A recent so-called advancement in the agricultural infrastructure is the use of portable Dow chemical canisters that laborers wear on their backs while spraying pesticides on crops. Boo describes the changing working conditions experienced by one of Manju's cousins, Anil. She writes, "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" (139).
Manju convinces Anil to try his luck in Mumbai and leave the rural life behind, but Anil finds Mumbai even more oppressive than Vidarbha, so, much to his chagrin, he ends up returning to his home town after only one season in the city. Now, Manju, Asha, and the rest of their family return to Vidarbha on official business: to find a suitable husband for Manju. A soldier from a relatively affluent family demonstrates interest in her, but Manju's father objects to the marriage, afraid that the soldier may have a predisposition to drink and potentially abuse his daughter. They return to Annawadi and Manju suggests to her mother that perhaps she can find a husband for herself; Asha, however, is doubtful.
Manju continues to teach her classes to the Annawadi children in the maidan, but Asha protests. Asha hates having the children crowd her house; she finds it unbecoming of an aspiring politician, and she feels that the classes distract Manju from what she feels is her main purpose, to network and elevate their family's status. As a result of her mother's complaints, Manju teaches fewer classes a week and takes a free training course in selling life insurance to wealthy Mumbai residents. Asha feels that the life insurance enterprise will serve their family two-fold. It will allow them to network with wealthy and influential people who may, in turn, help them find a wealthy and influential match for Manju, and it will provide them with supplemental income.
Manju joins the Indian Civil Defense Corps, "a group of middle-class citizens trained to save others in the event of floods or terror attacks" (147), because she figures it is both a worthwhile use of the extra time she now has in the absence of her classes and an opportunity to widen her network, as her mother is always urging her to do. Because of her slight frame, Manju is unable to participate in the "search and rescue" drills as a rescuer, because she cannot lift her classmates. Instead, she roleplays as a person in distress. Boo writes, "she’d get thrown over someone’s shoulder and carried to safety. Being touched was permissible here, and loveliest when she let her body relax in the arms of Vijay, an earnest, square-jawed college boy who led the battalion. He appreciated the sincere effort Manju put into being a victim," (148). One night after a meeting, Vijay takes Manju's hand in his as they walk towards their respective homes.
On Asha's fortieth birthday, just as Manju and Asha's husband are cutting her cake, she receives a telephone call. She doesn't answer it, but the phone rings continually for fifteen minutes. Finally she takes the call, and it is a police officer who pays Asha for her companionship. Asha tries to keep this part of her life a secret, but Manju knows that she sees men outside of her marriage for money and power; usually, Manju is able ignore it, but tonight, on Asha's birthday, as they try to celebrate as a family, the thought of her leaving to have sex with a strange man is unbearable. And yet, despite her daughter's pleas, Asha applies her makeup, slips on a dress, and goes into the city to meet the man.
Chapter 10 documents the friendship and partnership between Sunil and another garbage picker named Sonu Gupta, a rail-thin, "blinky" boy with whom Sunil used to be friends until he "accidentally broke Sonu’s nose" (155). Sunil sees Sonu around and marvels at how much trash the boy manages to collect. Sunil wonders how he's able to do it with sub-par vision, so he follows him around his route one day and sees that Sonu has struck some kind of partnership with airport guards, who give him the trash from their bins in exchange for him sweeping their work area.
Sunil and Sonu begin to spend a lot of time together as they team up to collect trash. Sonu lectures Sunil about bettering himself, not smoking, and not hanging around thieves like Kalu, who can only lead him to trouble. Sunil appreciates Sonu's brotherly concern for him, not used to having someone fret over his wellbeing. Sonu's home life is similar to Sunil's in that his father is a cruel drunk who sometimes tears up the rupee notes that Sonu spends all day earning. Sunil gets along well with Sonu, but he can't cut his ties with his friend Kalu, so he continues to hang out with Kalu behind Sonu's back. Kalu confides in Sunil that he's leaving Mumbai because he's caught between the police and a dangerous drug dealer; he agreed to be an informant for the police in exchange for the right to steal garbage from local businesses, but he is worried that the deal is about to catch up with him.
Kalu leaves Mumbai to work a construction job with his father and brother. Away from the city he gains some of his weight back (partly due to the lack of drugs at the construction site). When he returns to Annawadi, he looks healthier and is in good spirits because of an upcoming festival in honor of his favorite god. Since he's been away, Zehrunisa was able to get Abdul released from Dongri for most of the week awaiting his trial. He has to check in to the jail three times a week, but otherwise is able to continue working. When Kalu returns, Abdul is surprised to find that Kalu and his mother have grown close, and Kalu even refers to her as "mother." However, shortly after his return to Annawadi, Kalu is found dead behind the airport, where other garbage pickers have been turning up dead or injured lately, at an unusually high rate even for their dangerous line of work. Many people in Annawadi believe that Fatima left a curse on their town that is causing the deaths.
Mumbai police file Kalu's death as illness-related, due to TB, but everyone in Annawadi knows that he was murdered. By whom remains unclear. Sunil thinks that the airport guards killed him when they found him rooting through airport garbage at night. Abdul is certain that he was killed by the drug dealers on whom he informed. Either way, his death was brutal and uninvestigated. The powers-that-be in Mumbai do not see Kalu as a person deserving of justice, they see him as a scavenger who, in death, becomes no different from the trash for which he scavenges.
The police use Kalu's death at the airport as an excuse to arrest other boys who scavenge for trash on government property. The boys, not knowing that Kalu's death has already been filed as TB-related, live in fear that they will be charged with his murder. Abdul suffers a panic attack at the thought, but he is not the only boy paranoid about being blamed for Kalu's death. One boy, Sanjay, flees to a slum across town where his mother and sister live. He shares with his sister the news of Kalu's death and she is sad to hear it, but she's busy cooking dinner and doesn't realize the magnitude of her brother's distress. Before the night ends, Sanjay is so fearful that he will be blamed for Kalu's death that he swallows rat poison, killing himself.
Analysis
In Part Three of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo demonstrates how corruption and poverty beget more corruption and poverty, and illustrates the thin membrane which separates the most ambitious Annawadians like Manju and Asha from the upper- and middle-classes in Mumbai. A major theme emerges in Part Three, which is suicide and helplessness. Boo demonstrates how suicide has become a major issue in both rural and urban areas in India due to extreme poverty and unbearable working conditions. For some, escape seems to be the only answer. The problem is, the escapee often finds himself needing to escape the place he escaped to. For example, Manju's cousin Anil, citing the harsh and unforgiving working conditions in Vidarbha, especially after the introduction of Dow chemical portable pesticide canisters, leaves for Mumbai hoping to make money working construction jobs or collecting trash. But he finds the city air to be just as noxious as the pesticide spray and the lack of work worse than the backbreaking work he's used to.
Farmers in regions like Vidarbha are killing themselves because of inescapable debt or unbearable working conditions, but the problem is not limited to "the desperation of rural Indian poverty" (137). Boo bookends Part Three with tales of hopelessness and suicide in order to demonstrate that there is no escape from the strangulation of poverty; it is not limited to geographic factors. The problem is poverty and corruption itself. The parallels between Sanjay's suicide and the suicide of the laborer spraying Dow pesticides on the crops of a wealthy politician are circumstantially quite different, but at their core, they are both caused by the large-scale neglect of institutions meant to protect citizens. Instead of championing the safety of laborers, the government subsidizes technological "advancements" which make their work even more hazardous. Instead of investigating the murder of Kalu, the police file it as a TB-related illness, but allow boys like Sanjay to believe that the case is still open for the express purpose of being able to hold it over their heads. Justice and truth are the furthest thing from these officers' minds, and in the end, their threat of blackmail is so effective that it leads a boy to kill himself out of fear.
Boo also expands on the tension between Asha and Manju regarding the need for Manju to find a viable match for a husband. The very reason why they travel to Vidarbha is to display Manju to the bachelors there. Asha coaches Manju on how to seem like she's from the upper class, how to walk, talk, and dress as if she comes from effortless money. Manju points out that many rich people marry outside their caste and believe in marrying for love. She suggests to Asha that perhaps she should find her own husband, but, Boo writes, "Asha didn’t want to get as first-class as that" (144). This moment underscores, from a character perspective, Asha's need for total control, and also from a more general perspective, the limitations of imitation, especially when it comes to class. For as much as Asha emphasizes the importance of acting and presenting as if she is from a higher class, she recognizes that Manju is still practically moored in the obstacles of poverty. Thus, her aspiration to find her own husband, to Asha, seems silly or at best, impractical.
Boo brutally demonstrates Asha's pragmatism on this front in the final scene of Chapter 9, in which Asha abandons her own birthday celebration in order to meet with a demanding client. This client, unlike most of her supplicants and fellow Annawadians, is a police officer. He doesn't buy influence from Asha, he buys sex and companionship. Boo describes Asha's thoughts on the matter: "For years, Asha had hoped that her daughter wouldn’t guess about the men. Now she wished she had raised Manju to be worldly enough to understand. This wasn’t about lust or being modern, though she knew that many first-class people slept around. Nor was it just about feeling loved and beautiful. This was about money and power," (150). Asha's feelings of obligation towards this client for the sake of money and power come at the cost of her loved ones, and she feels that Manju should be willing to apply the same pragmatism to her own marital prospects.
