Summary
Boo begins her account of Annawadi with a prologue, but her prologue is unusual in the sense that it describes the events that ensue after a large chunk of the main narrative has already occurred. The story begins in the dead of night after a woman named Fatima (though her birth name was Sita and she is also referred to as "One Leg" or "The One Leg") is set ablaze and critically injured. Fatima tells authorities that a young man named Abdul and his father and sister are to blame, and many residents of the slum are easily convinced because they're jealous of the Husains' successful family garbage business. Now, Abdul and his family scramble to decide what to do before the police arrive.
Abdul's father is sick, his lungs enfeebled after years of handling and sorting noxious garbage for his family's garbage business; he is therefore in no shape to run from the law and thrive as a fugitive. Abdul, however, must entertain the possibility of living as a fugitive so as to continue to provide for his large family. He hides in a small structure near the family hut where he stores garbage to be sold later and hides behind piles of plastic bags among the rats.
From his hiding place, Abdul hears police officers arrive. They tell the Husains that Fatima is in stable condition in the hospital, and that she has accused Abdul, his older sister Kehkashan, and their father of attacking her and setting her on fire. The police arrest Abdul's father and Kehkashan, asking after Abdul, but no one in the family admits to knowing his whereabouts. Abdul knew it was unlikely that the Mumbai police would return to the slum until morning time, because, as author Katherine Boo notes, the police in Mumbai fail to take much stock in what happens in the poorest communities unless they're extorting or abusing the people who live there. Later that night while Abdul remains hidden, a resident of Annawadi named Cynthia (jealous because her own family garbage business failed) shouts in the maidan that the entire Husain family should be arrested, but she eventually retires to her hut and the slums fall silent once again. Abdul realizes that he has until sunrise to figure out a plan. In the morning, he expects the police to return.
But when the morning comes, the sound of clanging pots and pans jerks Abdul out of an unplanned nap in a neighboring hut. He rushes to his feet, dresses, and seeks out his mother for counsel. He resolves to turn himself in to the police in order to avoid any abuse his father and sister may otherwise suffer at the station. When Abdul enters the station, it seems that the policeman behind the front desk already knows who he is by the way his "fat and fishlike" lips break into a devious smile.
In the midst of the frantic action, Boo describes Annawadi and the Husain family's place therein. Annawadi is a slum built on land technically owned by the Airports Authority of India. Annawadi contains people of various castes, backgrounds, and nationalities that Abdul feels make it "a place booby-trapped with contentions, new and ancient," especially for Muslims, who make up a small minority compared to the Hindu population (about one in every ten people in Annawadi is Muslim). Many residents of Annawadi make money scavenging for garbage; the difference for the Husain family is that they are the wholesalers in the equation. They haggle and buy the garbage collected by other residents of Annawadi and then sell it in bulk to various outlets for a profit. Their ability to successfully wholesale the garbage has led other residents to resent them and their relative comforts. For example, the Husain hut is the only hut around them built from brick, while most of their neighbors' huts are made from porous, less sturdy materials like plywood.
But with the Husains' relative success, the operative word is relative. They still live in Annawadi, in a slum, where Abdul has to handle noxious garbage in order to support their family of more than ten people. Boo quickly establishes the rapidly widening wealth disparity in Mumbai which is dramatized visually in the form of luxury highrise hotels springing up and towering over Annawadi. Boo describes them as "four ornate, marbly megaliths and one sleek blue-glass Hyatt, from the top-floor windows of which Annawadi and several adjacent squatter settlements looked like villages that had been airdropped into gaps between elegant modernities."
In addition to the setting and primary conflict, Boo peppers her prologue with a taste of the characters and complex relationships that figure into the main narrative. She demonstrates the shame of Abdul's father, "too sick to sort much garbage, not sick enough to stay off his wife," a proclivity coupled with a religious aversion to birth control that leads to there being eleven mouths to feed in the Husain household. Abdul's father's inability to work creates a situation where his wife, Zehrunisa, must step in and haggle for Abdul, a highly unusual role for a woman from her devout Muslim background. Abdul thinks that Zuhrunisa revels in the vulgar language she uses, like "pimp and sisterfucker" to haggle for garbage.
Boo turns her narrative eye towards other members of her cast, too:
The dream of Raja Kamble, a sickly toilet-cleaner who lived on the lane behind Abdul’s, was of medical rebirth. A new valve to fix his heart and he’d survive to finish raising his children. Fifteen-year-old Meena, whose hut was around the corner, craved a taste of the freedom and adventure she’d seen on TV serials, instead of an arranged marriage and domestic submission. Sunil, an undersized twelve-year-old scavenger, wanted to eat enough to start growing. Asha, a fighter-cock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her teenaged daughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become Annawadi’s first female college graduate.
After meticulously setting the stage, intercutting between the blood-pumping action of Abdul's escape and subsequent surrender and the social and interpersonal milieu of Annawadi, Boo asks her reader to "rewind" eight months prior to that fateful night, to a hopeful and profitable January for the Husains.
Analysis
By thrusting her reader into the action with a prologue, Boo utilizes an unconventional storytelling technique called in medias res, Latin for "in the middle of things." In medias res storytelling engages the reader by forgoing initial exposition. Conventional storytelling calls for a beginning, middle, and end to unfold in that prescribed order. One might think of a reader wading into a pond; as they walk further into the water, they become more submerged. If they continue to the other side, they emerge gradually, eventually exiting the pond altogether. That's conventionally storytelling. In medias res would be like that same reader cannonballing directly into the middle of the pond where the water is deepest and swimming their way out from there. In her prologue, Boo places her reader at the "deepest" point of involvement in the plot. We see Abdul cornered before we've even formed allegiances, abandoning the sense of suspense that comes from not knowing what will happen and replacing it with the perhaps more substantive challenge of reverse engineering a story to figure out why and how the plot culminated to such disastrous circumstances.
Several important themes emerge in the prologue, promising to be expanded upon in the main narrative. The most emphasized of these themes is that of excess and wealth inequality in Mumbai. The very setting of the story, the slum of Annawadi, exemplifies the unsustainable level of growth in India. Boo writes that "in the new century, as India’s economy grew faster than any other but China’s, pink condominiums and glass office towers had shot up near the international airport." She observes that "one corporate office was named, simply, 'More.' More cranes for making more buildings, the tallest of which interfered with the landing of more and more planes: It was a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the overcity, from which wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums." The bluntly named corporate office boils down the insatiability of modern industry into one syllable.
The rate of growth elbows out Annawadians onto land owned by the Airports Authority where they build their homes and establish roots in a place where at any time they could be legally evicted. The "wads of possibility" tumbling down into the slum take the form of literal excess—waste and garbage ejected from the homes and businesses of the wealthy—and become units of economic worth to the poorest residents of Mumbai, who scavenge for garbage and haggle to sell it to wholesalers like Abdul and his family in order to survive.
Boo's description of the process of sorting garbage demonstrates the health hazards that underlie the Husains' line of work. Boo describes Abdul's father coaching his son in the art of sorting trash. "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." Of course, a lifetime of using one's body to determine the economic potential of noxious garbage and harsh chemicals takes a toll on one's health. Abdul's father's lungs are a perfect example of the tradeoff between being able to economically provide for one's family and survive in the short-term versus the long-term quality-of-life implications of their line of work.
Though Boo portrays Abdul as fearless of the longterm health hazards of the garbage business, she emphasizes his public image among his peers as cowardly and fearful of less immediate threats, like scary movies. "Abdul took all dangers, in all films, overseriously," she writes. She describes his younger brother Mirchi as "braver by a stretch," modeling his ideas of masculinity and strong character after the machismo heroes of Bollywood films. As Abdul hides in a trash heap, waiting out the police, Boo primes the reader for what will certainly emerge as an ongoing theme of courage and overcoming adversity and personal fears. The threats that her subjects face may manifest as threats of physical harm, but are just as likely to be institutional and cultural in nature.
Abdul sees Annawadi as "a place booby-trapped with contentions, new and ancient, over which he was determined not to trip." Among these ancient contentions is the cultural tension between the Muslim and Hindu residents of the slum. The Husains are among the small minority of Muslims in a predominantly Hindu settlement, which leads to mistrust and resentment, especially because the Husains have risen above subsistence with their family business. Annawadi hosts people from all over South Asia including Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and among the "newer" contentions include the partition of India and Pakistan that many of the residents lived through.
