In Katherine Boo's new book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, she follows a 19-year-old trash scavenger through a Mumbai slum. A snippet:
It seemed to [Abdul] that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they avoided. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
Monica Potts praises Boo's realistic portrayal of poverty:
Alongside disturbing moments, like a man slowly dying of a leg injury, she offers beauty: a secret spot where boys watch parrots nest in a fruit tree, a eunuch’s dance in an empty temple. But the first onslaught of monsoon shows how overwhelming the place can be: "Hut walls grew green and black with mold, the contents of ten public toilets spewed out onto the maidan, and fungi protruded from feet like tiny sculptures—a special torment to those whose native customs involved toe rings."
Elaine Blair focuses on the author's ability to show how well-intentioned fixes often fail:
[A]s her reporting painstakingly reveals, the effect of any single policy is dwarfed by the general mad siphoning of money into private hands that goes on at every turn and every income level. Some women in Annawadi make money by taking government-subsidized micro-loans for poor women and lending the money to even poorer women at a higher interest rate. The nuns at a local orphanage are selling donated foods that have passed their expiration date to poor women who then resell them to the public at roadside stands. Patients at the local hospital have to buy their medicine elsewhere—everything in the hospital’s supply cabinets gets pilfered and resold.
It is in this context of financial free-for-all that we must consider the remarkable case of a teenage garbage trafficker who decides to draw a line between legally obtained scrap metal and illegally obtained scrap metal. Boo describes Abdul’s shifting moral sensibility without sentimentality or emotional punctuation. He tries, for a while, to stick to his resolution, but finds that he can’t make enough money only on legal trash. As he puts it, "I tell Allah now I love him immensely, immensely. But I tell him I cannot be better, because of how the world is."
The Dish 