Katherine Boo’s magnificent investigation into the slum underworld of Mumbai. Boo, an American journalist, does not flinch from addressing the city’s social inequalities and, in particular, the plight of its rubbish-sorting underclass. Behind the L’Oréal hoardings and billboard adverts for the perfect home(“Beautiful Forever. Forever Beautiful”) lie the shacks and squatter colonies of Mumbai’s dispossessed.
Even the vilest and most crime-infested refuse sites are no deterrent to the author as she seeks out waste-pickers and other social strays to interview. Boo’s book is the product of four years spent in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi, built in the early Nineties in the shadow of shining luxury hotels. It is written with a novelist’s ear for dialogue and narrative pace, and could almost pass for a collection of non-fiction short stories.
In the guise of reportage, Boo tells a riveting story, yet she displays no crass sympathy for the social wretchedness she describes. Boo has set down the humiliations and deprivations of the inhabitants of Annawadi not in order to horrify the reader – though it does – but in order to bear witness. To give way to glib moral outrage would tarnish her credibility as a reporter.