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An Outsider Gives Voice to Slumdogs Katherine Boo on Her Book ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ By CHARLES McGRATH FEB. 8, 2012

Unlike many journalists Katherine Boo aspires to invisibility. She hates publicity and talks about herself with about as much ease as someone trying to wriggle from a thicket — stopping, pausing, retracing her sentences and looking for a better way out. In her new book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” the word “I” doesn’t appear until an author’s note on page 247, and by then it’s a little jarring.

One result is that “Beautiful Forevers,” a nonfiction account of the 3,000 or so people who live in Annawadi, a “sumpy plug of slum” on the outskirts of the Mumbai airport, reads almost like a novel: a true-life version of “Slumdog Millionaire” without the Bollywood ending. The characters include various thieves and Dumpster divers; the neighborhood ward boss and her prized daughter, who is earning a college degree by rote, memorizing word for word the plots of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Way of the World”; and a man who makes a living of sorts by racing a carriage drawn by horses painted to look like zebras. The plot turns on a seemingly petty feud in which a disgruntled woman sets herself on fire and then blames her neighbors, two of whom wind up jail, where they are brazenly extorted by a legal system that thrives on corruption.

Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times who has written extensively about India, wrote in an e-mail message that “Beautiful Forevers” is “the best piece of reporting to come out of India in a half century at

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1/20/16, 11:15 AMKatherine Boo on Her Book ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ - The New York Times

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least” and compared it to another groundbreaking book about poverty, George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier.”

In her early visits to Annawadi, which began in 2007, Ms. Boo, who is small, blond and delicate looking and knew none of the half dozen or so languages spoken there, was anything but invisible. There are, or used to be, two main landmarks in the slum: a concrete wall with ads for Italian tiles (“Beautiful Forever”) that give the book its title, and a foul-smelling sewage lake: a junk-rimmed pool of excrement, monsoon runoff and petrochemicals. While videotaping one day, Ms. Boo fell in, and when she came out her feet were blue.

“At first it was a circus act,” she said in New York the other day. “It was, ‘Look at that crazy white woman!’ ” But she spent so much time in Annawadi, reporting almost daily for four- or five-month stints over a span of four years, that eventually she became a fixture and was taken for granted. “The people got bored with me,” she said, “and they started laughing when others thought I was interesting. I think some of them even felt sorry for me.”

In 2009 Ms. Boo wrote an article for The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2003, describing the Mumbai premiere of “Slumdog Millionaire” and contrasting its lavishness with the lives of some of her slum dwellers. The story was picked up and translated by a Marathi-language newspaper. This got her in hot water with the local police, who were irritated by her suggestion that they had covered up a murder of a young slum dweller, but also gave her credibility with the Annawadians. “They saw that I was really doing what I said I was doing,” she said. “They saw that I even got the jokes.”

Ms. Boo was introduced to Mumbai by her husband, Sunil Khilnani, a former Johns Hopkins University professor who spends part of every year there and thought she could write about India in a way less condescending than many Westerners. Initially she was hesitant: there was the language barrier, and also her shaky health.

Since her late teens Ms. Boo, who is now 47, has suffered from rheumatoid

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1/20/16, 11:15 AMKatherine Boo on Her Book ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ - The New York Times

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arthritis and several related immunological disorders. She walks a little slowly and sometimes has trouble with her eyes. Her fingers are gnarled and bent. That she is still able to type is owing in large part to a 2002 MacArthur grant, which helped pay for surgery on her right hand.

For someone in her condition the best treatment is drugs that suppress the immune system, and these do not make such a person an ideal candidate for spending time in a slum where tuberculosis is practically epidemic. But one night Ms. Boo tripped over an unabridged dictionary in her own apartment, puncturing a lung and breaking three ribs, and decided home wasn’t much safer. “I thought if I don’t work, I’m risking my mental health,” she said.

For as long as she has been a writer, Ms. Boo has only wanted to write about the poor and the disadvantaged. In 2000, while at The Washington Post, she won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about the mistreatment of the mentally retarded in the Washington area. “I think I grew up with a healthy respect for volatility, all the things you can’t control,” she said. “And I became aware of the ways in which people who write about the disadvantaged often underestimate its psychological contours, the uncertainty — economic or whatever.”

Ms. Boo is herself both a late bloomer and a prodigy. She grew up in and around Washington, where her parents, both Minnesotans, moved when her father became an aide to Representative Eugene McCarthy. (The family name is Swedish, an Americanized version of Bö.) After high school, by her own account a “confused late adolescent,” Ms. Boo took the civil service exam and became a clerk typist for the General Services Administration. When she discovered she was ill, she quit and stayed at home for a while, just reading, and then went to night school while typing again, this time for the Federal Election Commission.

Ms. Boo graduated from Barnard in the late ’80s, still typing — for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials — and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper. Mr. Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said recently that he was impressed less by her writing than by her voluminous reading and her ability to think on her feet, and was amazed by how

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1/20/16, 11:15 AMKatherine Boo on Her Book ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ - The New York Times

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accomplished her first article was. “She had the soul of a poet but the arm strength of an investigative reporter,” he recalled.

Soon afterward he made Ms. Boo his No. 2, responsible not just for writing but also for editing the work of others, and from there she moved up the ladder to The Washington Monthly and then The Post, where she became known for the way she combined investigative digging, on-the-street reporting and brilliant writing. But she was never comfortable with interviewing official sources, she said, and is still proud she has never had lunch with one.

Another thing that makes her uncomfortable is policy wonkery, and by design “Beautiful Forevers,” a book as depressing as it is memorable, has no summing-up chapter full of recommendations. “I respect the division of labor,” she said. “My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.” She added: “Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Outsider Gives Voice To Slumdogs.

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