An outsider gives voice to slumdogs

One result is that a nonfiction account of the 3,000 or so people who live in a “sumpy plug of slum” on the outskirts of the Mumbai airport,reads almost like a novel: a true-life version of 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,memorising 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 neighbours,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 that Beautiful Forevers is “the best piece of reporting to come out of India in a half century at least”.

In her early visits to Annawadi,which began in 2007,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”) and a foul-smelling sewage lake: While videotaping one day,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. “The people got bored with me,” she said,“and they started laughing when others thought I was interesting.”

In 2009 Boo wrote 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,but also gave her credibility with the Annawadians. “They saw that I was really doing what I said I was doing,” she said. ”

Boo was introduced to Mumbai by her husband,academic and writer Sunil Khilnani,Since her late teens Boo,who is now 47,has suffered from rheumatoid 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.

By design Beautiful Forevers has no summing-up chapter full of recommendations. “I respect the division of labour,” 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.”