Humanity on the scrapheap

One night a few years ago in Washington DC, Katherine Boo tripped over an ‘unabridged dictionary’, broke three ribs, punctured a lung and, as she lay on the floor unable to reach a telephone, ‘arrived at a certain clarity’ about her future. With most people — certainly those like Boo with a history of wretched health — the clarity would have taken the form of some assuasive advice: ‘Take it easy,’ ‘Don’t push yourself,’ ‘Find something less difficult to write about.’

For Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has written mainly about poverty in the US, clarity suggested the opposite. If she was going to be felled by an unabridged dictionary, she reasoned with perverse logic, why not go out and tackle some really serious obstacles? Why not go and study slum conditions in Mumbai, a city where she didn’t speak the languages in a country which she hardly knew (her husband, though Indian, was working in Washington at the time) — a place where she would be regarded by her subjects with suspicion and perhaps derision, and where she did indeed become ‘a reliably ridiculous spectacle, given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping and running afoul of the police’. Fortunately these obstacles proved less obstreperous than the dictionary, and their successful navigation has resulted five years later in a remarkable book.

Annawadi is a ‘sumpy plug of slum’ encircled by the airport hotels, ‘four ornate, marbly megaliths and one sleek blue-glass Hyatt’. With some 3,000 inhabitants crammed into about 300 huts, it is not one of Mumbai’s largest slums. Nor is it one of the poorest, even though only six of those 3,000 have permanent jobs, and the most destitute of the rest live on a diet of weeds, fried rats and frogs from the sewage lake.