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’.