Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, to be hawked in Airport Road traffic. One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where site supervisors chose day laborers. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the small market niche got under way. A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Children in school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps.

Outside his neighbors' huts, some held together by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. January's income being pivotal to the family's latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine.Ībdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own.

Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family's most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul's ear. Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. A country dizzy now with development and circulating money.ĭawn came gusty, as it often did in January, the month of treed kites and head colds. It was about as hopeful a season as there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet's poor. Keep rewinding, back seven more months, and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucous love song, her delicate features unscathed.

See the flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink- flowered tunic shrink to nothing but a matchbook on the floor. Rewind, see Abdul running backward, away from the station and the airport, shirt buttons opening as he flies back toward his home. Let it keep, the moment when Officer Fish Lips met Abdul in the police station.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo