Behind the Beautiful Forevers, & The Morality of Corruption

At first read, and perhaps on second, there's not a great deal that distinguishes Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" from "Slumdog Millionaire."  Both are stories of individual strife and optimism, set among people so poor they warrant no notice from their wider society.  That Boo's book is nonfiction makes her story a masterclass in investigative reporting.  That it became wildly successful isn't much of a surprise: not only is it rivetingly told, but there is a tendency among well-read audiences in the West to reward books that present poverty as a problem belonging to other countries.

Boo, who has logged years in the trenches covering poor American communities, isn't part of that audience. She is deeply aware that poverty belongs to all of us; we create it almost at the same time that we create opportunity.  Success may be a good thing, but suffering is a powerful (and too often silent) externality.  

But that's not why I read "Forevers" - if anything, the fact that it was set in a slum made me wary. Recently, I find myself as tired of "Occupy Wall Street" as I am of Wall Street.  Tired of the clueless libertarians who insist that the school system would do just fine with no government oversight, tired of the socialists who claim that the highest goal of society is to finance everything for everybody (especially in election years). Tired of people who claim that the poor deserve their fate, tired of those who deny the doctrine of individual responsibility.  But mostly, I am tired of everyone everywhere scrambling for some sort of constant high ground in the moral debate over emerging global capitalism.  From what I can tell, there is no great divide between the high ground and the low ground; it's more an unmarked territory that most of us are traversing without even knowing exactly where we are in it.  

But from the moment I first opened it, "Forevers" sank its fierce narrative hooks into me, and I read it out of the oldest impulse there is - I wanted to know how it ended.  There were moments along the way when I marveled at Boo's craft - her ability to turn a perfect sentence, her talent at translating obscene Hindi into an English that still retained the cadence of the original (allowing me to reverse-engineer a few choice profanities), the way she seamlessly introduced news and numbers into her story, her gift for illustrating broad realities through a single painstaking example.

But mostly, I just wanted to know - would Asha become a slumlord? Would Manju ever graduate college? Would Meena's parents stop beating her? Would Abdul ever catch a break, poor guy?  (Abdul, a teenaged garbage sorter, is the book's almost-hero, and the outlines of his character could have been lifted straight out of Dickens.)

There are definitely some fictions that the book explodes, among them the notion that unceasing individual enterprise leads to prosperity.  Money doesn't change the reality of work, just the nature of it, the toll it takes on the mind and the body.  Abdul works without respite in a dirty profession, living in an unregulated slum so filthy that it is literally killing its residents one by one.  All the characters in the slum hunger for a "better" life - which to them means more money.  But Abdul is one of the few who still hungers for a better self.  His minor protests against Mumbai's rampant corruption include a steadfast honesty, a refusal to pick fights, a willingness to forgo the profit that comes from buying stolen goods.  But these small acts of morality make no dent at all in the broad scheme of things.  Abdul is taken into custody when he is falsely accused of a crime by a jealous and unhappy neighbor.  What should have been an open-and-shut case drags on for years and beggars his family in bribes.

All these are stories about slums, about poverty, about corruption and about Mumbai that we have heard before.  Residents of Delhi and Mumbai - the more fortunate ones, anyway - will read this book and say "yes of course, that's how it is."  Nothing at all will surprise.

But in a too-brief author's note at the end, Boo makes the point that stood out to me most strongly.  She writes, "The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility, but of our moral universe."  I've alluded to this before, but for me, the past 4.5 years in Delhi have been marked by constant and daily compromises.  There are many times, trying to decide what is "right" and whether another person has behaved "wrongly" - that the rules I've learned in the US just don't apply.  People under-perform in a million ways and then offer careless and infuriating excuses - but who is right when the system is so skewed? Is my taxi driver at fault for being late, or his company for assigning him a fare he would never be able to take on time, or the Indian govt for permitting our roads to exist in such a pathetic and worthless state that we have become a country of latecomers?  I am often angry, but it's an anger that struggles to find a clear target.  When I complain about a broken system, the blame always finds a convenient scapegoat, never the person who is actually guilty.

These compromises are easily made, easily forgotten, but they can have a corrosive effect on the moral spirit when they accumulate over time.  Delhi excels in changing us, not always positively.  One of the little-celebrated facts of Delhi expat life is that most people, in this country, assume a persona very different from the one they put on back home.  It is rarely a nicer one.  And it's not restricted to expats (who are privileged in India merely by virtue of being foreign).  Even among the most well-meaning privileged elites of Delhi society - people who might once have aspired to fix this country's problems - too many seem to have decided that it's better to just go with the flow.  In a corrupt system, the absence of privilege is an affliction, but so is the surfeit of it.  To an extent, these conditions hold true in the US as well, but less strongly, and there's a lot more space in the middle where people can make choices that are broadly moral and that have predictable moral consequences.

At the end of her author's note, Boo asks, "If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?"  It may sound melodramatic, but she's not far off.  When justice is an ephemeral and unrealistic concept, impossible to determine, it becomes too easy to do what's easy, for everyone.