“Young girls in the slums died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth.”Boo chronicles of the slum dwellers in Annawadi, situated behind the billboard of a floor tiles called Beautiful Forever near an airport. The central characters of this book are the Husains, a family of Muslim scavengers in the Annawadi slum. They have a garbage recycling business which made them the target of envy of their neighbors. Their son, Abdul is a hardworking teenager who has a knack on recycling garbage. Their impetuous mother, Zehrunnisa gets into a fight with Fatima, known in the slums as One-Leg. This entangles the Husains in a hopeless judicial system. Other character who made a dent are Asha,a Hindu woman who wants to become a slumlord. Her daughter Manju is her total opposite. Refined and university educated.
Poverty. Filth. Ambition. Survival. Corruption. Every transaction in the Undercity is embedded with corruption. Reading this is like a punch in the gut. A tragedy that is both individual and national. It was written in a style that very well reflects the subject. Point-blank, uncomplicated and no melodramatic tone. The poignant scenes of feticide and suicide marked the reality of slum living. The book was concluded with the author's revelation about her methods and resources. How Katherine Boo, a foreigner intimately lived with the Annaawadians to produce an accurate, leaving no stone unturned accounts of the complexities of rising India.
