All They Hope for Is Survival

“Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief ways of starting conversations,” Katherine Boo writes in “Beyond the Beautiful Forevers,” her exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter.

Half an acre. 335 huts. 3,000 people. And a concrete wall that is supposed to hide them from view: this is Annawadi, the Mumbai slum that comes vibrantly to life in this book’s pages. Ms. Boo says that she chose Annawadi because the scale of this “sumpy plug of slum” bordering a lake of sewage was small, and its location was fraught with possibilities. Annawadi sits beside the road to the Mumbai airport, on “a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.” In 2008, at the time the events in the book unfolded, scavenging and trash sorting were the children of Annawadi’s most promising career choices.

Much of the focus is on Zehrunisa and her oldest son, Abdul. One of Abdul’s brothers dreams of having a “clean job” at one of the nearby hotels. (“He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables.”) But Abdul is more of a pragmatist and has made himself an expert at trading in refuse.

“It was a fine time to be a garbage trader, not that that was the term passersby used for Abdul,” Ms. Boo writes. “Some called him garbage, and left it at that.”

Without condescending to her subjects in the slightest, Ms. Boo explains that dreams of upward mobility are just barely possible in Annawadi. And Zehrunisa’s family has set out to renovate the kitchen of the hut in which they live. The book takes its peculiar title from sunshine-yellow ads for ceramic tile that are painted on the concrete wall that hides Annawadi: the ad series repeats the words “Beautiful” and “Forever.” Behind those “beautiful forevers,” Zehrunisa wants some of that tile for her own.

It is a calamitous desire. And Ms. Boo sets forth the step-by-step process of ruination that it brings. The kitchen wall that is being renovated is shared by two dwellings; on the other side lives Fatima, a one-legged woman.

“Strong in the shoulders, she brought the crutches down hard on neighbors she considered disrespectful,” Ms. Boo writes about Fatima’s formidable temper.

One day, when the wall is being banged on, Fatima erupts in fury. “There is rubble in my rice!” she shouts.

“It’s my wall to break, prostitute,” Zehrunisa shouts back. The fight escalates quickly to what, in the hands of another writer, would be a sickeningly lurid moment, but Ms. Boo presents it with devastating understatement. Fatima becomes so furious that she sets herself on fire. She survives just long enough to lie about what happened. As a consequence, Abdul is accused of murder.

How does Ms. Boo know the details? A staff writer for The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize winner for her work at The Washington Post, she spent three and a half years in the midst of her subjects. She used written notes, video recordings, audiotapes and photographs; some of the children of the book used her Flip video camera to document events. She also made use of more than 3,000 public records.

The Fatima catastrophe is at the heart of this book. But Ms. Boo never milks her material for pathos; she doesn’t have to. By simply describing Abdul’s experiences at the hands of India’s criminal justice system, she reveals a degree of casual corruption that would stun even the most jaded cynic.

By accepting the amount of sewage, literal and moral, that pervades life in Annawadi, she delivers something much more powerful than an outright indictment. The book’s cover, with an image of abject squalor, does not do justice to its agile prose, wry tone and surprisingly upbeat theatrics. Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.

When Ms. Boo finally uses her own voice, at the end of the book, to explain how a fair-skinned blonde from The New Yorker managed to fit into Annawadi so wholeheartedly, she also frames the ultimate question that “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” addresses: why aren’t the slum-dwellers bound together by common interests and common enemies?

Here she crystallizes what she discovered: “Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process.”

The book’s relatively fortunate characters, like Asha, a cunningly ambitious woman who realizes it is advantageous to create problems and then be paid to solve them, “improved their lots by beggaring the chances of other poor people.”

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” needs no heavy hand to pack a wallop. “Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the 500-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended,” Ms. Boo writes with supreme restraint. “Nor was medicine.”

There is only one realm in which her approach loses rigor. She writes about so many scavenging kids, boisterously quarrelsome families and corrupt officials that the book is too crowded. In another setting this might be problematic. In Mumbai it is justified.