When New Jersey Was The World

Back in 2007 we were lucky enough to get to travel to India. Much of India is astonishing: beautiful, chaotic, rich, historical, exotic and a bunch of other florid adjectives that don't immediately come to mind. And then there's the abject poverty that you come across all too often and in really unexpected places. For me, the strangest sight were the shanty towns under the freeway interchanges. Our driver pointed out that they were cooking with dung. When we returned and landed at Newark, we took the shuttle to Midtown and my first thought on the ride back was how clean and well managed the Meadowlands looked.

It's a small thing to think for a fleeting couple of seconds what it's like to live underneath a highway overpass and cook with dung. Then and now I couldn't square it except to say that as a citizen of the world, and a participant in a global economy, that it was important to see it firsthand.

Although I was sincere about this, and believed in what I was saying, the whole response is still pretty hollow; I don't know what I gleaned from zooming over a highway encampment, except that I've never forgotten that image. And there's not much you can "do" about any of it except to notice it: maybe it's not the worst thing to at least talk about stuff like that, so at least more people know about . . . people living under a freeway, I guess? Anyway, you travel through this world for a few weeks and it's eye opening. Then you go back home and reevaluate the New Jersey Turnpike. Traveling can be funny like that.

Goober traveled to India once, too, with work, and they stayed in one of the fancy hotels near the airport in Mumbai. Each morning he'd open his shades and see these shantytowns right by the airport. It was a sight, I gather, he didn't soon forget.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity profiles the intertwined lives of several people in one of the shantytown slums by the airport. It's an amazing document for many reasons. For one, it's an astonishing monograph of this place and time; she makes it clear that we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from this one slum, but at the same time it's hard not to see the systemic failures of a hyper-corrupt society.

Beautiful Forevers chronicles life in Annawadi, first settled in 1991 by migrant workers building Mumbai's international airport. Sanitation and housing standards in India are sketchy enough, so you can imagine what a squat by a marsh near the airport must be like. The citizens mostly subsist by picking trash and selling what's useful: cans, bottles, scrap metal, etc. It's a horrible existence, except for the fact that many of them still have faith in their goals and hope about the future; that's the power of the global economy. They often get fucked by the global economy, as when the 2008 downturn obliterated the market for scrap metal. This is a place where children are either breastfed or work. Harsh, brutish, and all that entails.

For me, however, the worst, most dispiriting moments in Behind are when the bureaucrats wield their power to their own corrupt ends. And not in a Russian traffic cop kind of way but rather moments when a cop or a social worker extorts a trash-picking, slum-dwelling, dirt-sleeping squatter for their freedom. It's one thing to be corrupt with people of means but quite another to fuck over those beneath you. I'm not sure what worldview makes this a reasonable, accepted proposition, but whatever is going on in this society is so mind-blowing and depressing that you can't even conceive of it.

Now, that said, there's something very convenient about me — person of privilege who gets to roam the New Jersey Turnpike, that sparkling beacon of efficiency and order, at will — taking out all of my upset on a couple of lowly corrupt civil servants. You kick the dog you have, not the dog you might want or wish to have at a later time. But now that said, there's something agonizing about routine, everyday corruption: it's the single worst societal ill, because it's such an abrogation of the social contract.

In Forevers, the level of corruption is so extreme and so craven, that it's almost a bad example to use, except that I'm sure this happens all the time, or at least there's no guarantee that this is extraordinary. Abdul, the hard-working minority Muslim trash middleman who somehow gets accused of driving a psychotic woman to kill herself, is pressured by a social worker court-something-or-other to pay her off to change the woman's police report. They refuse and he goes to jail, but is saved from the adult justice system by a corrupt doctor, who offers to confirm his "age" for a fee. It's ruthless and unrelenting and supremely depressing.

Part of what feels good about complaining and griping is that the moral right is on your side. When society breaks down such that you can't gripe about routine transgressions of the social contract — an overly zealous parking agent, a poor waiter, etc. — it makes you feel small. It should really go with out saying but there's a compelling irony in using unimportant things to protect yourself from feeling small. That's what it's all about, though, right?

At some point reading the Beautiful you wonder how it is that this well-spoken American lady with such a soft, welcoming name is uncovering this gritty slice of Mumbai. The reveal comes in the Author's Note, when you find out that she actually went there and interviewed, observed and reported, day after day for more than three years. Three years. Let that sink in like your foot in a sewage-filled swamp by the airport: three years. It's a feat of reporting that I don't think many can touch. I'm Googling to see if Jacob Riis even went this far (it's unclear to me, after a minute or two of looking). On the one hand, it's like, thank you, Katherine Boo, you illuminated this faraway world that I wondered about. On the other hand, you're like, fuckin' a, seriously? You did what? And for how long? Pretty intense. And now I want Ben Mamafreaking Affleck to star in the optioned screen adaptation . . . oh, am I getting ahead of myselves? Apologies.