How to be a journalist

There is no “I” in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, except in the Author’s Note. She spent about four years in Annawadi, a slum near the Mumbai airport, trying with the help of two translators to listen to and understand the lives of the people who lived there. Across the 244 pages of the book, what you read and hear most are the voices of Asha and her aspirations to become a slum landlord; Abdul, a teenager who sorts garbage and is accused of a murder that is actually a suicide; Manju, the college girl who is bored stiff by having to read Mrs Dalloway. Boo’s opinions come in, if at all, in a low murmur.

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