Behind the Beautiful Forevers

“Here, in the thriving western suburbs of the Indian financial capital, three thousand people had packed into, or on top of, 335 huts. It was a continual coming-and-going of migrants from all over India.” 

This quote sets the scene in Annawadi. Despite the modernization and economic development that has benefited Mumbai, here exists a slum of deplorable conditions, in which impoverished humans are packed together like sardines. This passage also touches upon the transient nature of the population, as people come and go as their fortune rises and falls, as well as its ethnic diversity, which becomes a source of conflict later in the text.

“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunnysacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.” 

This quote describes the waste-pickers who scavenge through Mumbai’s garbage searching for anything of value. In describing them as “profit-minded Santas,” the passage illustrates how they pick waste for money, for survival, and how their profits support their families.

“Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.” 

As India experiences increasing economic development, the country’s citizens trade acquiescence to castes or other expectations for hope in reinvention. As this quote indicates, that same yearning for a better life also exists among the Annawadians, despite their limited opportunities for improvement.