35 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine BooBehind the Beautiful Forevers
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part Three: A little Wildness
Chapter 9 Summary: “Marquee Effect”
Asha and her family travel to Vidarbha, a rural region of Maharashtra, to visit with family. Asha was a field worker in her youth and was accustomed to backbreaking work and abject poverty. Although recent reforms and government aid meant to help rural workers, the rural suicide rate is high. Some resort to self-immolation or drinking pesticide when the situation seems hopeless. Anil, one of Asha’s relatives, tells how he came to Mumbai to seek more opportunities. After living on the streets and attempting—fruitlessly—to hire himself out as a day laborer, Anil returned to Vidarbha, disgraced.
As a college-educated girl, Manju is highly regarded in the village. Seeing rural poverty firsthand, she is afraid that Asha will arrange her marriage to a farmer and decides she would rather run away than let this happen.
Back in Annawadi, Asha has to take college classes or face losing her temporary teaching job. She has begun to study higher-class people and imitate their clothing and interactions. Multiple marriage offers have come in for Manju, including one from a widow in Mauritius. However, Manju has other options that seem more lucrative to Asha, including selling insurance. Manju studies and passes her insurance exams but ultimately does not know anyone who can afford to buy insurance. She also becomes trained for response in terrorist situations, and in this training she meets Vijay, an attractive college boy. Manju is becoming increasingly unsure about the value of her college education—jobs at government schools require large bribes, but jobs in private schools pay very little. With Asha berating Manju for paying so much attention to the children in her hut-school, Manju begins teaching her class every other day, then every third day.
On the night of her 40th birthday, Asha’s phone rings, interrupting her family’s celebration. She immediately begins to put on jewelry and makeup. Realizing what her mother is about to do, Manju pleads with her to stay, but Asha leaves anyway. As she has done before, Asha is meeting a police officer for sex—not for desire or love, but for money and power.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Parrots, Caught and Sold”
One day an injured scavenger is found in the road connecting Annawadi to the airport. The residents pass by, but no one helps him, and the man dies. The official cause of death, without benefit of an autopsy, is tuberculosis. More bodies appear in and around Annawadi. It is rumored that the One Leg’s death has put a curse on Annawadi and that the entire place will soon be bulldozed to the ground.
Sunil begins working with Sonu, the “blinky boy” with an eye defect. Sunil is surprised to learn that Sonu has several connections near the airport, and the two are soon splitting profits. Sonu objects to Sunil’s association with Kalu, the thief. Recently Kalu has been breaking into the recycling bins of airline caterers. When the police catch on to him, Kalu is told he can keep his stolen metal if he turns in a local drug dealer. Equally afraid of both the police and the drug dealer, Kalu flees to a hill country outside the city to work with his father and brother.
Abdul returns home from Dongri, although he must report back every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a condition of his parole. He is horrified to learn that his recycling business collapsed under Mirchi’s control and begins to reestablish himself. He has taken the Master’s teachings with him and passes them along to anyone who will listen.
One day Kalu returns from the mountains for the festival of his favorite god, Ganpati. He claims he will stop stealing now. The next morning, his body is found near the gates of Air India.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Proper Sleep”
The boys of Annawadi flock to the airport to see Kalu’s body. Abdul is overcome with fear, brought on by his recent prison experience; he had talked to Kalu only the night before, so would he somehow be blamed for Kalu’s death and thrown back into prison? Sunil, grieved, is made more aware of his place in the world. If even Kalu, one of the stars of Annawadi, could be disposed of so easily, what does this mean for the rest of them?
Kalu’s cause of death is listed as tuberculosis, another cover-up from a police precinct that cannot be bothered to solve crimes involving slum boys. Some of the boys are rounded up, questioned, and beaten. One of these is Sanjay Shetty, who decides to flee the Annawadi for Dharavi, a slum where his mother and sister live. There, he drinks rat poison and dies. In the fiction of the city’s police reports, he becomes a heroin addict who killed himself when he could not get another fix.
Kalu and Sanjay’s deaths bring Abdul and Sunil closer together. Everyone has theories about who killed Kalu, whether airport workers, drug dealers or other road boys. When Sunil visits the spot where Kalu’s body was found, all traces of a crime are gone.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
These chapters illustrate the problems of children in Annawadi. Even a college education will not guarantee your escape. And when you cannot escape, you might become just one more nameless victim.
Manju, whom Abdul terms the “everything” girl, is one of Annawadi’s shining stars. Yet even with all her education and accomplishments, Manju’s future seems grim. She is terrified that her mother will arrange a marriage that won’t suit her—to a rural farmworker, for example, or to an elderly man in Mauritius. The fact that Asha is even willing to consider sending her daughter to a man she has never met in Africa shows the extent of her greed. Her daughter is a commodity, and a valuable one. Manju’s career prospects are also slim. She can get a low-paying teaching job that will not elevate her out of the slum. She even completes an entire insurance course without seeming to consider that she does not know anyone who can afford insurance. Manju seems too educated to be happy with her surroundings, but education itself is not enough to lift her to a new position in life.
For “road boys” like Kalu, there are equally few options. As Sunil has learned, scavenging often does not earn enough to ease hunger pains, but stealing is dangerous work. Kalu falls between a rock and a hard place—face the wrath of the police, or the wrath of a drug dealer. It is not clear which of these groups is responsible for Kalu’s death, or whether it was another party entirely. What is clear is that the death of a road boy means little—except to other road boys. There is no meaningful investigation into Kalu’s death or any of the deaths that happen in or around the slum. The police seem content with closing cases quickly and moving on to more important matters—which don’t include the happenings in Annawadi.
