On humid afternoons, when the door to an aircraft opens on to either of Mumbai’s airports, the smell of burned-up fuel and heated metal rushes in accompanied by a riper, more human whiff—not exactly shit, but not exactly far from it. Nonplussed first-timers sometimes essentialize it as the smell of the city, and perhaps the country. Others may guess that this comes from the complex of slums which surrounds both airports, supplying vast quantities of labour, little of it formal, to surrounding suburban industries.

Katherine Boo’s first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, is an investigation of one of these slums, Annawadi, a semi-solid patch of land first settled by immigrant Tamil labourers in 1991. It follows three years in the lives of some of its residents, including a family of garbage sorters, a fixer associated with the Shiv Sena who hopes to gain serious political control over her neighbourhood, and a few young boys trying to stave off hunger as they shuttle between recycling work, petty crime, and the night-time comforts of Erase-X, which provide “an infusion of daring for after-midnight work”. Luxury hotels tower in the near distance around Annawadi. A long-standing project—sometimes reported as “airport beautification”, sometimes as “slum demolition”—to clear residents off the foetid land haunts it at regular intervals.

The author’s book closely tracks the distribution of opportunity in informal industries like garbage recycling. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

These sound like familiar stories about urban India because, like an indeterminate airport smell, they linger in urban Indian consciousness without quite assuming a fully explained presence. In that sense, the most immediate surprise that Behind the Beautiful Forevers will hold for an Indian reader is the depth and intimacy of Boo’s investigation. Boo, a reporter with The New Yorker, has been praised before for the remarkable sense of involvement and scrupulous, insider-level detail she brings to her journalism about urban poverty and injustice. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a book for which she reported in Annawadi from November 2007 to March 2011, will confirm all the compliments paid to the quality of her work, and occasion several new ones.

Boo narrates the years in the lives of these residents in third person, subsumed near-totally by the voices of her subjects. The book opens with Abdul, age 16 (or perhaps 19; “his parents were hopeless with dates”), fleeing from the scene of a crime he has not committed, and follows him as he and his family are accused, arrested and dragged through a monstrous routine of torture, corruption and indifference. They hunt for justice in the “overcity” of policemen and special executive officers, judges, and overseers like Asha, a corrupt neighbour trying to take control of Annawadi’s problems because there is money to be made. Almost all of Abdul’s story happens in reported speech; when he or Annawadi’s residents do talk directly, it is always to each other, and never to Boo.

What does it mean for a reporter not to be present in her work? Two recent narratives about urban Indian poverty, Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, come to mind in this respect. In both books, the reporters are always present as they talk to their protagonists. Both reporters, perhaps as inhabitants of the same ecosystem from which their books spring, make their difference a part of the story, and the transparency of their perspectives contributes to the success of each book. Boo, on the other hand, forsakes a presence in the book, knowing or guessing the pitfalls of playing a “bridge character” between her audience and the people of whom she writes.

Chronicler: Katherine Boo

She remains, as a writer, beautifully alert and vibrant, illuminating character and motive like a good novelist. “One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength,” she writes of Abdul, “...that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. ‘So let’s get a brick,’ replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction. Abdul had bumbled away. The brick belief was something he wanted to harbour, not to test.” When the young orphan Sunil slips into thievery, she writes of him, with as much wit as precision, as a “new economy microsaboteur”. Where spoken, the languages of Annawadi are reported accurately, without gimmick or reinvention: The boy who says, “I think his guarantee is over”, to describe a dying neighbour is also the boy who will eventually tell us: “I don’t like myself, doing this work. It’s like being an insult.” Indeed, perhaps the only times the reader is jostled out of the narrative are whenever religion intrudes into the lives of Annawadians. Boo is forced into the role of explainer: There is no convenient way to avoid writing things like, “But once the coconut was thrown, the evil eye would stick, even if your enemy hired a baba to burn three incense sticks in a glass of rice with a sprinkle of vermillion powder on top.”

As the book progresses, it becomes evident that even the small details work to enlarge a reader’s understanding of this world, not just conceptually, but through humane, individual truths. “The Annawadi Dalits had christened their slumlanes Gautam Nagar, after an eight-year-old boy who had died of pneumonia during one of the airport authority’s periodic demolitions,” she writes, in her first and last mention of Gautam Nagar in the book. But there it springs to life, in wrenching and unexpected detail. In an artfully placed clause, while writing about Sunil, Boo can create a picture of children living “in a state of almost constant hunger”, and pulverize the fond myth many urban Indians, and Mumbaikars in particular, harbour about their cities being places where no matter what, at least fellow citizens don’t starve.

Boo’s name does not appear in the book, but many others do. Doggedly obtained information about bribe-taking officials and abusive policemen, in particular, implicates several offenders by name. More broadly, Annawadi’s stories make plain the serious dysfunctions in the way state and private mechanisms interact with the poor. As a structural critique of inequality, the book is a remarkable and discomfiting success.

Its other big victory is moral. Annawadi may be a place easy to call “Dickensian”, but Dickens’ sentimentality could not have begun an exploration like Boo’s, so uncompromising about the exigencies of good and evil, rich and poor. Boo does not write to elicit compassion or charity. This raises the question: What does this story demand of its reader?

Behind the Beautiful Forevers—Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity: Penguin India, 254 pages, Rs 499.

There may be those who read Boo’s book to experience the pity and terror of a narrative in which the hardcover-reading classes are absent. But the book does not exist to restore humanity to an “undercity” (Boo’s word) that others simply haven’t yet noticed. It is also, symptomatically, a book about the failure to notice.

Boo is not in the business of making class-based accusations, but Behind the Beautiful Forevers eats into the hazy but persuasive confidence widely harboured about urban growth. The elite embarrassment over “Slumbai” is often secretly accompanied by the perverse notion that this blatantly public view of inequality, specific to Mumbai, is in some way its own solution. The contradiction of this visibility is that it softens the idea of real and deep divides into abstraction. That is why the Erase-X and the suppurating hands of scavengers will come as a shock to few Indian readers and almost no Mumbaikar.

Boo attacks this narrative obfuscation, not to deflate expectations, but to better understand the challenges of these expectations. The story is not just that growth fails to be inclusive; it is about the ways in which the excluded negotiate these failures. The story is these lines from the book’s last quarter: “Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. ‘We try so many things,’ as one Annawadi girl puts it, ‘but the world doesn’t move in our favor.’”