Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo: review In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was 10 and it was my first trip abroad. My father worked for Brooke Bond India, and had "tea business" to attend. Outside our hotel - the swank Taj - beggar children with lurid deformities were shaking tins at passers-by. I felt myself a voyeur of misery. I was reminded of my schoolboy visit while reading Katherine Boo's magnificent investigation into the slum underworld of the Indian city known today by its Hindi name of Mumbai. Boo, an American journalist, does not flinch from addressing the city's social inequalities and, in particular, the plight of its rubbish-sorting underclass. Behind the L'Oréal hoardings and billboard adverts for the perfect home ("Beautiful Forever. Forever Beautiful") lie the shacks and squatter colonies of Mumbai's dispossessed. Even the vilest and most crime-infested refuse sites are no deterrent to the author as she seeks out waste-pickers and other social strays to interview. Boo's book is the product of four years spent in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi, built in the early Nineties in the shadow of shining luxury hotels. It is written with a novelist's ear for dialogue and narrative pace, and could almost pass for a collection of non-fiction short stories. In the guise of reportage, Boo tells a riveting story, yet she displays no crass sympathy for the social wretchedness she describes. Boo has set down the humiliations and deprivations of the inhabitants of Annawadi not in order to horrify the reader - though it does - but in order to bear witness. To give way to glib moral outrage would tarnish her credibility as a reporter. In the author's account, Annawadi grew around the city's international airport when Tamil construction workers began to squat on government land there. They scraped a pittance by sifting through the trash spewed out daily from the hotels. Rotting food, beer bottle tops and plastic bottles could be sold in bulk to the neighbourhood's many recycling plants. Runaway teenage girls, too, were drawn to Annawadi's waste business as it promised the hope of a better and more remunerative way of life. Many of them had been raped back home in the countryside, or sold to pimps in the city. Sexual abuse of girls remains a shameful commonplace of 21st-century Mumbai, says Boo. Seeking help from the police is often seen as an act of betrayal; Indian girls are expected to bear their abuse. Among the slum's estimated 3,000 inhabitants are girls who have been sold by their parents to the local constabulary, and serially raped by them. During her residency in the slum, from 2007 to 2011, Boo videotaped all that she saw and heard. Public records and official documents (especially those of the Mumbai police) were scrutinised; hospitals, morgues and law courts were visited. The author was nothing if not scrupulous. Yet her book contains no footnotes or bibliography as the research has been absorbed invisibly into the narrative. One of the book's unforgettable real-life characters is Abdul Husain, a refuse-sorting worker from Uttar Pradesh in the north. As a Muslim, Abdul is looked down on by the slum's Hindu majority, and feels keenly his lack of social mobility in Mumbai generally. Even in disease-ridden Annawadi, complex caste separations and petty snobberies abound; a sense of hierarchy seems to lie beneath all social interaction. Abdul knows that he is of the wrong religion and colour to get a job in the Hyatt or other "glimmerglass" hotels on the slum's periphery. His father, in spite of his tuberculosis, toils night and day on the rubbish dumps in order to feed his family of nine. His work is often dangerous: Annawadi is built on landfill at the sea's edge, and even a light rainfall can put the whole slum under flood. In the end, Boo seems to be saying, poverty makes criminals of everyone in Mumbai. The law is enforced merely as a means to extort money; police detainees are obliged to forsake their savings to have a false criminal charge dropped. As an ethnology of Indian slum life, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a masterpiece that ranks with Sonia Faleiro's study of Mumbai's red-light district, Beautiful Thing. Useless to describe the singular power of this book; it is, quite simply, one of the finest works on contemporary India yet written. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum Katherine Boo Portobello, £14.99, 256pp