It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be—all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faced with dilemmas not unlike the one Abdul confronted, stone slab in hand, one July afternoon when his life exploded. If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?
My deepest debt is to the residents of Annawadi. I am also grateful for the support and insight of the following people and institutions:
Bharati Chaturvedi, Vijaya Chauhan, Benjamin Dreyer, Naresh Fernandes, Severina Fernandes, Mahendra Gamare, Shailesh Gandhi, Matthew Geczy, David Jackson, James John, Kumar Ketkar, Cressida Leyshon, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Nandini Mehta, Sharmistha Mohanty, Sumit Mullick, Shobha Murthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Alka Bhagvaan Nikale, Brijesh Patel, Gautam Patel, Jeet Narayan Patel, Rajendra Prasad Patel, Anna Pitoniak, Vikram Raghavan, Lindsey Schwoeri, Mike and Mark Seifert, Altamas Shaikh, Gary Smith and the American Academy in Berlin, Hilda Suarez, Arvind Subramanian, M. Jordan Tierney, and Madhulika and Yogendra Yadav.
Binky Urban and Kate Medina for believing, against considerable evidence, that I could do this.
David Remnick for his commitment to work that is slow to do and not necessarily appealing to advertisers.
David Finkel and Anne Hull for their sustaining counsel at every stage of this project.
Unnati Tripathi for her genius and bravery.
Mrinmayee Ranade for her teaching, her optimism, and her perceptiveness about the domestic lives of ordinary women.
Luca Giuliani, Joachim Nettelbeck, and the staff of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for providing the haven where I recovered from the reporting and wrote the first draft of this book.
Lorraine Adams, Jodie Allen, Evan Camfield, Elizabeth Dance, Ramachandra Guha, Anne Kornhauser, Molly McGrath, Amy Waldman, and especially Dorothy Wickenden for—among other things—smart and crucial reads that made this book better than it would have been.
My family, who years ago invested in the question of how to do justice to the lives and imaginations of Abdul Husain and his neighbors, and who guided me, editorially and emotionally, through this project: my late father, Clinton Boo; John and Nick Boo; Tom Boo and Heleen Welvaart; Catherine Tashjean; Asha Sarabhai; Kyla Wyatt Leonor; Mary Richardson; Matt Buhr-Vogl, who helped me see the connections; Jack Boo, canniest twelve-year-old editor ever; two Mary Boos—my fierce, brilliant sister and my mother, who remains my most trusted reader and inspiration; and Sunil Khilnani, my love, my better world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katherine Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has spent the last twenty years reporting from within poor communities, considering how societies distribute opportunity and how individuals get out of poverty. Her reporting has been honored by a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Boo learned to report at the Washington City Paper. She was also an editor of The Washington Monthly and, for nearly a decade, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. This is her first book.
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