Speaking Volumes: How To Be A Journalist-Katherine Boo

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2012, just to add to the growing mountain of Kate Boo-worship.)

“One choice that I don’t agonise about is when I write, keeping myself out of it. The reporter writing about how she got her story has become de rigeur: a lot of self-mythologising bullshit.”

There is no ‘I’ in Katherine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers, except in the Author’s Note. She spent about four years in Annawadi, a slum near the Mumbai airport, trying with the help of two translators to listen to and understand the lives of the people who lived there. Across the 244 pages of the book, what you read and hear most are the voices of Asha and her aspirations to become a slum landlord, Abdul, a teenager who sorts garbage and is accused of a murder that is actually a suicide, Manju, the college girl who is bored stiff by having to read Mrs Dalloway. Boo’s opinions come in, if at all, in a low murmur.

When you read interviews by journalists just discovering this brand-new form—chiefly in the US and the UK of the 1930s and the 1950s, but often also 1990s and 2000s India, to the enduring embarrassment of those of us who were shaped by those times—the ‘I’ is everywhere.

An early Paris Review profile of Graham Greene, conducted in 1953, has the intrusive voices of the two interviewers, with questions longer than Greene’s answers. In another few decades, the Paris Review interviews with writers had changed. The interviewer’s voice was sharp and personal, but his or her presence was increasingly obliterated.

“My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action-even an opinion is a kind of action.”

This defence of the reporter’s objectivity is made by Fowler in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American. But Greene didn’t necessarily believe that reporters should be objective; Fowler’s own objectivity rests on thin ground. ‘”You can rule me out,” I said. “I’m not involved. Not involved,” I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved.’ This, as Graham Greene knew and Boo knows, is not a stand any reporter can afford to take.

“The corpse measured 66 inches from blue toes to jutting ears.”

Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers is already a legend, especially among journalists. It cannot be dismissed as yet another lazy excursion into slum poverty tourism, or as an outsider’s account of India. Boo’s determination to give all of the space of the book over to the people she meets, rather than to what she thinks of them or of Annawadi, is what gives the book its moral centre and force.

In her time as a New Yorker reporter, Boo often wrote just one piece a year. When Indian journalists hear this, their first reaction is often envy—the three things that have been missing from the Indian journalism landscape are a proper grounding in media ethics, a lack of column inches and time. If 2,000 words—compared to the roughly 7,000 words Boo had earned at the New Yorker—is a luxury, a year to work on a story is almost unimaginable in the Indian context.

But there is another way to be the kind of journalist Katherine Boo represents. Boo and the Washington Post team won a Pulitzer for a year’s worth of reporting—20 stories--on the mental health care system. When you look at that line about the corpse, it speaks of careful reporting. At least a dozen Indian journalists working on a similar story might also have got those details.

Then Boo continues.

“The body in plaid pajamas was that of a 57-year-old retarded ward of the District of Columbia. On the streets outside the city-funded group home where he had lived and died, kids sometimes called him Retard-O. Inside, he sweetened the hours by printing the name his mother gave him before she gave him up. Frederick Emory Brandenburg. He blanketed old telephone directories with that name, covered the TV Guides the home's staffers tossed aside. He glutted the flyleaves of his large-print Living Bible. The immensity of the effort made his hands shake, but the habit seemed as requisite as breath. In this way Brandenburg, whose thick-tongued words were mysteries to many, impressed the fact of his existence on his world.”

It is hard to see with that paragraph, as it is with Behind The Beautiful Forevers, how much work went into it. Boo tells you some of it—a section in her book about the self-immolation of Fatima Shaikh is based on interviews with 168 people, she filed hundreds of RTI applications in order to understand the world of Annawadi. But it’s not the hours she spent interviewing the doctors she met at the group home or Brandenburg’s colleagues, or the hours she spent in Annawadi that are the point.
The point is only this: when she met the people who lived in Annawadi, Sunil and Abdul, Manju Waghekar and Zehrunisa, she listened to everything they had to say, even to everything that was hard for them to say. And that is what makes Katherine Boo’s journalism, and Behind The Beautiful Forevers, unforgettable.

Also:
Jonathan Shainin on Behind The Beautiful Forevers

Anjali Puri's interview with Katherine Boo

Samanth Subramanian in conversation with Katherine Boo, Philip Gourevitch, David Remnick and other journalists.

Speaking Volumes: Untold stories: India's non-fiction

(Published in the Business Standard, April 26, 2011)

In the first chapter of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee starts with a quote from Shakespeare, and a personal story about a patient, Carla.

He runs through the conversation he will have with her, and notes ruefully that there is something rehearsed even about his sympathy, given the demands of the months he’s spent working as a cancer fellow: “In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation — vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt.” Two paragraphs down, without ever losing sympathy for the individual struck with cancer, Mukherjee has moved deftly to Solzhenitsyn, to a bigger picture, using, as he writes, “the past to explain the present”.

Reading The Emperor of All Maladies before it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, I was struck, as were many other reviewers, by how polished Mukherjee’s writing was (“The emperors of exploration”, Business Standard, February 1, 2011). Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, had no creative writing or journalistic background — the two traditional catchment areas for non-fiction writers.

But in the middle of his busiest years as a surgeon and a cancer fellow, he had served a kind of apprenticeship — pieces by him had appeared in medical reviews (Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine) and in mainstream publications known for their demanding editorial standards (The New Republic, The New York Times). Mukherjee’s recording eye for detail, matched with a deep empathy for his patients and an ability to do the historical research required, made this not just a prize-winning book, but a classic and lasting work of non-fiction.

In 2010, when Basharat Peer’s memoir of Kashmir, Curfewed Night, was published, one of its most enthusiastic champions was William Dalrymple, who called Peer a “new star of Indian non-fiction”. A few months later, Dalrymple spoke of his excitement at what seemed to be a new trend — the slow shift towards non-fiction replacing our somewhat obsessive focus on Booker-winning novels and other fiction.

Samanth Subramanian, like Sonia Faleiro, is one of the new stars of non-fiction; Following Fish, narrative journalism exploring India’s coastline, remains one of the best food and travel books of recent times. “This is just the beginning,” he says. We both agree that a handful of authors and non-fiction books from the subcontinent isn’t enough to call a movement, yet.

But as Subramanian points out, what may be changing – and where Dalrymple is correct – is a sensibility, as our curiosity about our own stories is matched by the willingness to actually go out and tell them. “There’s never been a paucity of academic non-fiction – good or bad – in India,” Subramanian notes. “But general non-fiction, journalistic non-fiction hasn’t had much of an outlet.”

Even among the journalists, someone like Sonia Faleiro, who wrote Beautiful Thing after reporting on the lives of bar dancers for Tehelka, or even Suketu Mehta, whose Bombay biography Maximum City sparked a curiosity about Indian non-fiction seven years ago, narrative non-fiction is something you have to earn. Few Indian publications support essays longer than 1,500-2,000 words; and even fewer would offer that space to issues other than politics.

The Caravan, run by Jonathan Shainin and a crack team of writer-editors, who include author Anjum Hassan and former Random House editor Rajni George, is one of the few magazines that look for and nurture narrative non-fiction, aside from a handful of men’s magazines that occasionally commission lengthy essays. (You could make the argument that magazines like Esquire and Playboy contributed much more than centrefolds to US culture —by commissioning short stories, long interviews and long journalistic essays, they helped several generations of writers to survive and grow.)

It’s tempting to see Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer triumph as confirmation of the Indian success story in non-fiction; but in a way, Mukherjee’s success as a writer is a very American, not Indian, success. What would it take to have a The Emperor of Maladies come out of India? More supportive publishing houses, more magazines with demanding editorial standards, more imagination and willingness to go after the untold stories on the part of writers? I don’t really have the answers, but it’s an interesting question.

Tailpiece: The release of the Ibn-e-Safi thrillers (Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread) could revive nostalgia for the days of “clean” blood-and-guts fiction. Ibn-e-Safi’s son says his father, already a well-known Pakistani writer when he considered writing the Jasoosi Duniya series, rose to the challenge when he was told that the books wouldn’t sell in India without sex and violence. He refused to include women, and his spy stories proved successful all the same.

There may have been precedent, though. Indian tastes ran to Alistair Maclean, whose thrillers were notable for his stern abjuration of romance. Maclean famously said that sex gets in the way of the action, a sentiment he may have borrowed from yet another creator of largely celibate heroes, Desmond Bagley, who said that sex gets in the way of the plot. How James Hadley Chase managed to juggle both will, presumably, remain a mystery.

2010: The year's best non-fiction

From Delhi’s courtesans and merchants at the time of the Mutiny to the search for the perfect hilsa, Indian non-fiction had more variety on offer this year than in the previous five. Here are some of the highlights—an indicative rather than comprehensive list, for reasons of space—of 2010 in general non-fiction.


Business: The second-best thing about All The Devils Are Here (Portfolio/ Penguin, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera) and The Big Short (Allen Lane, Michael Lewis) is that these two business books read like well-written, fast-paced thrillers. The best thing about McLean’s history of the 2008 financial crisis and Short’s dissection of the “tiny handful of investors… for whom the trade became an obsession” is that they are snapshots of a time of greed and hubris. In comparison, Hamish McDonald’s long-anticipated Ambani and Sons (Roli Books) is big on gossip, comprehensive enough, but lacked the punch and the rigorous analysis that a Michael Lewis brings to the table. It reads like a rehash of McDonald’s earlier book, the controversial Polyester Prince.

History: Ramachandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India (Viking/ Penguin) drew crowds and intense debate, over those the historian chose to include in this collection of 19 profiles. Despite its many insights, it fell short of Guha’s best work—a milestone rather than a monumental work in his career. Mahmood Farooqui’s Besieged: Voices from Delhi, 1857 (Viking/ Penguin) was a welcome reminder of the missing oral histories and the untouched records in our libraries. A lasting addition to Mutiny scholarship, it could, however, have done with more commentary and analysis from Farooqui. Madhushree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (Tranquebar) offered both in a trenchant criticism that directly linked Winston Churchill’s biases to the great famine of Bengal. And one of the more entertaining analyses of contemporary India was Santosh Desai’s collection of essays on the middle classes, Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India (HarperCollins).

Travel writing: Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish (Penguin), winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book prize, was one of the discoveries of the year. Marrying a journalist’s eye to a writer’s turn of phrase, Subramanian made his travels up and down the Indian coast come alive, for foodies and travel junkies alike.
Sadanand Dhume’s gripping My Friend The Fanatic: Travels With A Radical Islamist (Tranquebar) is one of the more illuminating and thoughtful examinations of contemporary Islam available, which includes meetings with top Al-Qaeda chiefs and the inventor of an especially risqué dance called drilling. Balance this with Amitava Kumar’s rigorous but personal Evidence of Suspicion: A Writer’s Report on the War on Terror (Picador India), which moves between India and the US and is a brilliant study of how governments have internalized paranoia at the expense of the rights of their citizens.

The arts: Deepanjana Pal’s Life of Raja Ravi Varma (Random House) was one of the few approachable and entertaining artist’s biographies—as opposed to hagiographies—to be written in recent times. Pal’s bland and slightly workmanlike style is offset by her intimate understanding of the period and of art. With Penguin Studio’s monumental tribute to Dayanita Singh, it’s the photographs that do the talking as much as the perceptive essays by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen—definitely a collector’s item, and an essential guide to the work of one of India’s most celebrated photographers. And well worth its Rs 6,000 price tag is the Khoj Book (HarperCollins), with well-curated profiles of 101 Indian artists, from one of India’s most experimental and freewheeling art galleries.

For Charles Correa fans, A Place in the Shade (Penguin India) is a quiet, thoughtful and inspiring collection of the maestro’s essays on architecture—again, essential reading for anyone interested in India’s cities and buildings. And on a lighter note, don’t miss Jai Arjun Singh’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (HarperCollins)—a cult film and books blogger on one of our funniest and most intriguing cult films.

Next week: the year's best biographies and memoirs, fromfrom the lives of bar dancers in Bombay to Mark Twain’s irreverent take on Samuel Clemens and the ultimate assessment of the man in the White House.

Book review: Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro

(Published in the Business Standard, November 2010.)




Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars
Sonia Faleiro
Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton,
Rs 450, 216 pages





In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta’s 2005 blockbuster about Bombay, he writes about his relationship with a bar dancer who grew to confide all of the details of her life to him, from the nature of her clients to her habit of cutting herself when in extreme emotion. “What is sex after such vast intimate knowledge?” Mehta wrote, in a particularly revelatory line.

From Truman Capote to John Berendt to Suketu Mehta and Sonia Faleiro, part of the lure of non-fiction is, inevitably, just this: the vast intimate knowledge of another human being that no other form or act can offer. That knowledge, for the best non-fiction writers, is usually pressed into service of something that goes far beyond the ordinary voyeurism of the journalist; at its best, it can be an attempt to understand the rich, confusing business of life itself.

As Maximum City made its explosive impact in 2005, another young writer was finding her voice, and her subject, in the world of Bombay’s dance bars. Sonia Faleiro would spend the next five years immersed in the seedy but subtly empowering atmosphere of the bars in Mira Road, listening to the conversations of dalals and bar girls, clients (chamar chors and Bada Dons), hijras and brothel owners.

“My story is the best you will ever hear. The best, understand? Now come close. Closer! Okay, ready?”

Beautiful Thing sets the pace right from the epigraph, and from its first, searing chapter. Here is Leela, the bar dancer whose life Faleiro faithfully shadowed for years, wearing her client’s boxer shorts as she admires herself in the mirror, young, beautiful, confident, an “alone girl” who demands gifts of money, clothes, jewellery and oddly, vegetables, from the clients who are dazzled by her courtesan’s turn at the bar. “Our often one-sided relationship may be characterized thus: I called Leela. She ‘missed-called’ me,” writes Faleiro, setting the boundaries early on. Her interest in the lives of the bar girls, from Leela to the unbelievably beautiful queen of nakhra, Priya, will always be one-sided, unreciprocated.

Leela, when the story opens, is at the top of her profession, and her profession is at the top of the complex hierarchy that governs sex workers in Bombay. There are destitute prostitutes, the bottom-feeders; brothel girls, a step above; call girls and massage parlour girls; and right at the top, in the glittering tinsel light of the bars, the bar dancers. Leela’s story is not a simple one, and to tell it, Faleiro turns herself into the proverbial camera, the invisible, omniscient writer whose only job is to record what happens.

“When you look at my life, don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road…,” Leela tells her. “But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say, “Get lost oye!” And they do. And if I want a gift or feel like “non-wedge”, I just have to tell them and they give me what I want, no questions. ..I make money and money gives me something my mother never had. Azaadi. Freedom.”

Leela’s story is as harsh and brutal as the story of hundreds of other women in India. Faleiro chronicles their lives through hers; the casual rapes by family members or the police, the limited possibilities of finding respectable, paying work in Bombay’s brutally crowded, busy streets. In 2005, the dance bars offered a kind of halfway house for women who didn’t have to do “galat kaam” unless they were so inclined, and who weren’t subjected to the darker cruelties of being trafficked into the sex trade. Working in the dance bars gave them respectability—many, as in Leela’s case, received an anxious, obsessive love and respect from the families who depended on their earnings. They had, too, a kind of freedom—the freedom to pick and choose their clients, to flirt, to fight over a particularly fancy “Kushtomer”, and the freedom to spend their money as they saw fit.

As with John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing reads like great fiction—from Masti, the stunningly confident hijra, to Priya, the narcissist in love with her own impossible beauty, to Apsara, Leela’s grasping, selfish mother, the cast of characters here are unforgettable. And Faleiro does a brilliant job of blending reportage with the moving, saddening story she has to tell—in a fit of misplaced politicking and morality, the Bombay government closed down the dance bars, condemning most of these women to the indignities, dangers and insecurities of “dhanda”. Her perspective, always respectful to the subjects of her story, allows this to be a story of and about Bombay’s women—a massive, and refreshing, change from the masculine world of the gangs we’ve been offered by previous Bombay chroniclers.

Beautiful Thing is marred slightly by Faleiro’s obsession with accents—by the fourth repetition of “bootiful” and the third of “kushtomer”, the reader might wish that she had exercised less Kiplingesque fidelity. Nor should one expect objectivity; Faleiro makes it quite clear that her sympathies lie with the women in this trade, and her fascination with their independence can cloud her judgment. But these are minor quibbles.

Because the truth is that Beautiful Thing is one of the books we’ve been waiting for in contemporary India—a non-fiction debut of astonishing integrity and sensitivity, where Faleiro tells a story that is beguiling, incredibly funny in parts, and absolutely heart-breaking. This is without question a brilliant, unforgettable book by a writer who is one of the best of her generation. Beautiful Thing is one of the best books of the year; and is one of the most gripping and honest books written about Bombay in a very long while.