This section of the text is very sad. Meena kills
herself; this highlights a culture of suicide I have never seen before. Up to
this point, the book has treated the people of Annawadi as an interesting
culture. Ethnography creates distance. I, the reader, have been able to observe
their customs with interest, even personal investment. But there have never
been any personal stakes for me.
This section brought the reality of
the text into sharp relief. This is a work of non-fiction. Real people are
suffering in a terrible way. The Annawadi described in the book is a place
where multiple people consider suicide a way to deal with their suffering.
Thinking about Meena’s life, especially as a
girl close to her age, I related to her—not to her decision to kill herself,
but to the torment that pushed her to that point. She was a girl who had been
beaten twice in one day and was expecting to be beaten again. She was being
forced to marry someone she barely knew at an age when she barely knew herself,
and felt terribly unprepared to be married.
For me, the worst part of Meena’s story is that
everything she felt was natural. Of course she hated being beaten. Of course
she did not feel ready to be married at 15. There was no help for her; she had no hope
that she could find another way out. She is not a tragic character, but a real
girl who went through a staggering level of abuse. Boo has made her into both.
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