Boo 175-end

Despite the text being non-fiction, it is quite poetic.  ‘‘The flowers in my hair die in two hours’’.  The unfolding events in Annawadi are extremely morbid and the living conditions are disgusting.  Boo manages to write with brutal honesty that I am able to feel these emotions and not just infer that these are characteristics of Annawadi.  Boo utilizes comic relief, but always in unison with an overruling sense of melancholia, ‘‘the serpent curse of Fatima’s ghost’’.  The lives of this place are so discombobulated, or at least that’s how I feel when I read Boo’s piece.  For instance, ‘chewing tobacco’, ‘rat poison’ and ‘grinding rice’ are all in a matter of 8 lines.  The text is bursting with toxicity and fatality.  Ridiculous realities of the residents of Annawadi such as the mother being sick of her daughter and thinking, the idea that dancing makes one crazy, being beaten for talking to a boy at night, or harmed because a girl didn’t make her little brother an omelet because she is fasting and didn’t want to be tempted is quite suffocating for me, the reader.  The men of this town are quite dramatic, oppressive, chauvinistic and irrational. On the other hand, the girl seems very fantastical – ‘oh I’m fasting’, ‘oh I ate poison’. So many different things from out of left field are thrust into one short segment like an injection composed of a million and other drugs.

I would agree that Boo is a talented writer and has the ability of making non-fiction seem fictional.  The text can be quite suspenseful.  Once Meena said how she paid for the poison, it became a tad ironic because her brother, the one she tried to get away from was the one she used to kill herself.  The reason for all of this utter tragedy and the means to find freedom is gross of course.  If it was fictional, I might have taken it with a grain of salt, but it is life and that is depressing, but Boo takes me out of that rut, because she imbues it with dark romanticism like carving one’s name in concrete or flesh seems like a fairytale.

Ultimately, the means to acquire such information is unbelievable.  How did Boo feel knowing that there were terrorist or how does she feel while living in an apocalyptic world.  I would think of the villagers’ feelings but a few recognizable characters are already dead.  What if Meena was still alive during the attacks?  What devastating harm would she do to herself or someone else?  It disturbs me that I become numb to the morbid and suicidal extremes of Annawadi women, but again the numbness wears off once Abdul starts questioning if the lives of slum dwellers are real.

The end.

‘Since coming home they hadn’t once asked about their mother, but Noori, who’d seen the burning through the window, had changed. She’d stand in the road as if she wanted the oncoming cars to hit her, and had developed a nervous habit of chewing her head scarf.’’  I am just at a lost of words.  This text is far more gut wrenching and tear-jerking than an innumerable amount of films.

‘She told me they called her a prostitute and would taker her other leg…She told me that they beat her…She told me that they held her by the neck and beat her with a big stone.’’  Words like ‘she told me’ are incredibly haunting.  The situation seems so primitive and unjustifiable despite being in court. 

To think that this is the 21^st century is even more daunting.  This is about an aspect of Indian culture and I find it so strange that I can relate some parts of this culture to others. For instance the chauvinism that is site-specific or the tragedies that unfold within this black hole filled with sewage, which is detached from other parts of town such as Mumbai; is translated in other instances of the world.  According to Dazed Digital (http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/19852/1/hedi-slimane-stands-up-for-lgbt-rights-in-brunei), there are recent news that Heidi Slimane, the creative director of fashion house Saint Laurent Paris will refrain from staying at any hotel of the Dorchester Collection because the hotel chain’s owner, Sultan of Brunei has applied homophobic laws in his country, Sharia.  Homosexuality is illegal in that country where as gays can face up to 10 years in prison, but now gays are sentenced to death by stoning. 

The universal theme of human rights, in Annawadi’s case, women’s rights is parallel to that of gay-rights.  The extreme thing is that there is a manipulation of time.  Battling women’s rights were first erupted in society in the sixties and gay rights were present in the eighties, but we are in the 21^st century and not every country is as liberal as for example, The United States of America or The Bahamas.