Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Characters and Significant Quotations
For the following characters provide brief character sketches and also rearrange them into
family trees and whatever other categories apply:
1. Abdul
2. Zehrunisa
3. Karam
4. Mirchi
5. Asha
6. Rahul
7. Manju
8. Sunil
9. Kalu
10. One Leg
Key Quotations:
1. “It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as
he sorted garbage, like with like. There were too many people in Mumbai for
everyone to have a job, so why wouldn’t Kunbi caste Hindus from Maharashtra
hire Kunbis from Maharashta, instead of hiring a Muslim of garbage-related
provenance? But Mirchi said that everyone was mixing nowadays, that old
prejudices were losing strength, and that Abdul just couldn’t see it, spending his
days with his head in his trash pile” (13-14).
2. “In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had
purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global
ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of
opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained” (28).
3. “The ads were for Italianate floor tiles, and the corporate slogan ran the wall’s
length: BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL
FOREVER. Sunil regularly walked atop the Beautiful Forever wall, surveying for
trash, but Airport Road was unhelpfully clean” (37).
4. “The city was rough on migrants, terrible sometimes, and also better than
anywhere else” (41).
5. “The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in
the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the
taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented,
but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected
money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it” (53).
6. “Manju wanted to be a teacher when she finished college, and her great fear was
that, in a fit of pique, her mother would wed her to a village boy who didn’t think
that a woman should work. That she’d die doing the things she was doing now;
sweeping the dirt that had blown in from outside, mopping, then sweeping the
new dirt that had blown in while she mopped” (61).
7. “As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding
an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and
corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education” (62).
8. “She (Meena) was a Dalit (once termed untouchable); Manju belonged to the
Kunbi farming caste, a backward caste but higher. Like most young
Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an
irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved
to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets” (66).