Annawadi is built on garbage dumps at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are scavengers, construction workers and economic migrants, all of them living in squalor in the hope that a small part of India's booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a murder rocks the slum community and global recession shocks the city, suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai's margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.