Behind the Beautiful Forevers (5 page)

Four-wheelers, bikes, buses, scooters, thousands of people on foot: It took Abdul more than an hour to go three miles, given calamitous traffic at an intersection by the gardens of the Hotel Leela, around the corner of which European sedans awaited servicing at a concern named “Spa de Car.” A section of the city’s first metro rail was being constructed here, to complement an elevated expressway slowly rising on Airport Road. Abdul feared running out of gas while in the gridlock, but in the last spidery light before nightfall, his wheezing vehicle gained a vast slum called Saki Naka.

Among Saki Naka’s acres of sheds were metal-melting and plastic-shredding machines owned by men in starched kurtas—white kurtas, to announce the owners’ distance from the filth of their trade. Some of the workers at the plants were black-faced from carbon dust and surely black-lunged from breathing iron shavings. A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “Sa’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.”

For all Mirchi’s talk of progress, India still made a person know his place, and wishing things different struck Abdul as a childish pastime, like trying to write your name in a bowl of melted kulfi. He had been working as hard as he could in the stigmatized occupation he’d been born to, and it was no longer a profitless position. He intended to return home with both hands and a pocketful of money. His mental estimates of the weight of his goods had been roughly correct. Peak-season recyclables, linked to a flourishing global market, had bestowed on his family an income few residents of Annawadi had ever known. He had made a profit of five hundred rupees, or eleven
dollars a day—enough to jump-start the plan that inspired his mother’s morning curses, and that even the little Husains knew to keep close.

With this take, added to savings from the previous year, his parents would now make their first deposit on a twelve-hundred-square-foot plot of land in a quiet community in Vasai, just outside the city, where Muslim recyclers predominated. If life and global markets kept going their way, they would soon be landowners, not squatters, in a place where Abdul was pretty sure no one would call him garbage.

Rahul’s mother, Asha, took note in that winter of hope: The slumlord of Annawadi had gone batty and pious! Although Robert Pires beat his second wife, he let her live. He erected a Christian shrine outside his hut, then a second shrine, to a Hindu goddess. Before these altars every Saturday, he clasped his meaty hands in prayer and atoned for all past crimes by giving tea and bread to hungry children. Weekdays, the attractions of the underworld paling, he passed the hours in slack communion with nine horses he stabled in the slum, two of which he’d painted with stripes to look like zebras. Robert rented the fake zebras, along with a cart, to the birthday parties of middle-class children—a turn to honest work he thought the judging gods might factor in.

In this reformation, thirty-nine-year-old Asha Waghekar perceived an opportunity. Robert had lost his taste for power just as she was discovering her own. Let others thread the marigolds. Let others sort the trash. For the overcity people who wished to exploit Annawadi,
and the undercity people who wished to survive it, she wanted to be the woman-to-see.

Slumlord was an unofficial position, but residents knew who held it—the person chosen by local politicians and police officers to run the settlement according to the authorities’ interests. Even in a rapidly modernizing India, female slumlords were relative rarities, and those women who managed to secure such power typically had inherited land claims or were stand-ins for powerful husbands.

Asha had no claims. Her husband was an alcoholic, an itinerant construction worker, a man thoroughgoing only in his lack of ambition. As she’d raised their three children, who were now teenagers, few neighbors thought of her as anyone’s wife. She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.

Robert’s chief contribution to Annawadi history had been to bring Asha and other Maharashtrians to the slum, as part of a Shiv Sena effort to expand its voting bloc at the airport. A public water connection was secured as an enticement, and by 2002, the Maharashtrians had disempowered the Tamil laborers who had first cleared the land. But a majority is a hard thing to maintain in a slum where almost no one has permanent work. People came and went, selling or renting their huts in a thriving underground trade, and by early 2008, the North Indian migrants against whom Shiv Sena campaigned had become a plurality. What was clear to Asha was also clear to the Corporator of Ward 76, the elected official of the precinct in which Annawadi sat: Robert now belonged to his zebras. He’d lost interest in Shiv Sena and the slum.

The Corporator, Subhash Sawant, was a man of pancake makeup, hair dye, aviator sunglasses, and perspicacity. While the obvious choice to succeed Robert as slumlord would have been a well-spoken Shiv Sena activist named Avinash, Avinash was too distracted to serve
the Corporator’s interests. He was fixing hotel septic systems day and night to afford private schooling for his son.

Asha, on the other hand, had time. Her temp work, teaching kindergartners at a large municipal school for modest pay, was a sinecure the Corporator had helped her obtain, overlooking the fact that her formal schooling had stopped at seventh grade. In return, she spent a good deal of class time on her cellphone, conducting Shiv Sena business. She could deliver her neighbors to the polls. She could mobilize a hundred women for a last-minute protest march. The Corporator thought she could do more. He asked her to handle a petty Annawadi problem, and then another, somewhat less petty, and yet another, not petty at all, at which point he gave her a bouquet of flowers and his fat wife started giving her the fish eye.

Asha took these things to be signs of an imminent triumph. Eight years after arriving in Annawadi and investing her hopes for economic betterment in political work, she had an influential patron. In time, she imagined, even the men of Annawadi would have to admit she was becoming the most powerful person in this stinking place.

Many of the men had preyed on her, early on. Assaying her large breasts and her small, drunken husband, they had suggested diversions that might allay her children’s poverty. The menacing Robert had made his own blunt proposal one evening as she was filling a pot of water at the tap. Asha had set down the pot and replied coolly, “Whatever you want. Tell me, bastard. Shall I strip naked and dance for you now?” No other woman, then or since, had spoken to the slumlord that way.

Asha had developed her sharp tongue as a child, working the fields of an impoverished village in northeastern Maharashtra. Pointed expression had been a useful defense when laboring among lecherous men. Discretion and subtlety, qualities useful in controlling a slum, were things she had learned since coming to the city.

She had by now seen past the obvious truth—that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition—to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn’t blame his dissatisfaction on someone else? Wealthy citizens accused the slumdwellers of making the city filthy and unlivable, even as an oversupply of human capital kept the wages of their maids and chauffeurs low. Slumdwellers complained about the obstacles the rich and powerful erected to prevent them from sharing in new profit. Everyone, everywhere, complained about their neighbors. But in the twenty-first-century city, fewer people joined up to take their disputes to the streets. As group identities based on caste, ethnicity, and religion gradually attenuated, anger and hope were being privatized, like so much else in Mumbai. This development increased the demand for canny mediators—human shock absorbers for the colliding, narrowly construed interests of one of the world’s largest cities.

Over time, of course, many shock absorbers lost their spring. But who was to say that a woman, a relative novelty, wouldn’t prove to have a longer life? Asha had a gift for solving the problems of her neighbors. Now that she had the Corporator’s ear, she could fix more such problems, on commission. And when she had real control over the slum, she could create problems in order to fix them—a profitable sequence she’d learned by studying the Corporator.

Guilt of the sort that had overcome Robert was an impediment to effective work in the city’s back channels, and Asha considered it a luxury emotion. “Corruption, it’s all corruption,” she told her children, fluttering her hands like two birds taking flight.

As Asha arrived home from her teaching job one afternoon, her step didn’t quicken when she saw supplicants lined up against the
wall of her hut. From the Corporator she had learned the psychological advantage of making people wait and stew. With barely a nod to her visitors, she stepped behind a lacy curtain at the back of her hut and unraveled the deep red sari she’d worn to work.

Now that she was older, her eyes drew more attention than her breasts. She could weaponize them in an instant, and boys caught gaping at her magnificent nineteen-year-old daughter, Manju, would reel backward as if they’d been struck. When Asha thought about money, her eyes narrowed. She thought about money most of the time; Annawadians called her Squint behind her back. But the real distinction of her eyes was their brightness. Most eyes dulled with age and disappointment. Hers looked far more radiant now than they did in the photograph she possessed of her youth. A tall, stooped, emaciated farm girl with sun-darkened skin, freshly embarked on a disastrous marriage: When Asha looked at that photo, she laughed.

She emerged from behind the curtain in a shapeless housedress, another strategy picked up from the Corporator. He often presided over his lavender-walled, lavender-furnished living room in an undershirt, legs barely covered by his lungi, while his petitioners flop-sweated in polyester suits. He might as well have said it aloud:
Your concerns are so unimportant to me that I haven’t bothered to dress
.

Settling on the floor, Asha accepted the cup of tea brought by Manju and nodded for the first of her neighbors to speak. An old woman with a creased, beautiful face and matted coils of silver hair, she hadn’t arrived with a problem. She was weeping in gratitude, because on this date, three years earlier, Asha had helped her secure a temp job with the city government, extricating trash from clogged sewers for ninety rupees a day. Before Asha had learned better, she had performed many such kindnesses for free.

From her pay, the older woman had bought Asha a cheap green sari. Asha didn’t care for the color. Still, it was good for the other visitors
to hear the old woman’s blessings, see the way she pressed her forehead to Asha’s bare feet.

Another weeper spoke next: an overweight exotic dancer who had lost her job in a bar and was now getting by as the concubine of a married policeman. She had to service the officer in the hut she shared with her mother and her children, which was prompting family hysterics. “He says he’s going to stop coming, because of the drama. Then what will we eat?”

Asha clucked. A morals campaign had driven most of the sex trade out of the airport area, and Annawadi’s “outline women,” as they were known, now had three bad options for satisfying their clients: in their family huts; behind a line of trucks parked nightly outside of Annawadi; or in the goaty, one-room brothel.

Briskly, Asha issued her advice: Explain more clearly to your family the long-term advantages of the liaison. “Maybe the officer doesn’t give you too much now, but later, he might fix your house. So tell them to stay quiet and wait and see.”

As she spoke, she ran her fingertips over her new orange ceramic floor tiles. Eight years back, when Annawadi was a flimsy encampment, her three children had jumped truckbeds to steal the wood and aluminum scrap from which the family had hammered up a shack. Now the hut had plaster walls, a ceiling fan, a wooden shrine with an electric candle, and a high-status, if nonfunctioning, refrigerator. The place was narrow and cramped, though. That had been the trade-off. To finance the improvements that might persuade her neighbors of her rising status, she’d rented bits of her living space to some of the continual stream of newcomers to Mumbai. Migrant tenants were holed up in a side room, a back room, and on the roof.

Although Shiv Sena was hostile to such migrants, Asha had always been more practical than ideological, and considered no financial
opportunity too small. “Why do you care if other people call us misers?” she asked her children. As they said in her village, drops of rain fill the lake.

“Be quick, I have people waiting,” Asha said into her cellphone. It was her younger sister, of whom she was jealous. Her sister’s husband was a hardworking chauffeur, and their hut in a nearby slum had a stereo system and four fluffy white dogs, just for fun. Asha’s consolation was that her sister’s daughter was plain and slow and nothing like Manju, the only college-going girl in Annawadi, who was now kneading bread dough for dinner and pretending she wasn’t eavesdropping on her mother’s conversations.