Behind the Beautiful Forevers (15 page)

He pulled Fatima up. When he let go, she flopped back down, howling.

People took note of the upturned vessel of water.

“She’s a fool then,” said an old man. “She wanted to burn herself a little, create a drama, and instead she burned herself a lot.”

“It is because of these people that I have done this,” Fatima cried out, her voice astonishingly clear. Everyone knew which people she meant.

Kehkashan stopped sobbing long enough to issue a command to her brothers and father. “Run! Go! She said she was going to trap us. She might say we have set her on fire!”

“A police case now—they’re finished,” a neighbor said, watching the Husain boys tear past the public toilet in the general direction of the Hotel Leela, with its eight-hundred-dollar suites.

“Water!” Fatima was pleading. Her face was red and black.

“But if she dies while you give her water, the ghost will get inside you,” someone said.

“Ghosts of women are the worst. Years go by and they don’t leave you be.”

A luckless teenaged girl named Priya finally brought the water. Priya, one of the poorest girls in Annawadi, sometimes helped Fatima cook and care for her children in exchange for food. She was said to have two ghosts inside her already.

“Stupid people. They say it’s bad to give water after a burn.”

This was a new voice, crisper than the others: Asha’s voice. She was standing at the back of the crowd.

People turned. “Then tell her not to drink, Asha! Stop her!”

“But how do I snatch it away?” Asha said. “If it’s her last moment, I don’t want to take a dying woman’s curse. What if she passed right then?”

Manju came out. Her mother ordered her away. Manju’s best friend, Meena, came closer. It was unspeakable, what she saw. Fatima
writhing in a brown two-piece outfit with pink flowers on the front and back, most of the flowers now burned away. Where the flowers had been, strips of skin were hanging. Meena ran away to be sick, felt she’d be sick her whole life, what she’d seen.

“How will I get to the hospital?” Fatima was saying. “My husband isn’t here!”

“Someone should get an autorickshaw and take her to Cooper Hospital. All these idiots are just staring—she’s going to die before our eyes.”

“But if you take her to Cooper, the police will say you were the one to set her on fire.”

“Asha should take the One Leg to the hospital,” someone said. “She’s Shiv Sena. The police won’t fuck with her.”

Fatima’s eyes zeroed in on Asha. “Teacher,” she cried. “How can I walk and go, when I am like this?”

“I will pay for the autorickshaw,” Asha replied. “But I have people waiting for me. I am too busy to go myself.”

The other Annawadians watched as Asha strode back to her hut.

“I offered to pay for the rickshaw, but why should I have gone?” Asha told her husband later, at home. “It was a fight between these garbage people and who knows what happens when you get involved. Anyway, Zehrunisa should have taken my offer of help at the police station. She doesn’t understand the basic thing: You pay early, it costs less later on. You put money in the One Leg’s hand like she’s a beggar. You stop it before it gets to the hysterical level. Now it will be a police case and she’ll need a lawyer. Does she think the lawyer will do the work first, before taking the money? Does the midwife wait to get paid? Even when the baby dies, the midwife collects her fee. But I wash my hands of her, that family and their dirty money.
Haram ka paisa
.”

She smiled. “What the One Leg should do is tell the police, ‘I was
born Hindu and these Muslims taunted me and set me on fire because I’m Hindu.’ Then these guys would be inside the prison forever.”

It was 8
P.M
. now, the sky above the maidan purple as a bruise. Everyone had decided that when Fatima’s husband returned from his garbage-sorting work, he could take his wife to the hospital.

The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boys waited to see if Fatima’s face would come off. That had happened to a woman who had rented a room from Asha. The woman’s husband had left her, and she, unlike Fatima, had torched herself thoroughly. The woman’s charred face-skin had stuck to the floor, and Rahul claimed that her chest had sort of exploded and that you could see straight through to her heart.

Fatima’s hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she’d put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of Kali had gotten carried away and done the whole face. There was no mirror in Burn Ward Number 10, Cooper Hospital, the large hospital serving the poor of Mumbai’s western suburbs, but she didn’t need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her.

Leaving Annawadi, her spindly husband carrying her on his back, she’d started to be treated as a mattering person. “What have I done to myself!” she had cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. “But it is done now, and I will make them pay!”

No autorickshaw driver had wanted to transport a woman in such a state as she, given the potential damage to seat covers. But three young men had intervened, getting her to the hospital by threatening a driver with his life.

And here at Cooper, where fluorescent lights buzzed like horseflies, she continued to feel like a person who counted. Though the small burn ward stank of fetid gauze, it was a fine place compared to the general wards, where many patients lay on the floor. She was sharing a room with only one other woman, whose husband swore he hadn’t lit the fateful match. She had her first foam mattress, now sopping with urine. She had a plastic tube in her nostrils, attached to nothing. She had an IV bag with a used syringe sticking out of it, since the nurse said it was a waste to use a fresh syringe every time. She had a rusty metal contraption over her torso, to keep the stained sheet from sticking to her skin. But of all the new experiences Fatima was having in the burn ward, the most unexpected was the stream of respectable female visitors from Annawadi.

The first to come had been her former best friend, Cynthia, whom Fatima blamed for her current situation. Cynthia’s husband had run a garbage-trading business that failed as the Husains’ business prospered, and Cynthia had encouraged Fatima to do something dramatic to prompt a police case against the family that had bested her own. This had been terrible advice, Fatima saw belatedly, though the banana lassi Cynthia brought had been good.

Zehrunisa came, too; Fatima caught a glimpse of her one morning, cowering just outside the room. Then four other neighbors appeared, led by Asha. Fatima felt honored that Asha had come. At Annawadi, the Shiv Sena woman looked right through her. Now, proffering sweet lime juice and coconut water, Asha whispered into Fatima’s blackened ear.

She reminded Fatima that what had happened between her and the Husains had been seen by hundreds of people on the maidan, and that Fatima ought not to tell lies about being beaten or set on fire. “What’s the point of having such
ghamand
, such ego?” Asha wanted
to know. “Your skin is burned, you’ve done this stupid thing, and still your heart is full of vengeance?”

Asha was trying to broker a truce that would avoid a police case. If Fatima would admit that the Husains hadn’t attacked her, Zehrunisa would pay for a bed in a private hospital and settle some money on Fatima’s daughters. Fatima understood that Asha intended to take a commission from Zehrunisa for this settlement. She was burned, not mental. But it was too late to tell the truth. She’s already made her accusations to the police.

On arrival at Cooper, Fatima had said that Karam, Abdul, and Kehkashan had set her on fire—the account that had propelled officers into Annawadi after midnight to arrest Karam, as Abdul hid in his garbage. But by the next morning, the Sahar police had learned that Fatima’s statement was untrue. Her eight-year-old daughter, Noori, had been especially clear in her account: that she’d watched through a hole in the family hut as her mother set herself on fire.

If a charge against the Husains was going to stick, and money from the family extracted, a more plausible victim statement was required. In order to help Fatima make such a statement, the police had dispatched a pretty, plump government official to Cooper—a woman with gold-rimmed designer eyeglasses who had left Fatima’s bedside shortly before Asha arrived.

Poornima Paikrao, a special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra, was commissioned to take the hospital-bed statements of victims. Gently, she helped Fatima construct a new account of the events that led to her burning. Even when Fatima had admitted that she couldn’t read over what the officer had written, nor sign her own name at the bottom, the woman in the gold-rimmed glasses had remained respectful. A thumbprint would be fine.

As the special executive officer understood, inciting a person to
attempt suicide is a serious crime in India. The British had written the criminal code, and their strict anti-suicide provisions were designed to end a historical practice of families encouraging widows onto the funeral pyres of their dead husbands—a practice that relieved the families of the expense of feeding the widows.

In the new account, Fatima admitted to burning herself, then carefully apportioned the blame for this self-immolation. She accurately reported Kehkashan’s curse at sundown about twisting off her other leg. She accurately reported Karam’s threat about beating her, and his demand that her husband pay for half the wall that divided their huts. She didn’t mention Zehrunisa, who had the best possible alibi, having been in the police station when Fatima burned. Instead, Fatima put the weight of her accusation on Abdul.

Abdul Husain had threatened and throttled her, she said in her statement. Abdul Husain had beaten her up.

How could you bring down a family you envied if you failed to name the boy in that family who did most of the work?

“As my left leg is handicapped, I could not retaliate at them. In anger, I put the kerosene lying in my house on myself, and set myself on fire,” her statement concluded.

Special Executive Officer Poornima Paikrao added to her account, “Record made under clear light of tubelight,” and departed the hospital room to begin her real work. With this improved witness statement, and several other witness statements she hoped to influence at Annawadi, she thought she could make a handsome profit from the Husains.

By Fatima’s third day at the public hospital, the blackened skin on her face had puckered, turning her almond-shaped eyes into
rounds. She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t known, lighting the match, what would happen. “The more I talk, the more I hurt,” she said to her husband, who stood at her bedside. Despite the pain, she felt compelled to yell at him from time to time, though her voice was lower-pitched than it had been.

Her husband had always been shovel-faced, but now his face seemed to lengthen by the day. And while he had a garbage sorter’s superior coordination, his stricken state turned him into a bumbler. Grinding Fatima’s pills into powder, he seemed overwhelmed by the complexity of the physical task. He broke the bread he’d brought to feed her down to crumbs.

She wasn’t very hungry, which was fortunate. Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. “Out of stock today” was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in. A small tub of silver sulfadiazine, the burn cream recommended by the doctor, cost 211 rupees and was finished in two days; Fatima’s husband had to borrow money to replace it. As he applied the cream, he feared hurting his wife, especially when touching the part of her belly stripped of pigment. He had thought the nurses might help, but they avoided physical contact with the patients.

The tall young doctor didn’t mind touching patients. He came one night and stretched out one of Fatima’s arms, and then the other, and when he did so, her bandages, which had turned yellow and black, came loose.

“Something’s wrong,” she told him. “I’m so cold.”

“Drink three bottles of water a day,” he said, and put the filthy bandages back in place. Fatima’s husband had no money to buy bottled
water after buying the burn cream. The doctor called the old man irresponsible behind his back, for failing to give his wife what she needed.

As the husband returned to work to afford medical supplies, Fatima’s mother took over the hospital care. “The neighbor family set me on fire,” Fatima told her mother, and then she told a different story of what had happened, and the mother became confused. Fatima was confused herself by now, and didn’t want to explain it all over again. Her job was to heal. The police could take care of the fine points of her accusation, now that they had Abdul and Karam Husain in the station.

The first time the officer with the fish lips brought down the leather strap, Abdul screamed before it landed—a howl that had built in him since early morning, when he had raced to the police station to surrender.