Behind the Beautiful Forevers (17 page)

Abdul tried to make sense of this reprieve. Asha’s son Rahul was Mirchi’s best friend. Maybe Rahul had convinced his mother to protect Abdul. Or maybe Asha had noticed Abdul over the years, sorting his trash on the maidan—seen he was a hardworking kid, a quiet loser who didn’t deserve to be brutalized.

Abdul’s father had a better guess. The call was probably a show conducted for father and son, who could be counted on to report it to Zehrunisa. Asha and Thokale often worked together. Now Thokale was demonstrating his power to ensure that Abdul and his father would not be severely injured in police custody—what he’d assured Zehrunisa in exchange for money. For Asha, the show would prove to the Husains that she
did
have influence at Sahar Police Station, and increase the likelihood that she would get a payoff, too.

But Karam wasn’t about to explain the economics of reprieve to his traumatized son. He thought it better for the boy to believe that someone had noticed his frantic labor on behalf of his family and decided to defend him out of kindness.

At sundown, four days after the burning, a Muslim fakir came to Annawadi with a peacock-feather broom to offer blessings and drive away evil spirits. Fakirs rarely came to Annawadi because the slum contained so few Muslims, the constituency most likely to pay
for their extraworldly services. Abdul’s sister Kehkashan jumped up when she saw the old man. Her mother, fearing what might happen to a beautiful young woman in the police station, had pleaded with Officer Thokale to keep her out of custody as long as possible, but Kehkashan had now been ordered to turn herself in. She felt desperate for a fakir’s blessing.

Taking a ten-rupee note from her bra, she closed her eyes as the fakir touched the top of her head with the broom. She was relieved he didn’t beat her with the broom, as some fakirs did when they performed the
jhaad-phoonk
. She hoped it was because he sensed no diabolical spirits hovering over her, and not just that he had adopted some modern, client-pleasing technique. As Kehkashan sat still, the better to allow his blessing to seep through her body, the fakir moved on to Fatima’s door.

Fatima’s husband stormed out of the hut, wild-eyed. “Are you without hands? Are you without legs? You have come to
me
to beg? In the name of God! Go earn your living, go get a job!”

The fakir looked at the sky, fingered the golden zari threads in the pocket of his kurta, and backed away.

Now Kehkashan was distraught. “Allah! To turn away a fakir, to take his curse?” Fatima’s husband had set himself up for bad luck, the way he’d spoken to the fakir, and the bad luck most likely to befall him would be a ruination of the Husains as well.

“What has happened to that man,” the fakir wanted to know.

“His wife burned herself,” Kehkashan said in a low voice.

“So when did she die?”

“No! No!” Kehkashan cried out. “Pray that she lives, else we will be in a grave situation.”

Fatima’s daughter Noori leaned against Kehkashan. The girl had been clinging to Kehkashan ever since she’d seen her mother burning. “I am playing a boy today,” Noori said. “Talking like a boy, too.”

“Like my sister Tabu,” Kehkashan replied, distracted. “She only wants to wear boy clothes or she’ll cry.” Kehkashan was resolved not to cry herself.

“Get the rice so I can clean it,” she said to Mirchi, rising and brushing herself off. “And whose turn is it at the tap?”

Her youngest brother, Lallu, was now old enough to curse like his mother: “Give dinner to me fast or I will put your eyes out!” Her youngest sister was having a come-apart, having not received her rightful share of a packet of Parle-G biscuits.

When the fakir completed his ministries and departed Annawadi, the scene through the door of the Husain hut was little different from those unfolding behind the other doors he passed. As night dropped its hood over the slum, dinners were being scrabbled together, abuses were being hurled, tears were getting kissed away. The next morning, Fatima came home in a white metal box.

An infection had killed her. A doctor adjusted the record in the name of hospital deniability. Burns that covered 35 percent of Fatima’s body upon admission to Cooper became 95 percent at her death—a certain fatality, an unsalvageable case. “Greenish yellowish sloughs formation all over burn injuries with foul smell,” read the postmortem. “Brain congested, lungs congested. Heart pale.” Fatima’s file was tied up in red string and sent to the records room of the morgue, where feral dogs slept among the towering stacks of folders on the floor, and birdsong came through the window. A flock of spotted doves had colonized a palm tree outside, the
croo-croo-croo
of one bird overlapping the call of another.

Fatima had gotten small again, dying—took up less than half of the box. All of Annawadi came outside, as it had when she burned,
but this time the onlookers kept their distance. The slum grew quiet, and quieter still when Zehrunisa and Kehkashan emerged from their hut, heads covered, to wash the corpse.

Only other Muslim women could perform this crucial ritual, the washing away of Fatima’s sins. No matter what, Zehrunisa always said, Muslims had to join up for festivals and sufferings. It was the tradition to tell Fatima she was dead now and going to be buried, so the Husain women murmured the words while dipping cotton rags into a vessel of water and camphor oil. Lifting a sheet of white muslin, they began to clean Fatima’s body. They moved up the length of her long leg, then the half leg, working slowly toward the shiny black face. “Close the mouth,” someone said. “Flies are getting in.”

When Fatima was clean and sinless, Kehkashan closed the box and covered the bier with the Husains’ best cotton quilt, the one with tiny blue checks. Fatima would now be taken to a Muslim burial ground a mile away, and Kehkashan would go to jail. A charge would be filed, likely based on Fatima’s second statement that the Husains had beaten her and driven her to self-immolation, which named Abdul as the most violent actor. At the police station, an officer had told Zehrunisa she’d have to pay another five thousand rupees to see the chargesheet.

Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing—the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.

Only men could go to the Muslim burial ground. Mirchi stood beside Fatima’s husband, who held one of the bier’s four poles. It was
rush hour as the camphor-scented metal box moved out onto Airport Road.

The procession of dolorous slumdwellers seemed even smaller against the outsized enthusiasms of the airport city. Giant billboards announced the forthcoming launch of an Indian version of
People
magazine. Chauffeur-driven black sedans rolled out of the Hyatt—attendees of a pharmaceutical convention, taking a break to check out the town. At the Hotel Leela, Americans representing Universal theme parks were feeling optimistic about their plan for entering the Indian market. “The percentage of rich people is small in India, but look at the absolute numbers. Enough of them that we can make this work. Don’t talk to me about Disney—we’re the best brand. Spider-Man, Revenge of the Mummy, and now we’re seeing good results out of Harry Potter. I know, people say I should go to Disney World, check out the rival, but I can’t do it. I’m too competitive—not going to give the opposition a dime—”

The white box proceeded across a hectic intersection, past Marol Municipal School, through the narrow lanes of one slum and then another, until it reached a water-stained green mosque, a papaya tree, and a burial ground filled with pigeons.

Fatima went into the same earth that held her drowned two-year-old daughter. In a matter of days, her other two daughters were entrusted to Sister Paulette.

Fatima’s husband loved his daughters, and grieved as he sent them off. But he worked fourteen hours a day sorting garbage, and local drunks sometimes despoiled little girls left home alone in Annawadi.

Now it poured, a stinging rain. On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August. At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food through mounds of wet, devalued garbage, shitting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stamped the mud from their feet and said, “My stomach is on fire, my chest.” “All up and down this leg, all night.” The sewage lake’s frogs sang sympathetically, but you couldn’t hear the frogsong indoors. Rain banged on the metal rooftops as if slum zebras were stampeding overhead.

Someone had once told Sunil that the rains washed the mean out of people. They certainly washed the stripes off the zebras. For weeks the animals stood revealed as poke-bone, yellow-hide nags, until the
slumlord-in-decline, Robert, refreshed the black stripes with Garnier Nutrisse hair dye.

The trail of garbage was sparser in the monsoon than in other seasons, since traffic at the airport declined and construction projects stalled. Sunil’s concrete ledge above the Mithi River was wiped clean by the wind and the rain. He found a little consolation behind one of the walls lining Airport Road. In this wet, jungly spot, six purple lotuses bloomed. He kept the discovery to himself, fearing other boys might pluck the blooms and try to sell them.

As Sunil moved through the streets around his secret lotuses, chasing busted flip-flops, plastic bottles, and other floaters, he sometimes passed Zehrunisa Husain, who was uncharacteristically garbed in a burqa. She kept losing her footing, trying to move too fast through muddy ponds that had formed on the roads.

Other scavengers whispered that she’d sold the room in the back of the family hut to pay for a lawyer. Sunil hoped that whatever she was doing for Abdul would spring him from custody, since Mirchi was useless as Abdul’s replacement at the weighing scales. The younger Husain boy didn’t know the value of anything, and when Sunil and the other waste-pickers tried to help him, he made fun of their boils.

Scavengers were sensitive about their boils, and the worth of their goods. The business of the Husains’ competitor, the Tamil man with the video-game parlor, surged accordingly.

Zehrunisa saw that Mirchi’s inexperience was hurting the business, but she was too busy with the criminal case to negotiate with the scavengers herself. She was too busy to bathe or feed her young children. Those children, too, became Mirchi’s responsibility, since the relatives before whom Zehrunisa needed to prostrate herself were scattered in slums across a rain-wrecked city. “Please, will you put up bail to get my sick husband, son, and daughter out of jail?”

In each hut, she’d had to sit through an hour of clucking sympathy and excuses before moving on to the next humiliating visit. Only one begging session had been brief. She’d practically had to swim through Saki Naka slum in the damned burqa in order to reach the hut of Abdul’s soon-to-be-former fiancée. The girl’s father looked at her as if she’d spent the morning at the local liquor still, and that was that.

Her problem was that she lacked collateral to secure the jail bonds. Since she couldn’t read, Mirchi had reviewed the official documents that her husband had stored in a gray plastic case along with some Iqbal poems and a racy Urdu paperback thriller. Mirchi had unearthed a document for each of the five possessions that had changed the family fortunes. A pushcart that had allowed his father to carry garbage to the recycling plants, and thus to become a buyer of scavengers’ goods. The family hut, purchased from a migrant who’d given up on Mumbai. The storeroom next to the hut, which allowed the family to forestall selling their goods when market prices were low. The three-wheeled jalopy with a truckbed that could transport more than the pushcart. The deposit on the land in Vasai. Only Karam Husain’s name was on these papers.

“Mother, be calm. I’m fine here,” lied Kehkashan when her mother came to the women’s wing of the Byculla Jail to explain why she couldn’t post bail.

Karam was less understanding when she arrived at Arthur Road Jail, the city’s largest, most infamous detention center. She’d had to queue for four hours in order to see him, paying off guards and officers long before she’d gotten through the gates. Behind those gates, there were four times as many inmates as official capacity.

“I am desperate,” her husband told her. His cell had so many bodies that no one could lie flat. He couldn’t breathe because of the crowding. He couldn’t choke down the food. He yelled at her for
starting the fight with Fatima, then yelled at her to get him out. As if she hadn’t been trying. As if he hadn’t been the idiot who had threatened to beat Fatima. As if he hadn’t been the one to leave his wife’s name off the family papers.