Behind the Beautiful Forevers (20 page)

Some Kunbis said that July was the month when the gods slept. Asha’s relatives hoped the gods had changed their schedules this year, and were also awake nights, worrying.

In the two decades since Asha and her husband left their respective farming villages, twenty miles apart, much had changed for the better. Some houses had grown larger and sturdier, thanks to the money those who’d left for the city sent back home. Public money had also altered the landscape: Scattered among desiccated farms were new schools, colleges, and handsome government offices with lawns as well tended as those of the Airport Road Hyatt. The government had built more water projects, too, but these had failed to compensate for the decline of Vidarbha’s natural water systems. Poor rains and illegal siphoning depleted the water table; streams dried up; rivers reversed course. As fish died and crops failed, moneylenders became unofficial village chiefs.

Ashamed and in debt, some farmers killed themselves—an old story, one of the Marathi-movie staples. But the movie reel was still playing. In the new century, the government counted an average of a thousand farmer suicides a year in Vidarbha; activists counted many more. Whatever the number, the suicides had turned the region into international shorthand for the desperation of rural Indian poverty.

The files accumulating dust in the records rooms of the Vidarbha bureaucracy indicated that modern means of suicide—drinking pesticide, mainly—had supplanted self-immolation. Over thousands of mildewed pages, relatives described their loved ones’ distress.

Last two years we had crop failure. He could not repay his loan. Then came a fire in the hut. All the seeds got burned—sunflower, wheat, destroyed. He couldn’t afford to marry his second son, and people would keep asking when the marriage would happen—

His family was so big, and after looking at bank documents he was disturbed and drank insecticide. The loan was huge, and he didn’t see how he could pay.

He was slow-minded, short on his lights, and worked the fields, then took loans for the daughter’s wedding, and felt trapped.

He said, “Father, I will kill myself if you don’t buy me a cellphone,” then he went and drank the poison.

The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had come down from Delhi to express his concern for the farmers’ hardship, and the central government’s determination to relieve it. The families of some indebted suicides would get government compensation, and a debt-restructuring and interest-waiver program had begun for the farmers who had borrowed from banks instead of moneylenders. A massive national scheme to increase rural incomes was also underway, guaranteeing unemployed villagers a hundred days a year of publicly subsidized work. One of the government’s hopes was to stop villagers from abandoning their farms and further inundating cities like Mumbai, but Asha’s relatives knew nothing of these celebrated relief programs.

Among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade. Elsewhere that summer, public telecom licenses worth the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars were being sold to the highest under-the-table corporate bidder; public funds meant to build world-class sports facilities for the 2010 Commonwealth Games were being diverted to private interests; parliamentary opposition to the future of a landmark India–United States nuclear treaty was being softened by trunksful of cash; and the combined
wealth of the hundred richest Indians was surging to equal nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP.

In a forested stretch of Vidarbha east of where Asha and her husband had grown up, many citizens had stopped believing the government’s promises about improving their fortunes. Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they’d helped revive a forty-year-old movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail-bombs, and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India’s 627 districts, including an underdeveloped swath of central and eastern India known as the “Red Belt.” This summer, the Maoists had been especially productive in the state of Orissa. They’d sunk a boat full of military commandos, killing thirty-eight, and bombed a police van, killing twenty-one more.

In most rural villages, however, people weren’t yet talking revolution. They were waiting to see if improvements in infrastructure and agricultural technology might change their prospects. This year, as Manju’s seventeen-year-old cousin Anil labored in the cotton and soybean fields, he carried one such advance on his back: a heavy metal canister of Dow pesticide.

The fields on which he worked belonged to a rich politician who paid his laborers a thousand rupees, or twenty-one dollars, a month. While the politician’s crop yield and profit increased with the new chemicals, the freight of the canisters and the noxious inhalations made the laborers’ work, never easy, blisteringly hard. At the end of a recent workday, one of Anil’s co-workers had set down his canister, climbed a tree at the edge of the farm, and hanged himself. His family received no government compensation for the loss.

At night, Anil had many imaginary conversations with the politician for whom he worked, in which he gently argued that more difficult
labor be rewarded by slightly higher pay. A complaining worker was easily replaced, though. Anil kept his thoughts, including the suicidal ones, to himself.

Try your luck in Annawadi, Asha had suggested the previous year, and so Anil had become one of the roughly five hundred thousand rural Indians who annually arrived in Mumbai. Each dawn, he stood with other work-seekers at Marol Naka, an intersection near the airport where construction supervisors came in trucks to pick up day laborers. A thousand unemployed men and women came to this crossroads every morning; a few hundred got chosen for work. Anil didn’t know that life expectancy in Mumbai was seven years shorter than in the nation as a whole. He just knew that at the intersection, trying unsuccessfully to compete with all the other migrants, he felt as if his chest were stuffed with straw. After a month of rejection, he’d gone home.

“People laughed to see me back,” he now told Manju. “I had told them I was going to earn money and see the city, and I didn’t do either. Only major thing I saw were airplanes.”

The night before the wedding, Manju, in her position as the oldest female of her generation, carried a pot of grains through the village to the temple where prayers would be said for the bride and groom. In a peach-sequined chiffon tunic that her aunt in the city had tired of, she led a parade of family and neighbors along dirt roads full of scavenging donkeys. Past some mud-and-dung houses painted a shade of green no longer known in the fields, she clambered up a steep path to the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god.

Earlier, she’d powdered the groom’s face and added glitter around his eyes with a toothbrush. But even in the dark, unelectrified temple she could feel people’s eyes following her, not the sparkle-caked groom. An urban, college-going girl was a firework in the village. But
which of the Kunbi men would Asha choose to be her husband? Some of them would consider Manju too educated to be docile; others would be too poor to sustain her mother’s interest.

Manju failed in her efforts to track Asha’s movements at the glum wedding the following day, but soon after, a young soldier appeared at the house where the family was staying. Asha went outside to speak to him privately. From time to time, Manju could hear her mother’s hoarse laugh.

Recently in Annawadi, Manju had watched Asha negotiate a marriage between a shy neighbor girl and a boy from another slum. Manju had been excited at the chance to glimpse the sort of negotiations that would one day decide her own future. It had seemed to be going well, until the girl lifted her head. “Not beautiful!” the boy’s family had objected, blaming Asha for wasting their time.

The harsh pragmatism of that afternoon had armed Manju, so when Asha called for her to bring out tea, she smoothed her hair, lowered her eyes, and tried to keep her heart ice-cold. Taking his cup, the soldier stared at her for a long moment and said, “Don’t stand in the sun—you’ll get too black.”

He wasn’t bad looking, despite the mustache, and Manju’s eyes were not so lowered that she failed to note his own eyes sliding down her body. She felt as if she’d been touched. It sometimes disturbed her how strongly she wanted to be wanted; she felt very nearly ready for marriage, for sex. But if Asha arranged any marriage that sentenced her to a life in Vidarbha, Manju had decided that she would run away.

One night before the family returned to Annawadi, Anil told his cousins of a dream he’d had. He was sprinting away from the farm, and Manju, Rahul, and Ganesh were running alongside him. “We were all escaping, and our mothers were angry. They were saying, ‘If you go, we won’t let you come back.’ And we were saying, ‘Don’t call
us back! We don’t want to come back! We’re going somewhere better!’ We were laughing so hard as we ran.”

Back at Annawadi, Asha shut the sordid Fatima drama out of her mind, and shut her door on the frantic Zehrunisa. She wanted to devote the rest of the monsoon season to self-improvement. For one, she needed to take a college course or two, or she would lose her temp job teaching kindergarten at Marol Municipal School. The government of Maharashtra had been trying to increase the quality of its schools, and some of the teachers were being pressured to show they were trying to get an education themselves. Fortunately, Asha’s professor at Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University had assured his class of teachers that he would provide answers to the end-of-year papers and exams.

But Asha wanted to be a politician, not a low-paid kindergarten teacher. To achieve this goal, she thought she’d have to shed her slum ways as she’d shed her village ones. It was a second kind of migration—of class. The key, she told Manju, was “to study the first-class people. You see how they’re living, how they walk, what they do. And then you do the same.”

Asha had raised her daughter to believe that she was different from the other children in Annawadi, superior even to her own brothers. At fourteen, Ganesh was gentle and hesitant, while Rahul, for all his confidence, lacked ambition. Having given up on hotel work, he was perfectly content with his new temp job, clearing tables at a canteen for airport employees. More and more, Asha could see her husband in the boys. Having taught them what she thought they could learn—they were now among the fastest male onion-dicers in Annawadi—she let them be. Only she and Manju seemed capable of
the intelligent planning that might help carry them into India’s expanding middle class.

Asha remembered how it was when her neighbors heard that she’d gotten a kindergarten post with only a seventh-grade education. They called her “Teacher” snidely. Over time, however, the title stuck and the mockery melted away. Similarly, you could pose as a member of the overcity, wait out the heckles, and become one. It was another form of the by-hearting that Manju did at school.

“And don’t be afraid to talk to the first-class people directly. Some of them are quite nice, they’ll speak back,” Asha instructed her daughter. “Inquire of them how to look better, take their advice.”

Recently, Asha had asked a Shiv Sena man to make a rigorous critique of her image. “He says, don’t wear shoes with heels when you have height, because it cheapens you,” she reported to Manju. “Don’t wear your housedress outside. Wear a sari instead. Put your mangalsutra on a long chain, not a short one. Don’t look as if you’re worried, even if you are—no one wants to look at such lines on your face. And don’t walk with people who look worse than you.”

The Shiv Sena man had been a little blunt, conveying that last tip. She had been walking with him to the Corporator’s house one evening, and he’d said, “I am looking nice, and you are looking ugly, and your ugliness takes away from me, too.”

Manju brought additional information home from college: dangling earrings, low-class; tiny hoops, high-class. High-class women also wear jeans, she told her mother, who subsequently sanctioned a pair of bell-bottoms. One day, looking in the mirror at how the jeans worked with the peach-sequined secondhand tunic, Manju said aloud to herself, “Marquee Effect.” She’d learned the term in computer class, practicing Photoshop.

The Marquee Effect dimmed a bit when Asha’s sister gave both
mother and daughter haircuts with feathery bangs. In the humidity, the feathers rose in a great cloud of frizz. But it was fun, spending the monsoon getting modern. Sensing her mother suddenly treating her as an equal, Manju broached a new subject: that many first-class people married outside their own caste, to people they, not their parents, had chosen.

“Rich people all have this different mind-set,” Manju said.

Asha didn’t want to get as first-class as that.

Asha had liked the soldier from Vidarbha, who came from a relatively affluent family, but her husband had objected to the engagement on the unlikely grounds that army men were often drunks like himself. In Annawadi, Sister Paulette had visited Asha twice now to lobby on behalf of another potential groom, a middle-aged man who lived in Mauritius. “He’s my brother,” the nun said, eyes blinking fast. Asha suspected Sister Paulette was operating on commission. Asha was, too, in a way.

Most Annawadians considered daughters a liability, given the crushing financial burden of the dowry. But it had long ago occurred to Asha that a girl as beautiful, capable, and self-sacrificing as Manju might make a marriage so advantageous it would lift up her whole family. The Mauritius man was rich, supposedly, but Asha was uneasy about sending her only daughter to Africa, where she’d heard that pretty girls got sold into slavery. She decided not to decide, for now. Instead, she encouraged Manju to widen her social circle, which would increase the odds of a superior offer.

Asha believed a person seeking betterment should try as many schemes as possible, since it was hard to predict which one might work. Manju’s first idea had been to sell insurance, as one of her college classmates had done. The Life Insurance Corporation of India was offering free training to aspiring agents in an office building down the road from the Hotel Leela.