Behind the Beautiful Forevers (23 page)

Sunil wished Kalu didn’t have to go. Annawadi would lose a lot of its color without him. It would lose the dramatic, hip-propelled reenactments
of
Om Shanti Om
and the subtler entertainment of Kalu’s hair, which changed in accordance with his favorite movies. Recently he’d grown it long and lank like the crazy college boy played by Salman Khan in that old film
Tere Naam
.

Moreover, thieves like Kalu had status that garbage-pickers lacked, and with Kalu’s departure, Sunil would be more firmly fixed in his own identity as a scavenger, like Sonu the blinky boy—the kind of person other people allowed to suffer unaided and die alone on the road.

A few days before leaving, Kalu told Sunil, “My real name is Deepak Rai. Don’t tell anyone. Also, my main god is Ganpati.” He thought Ganpati, the elephant god, the remover of obstacles, should be Sunil’s main god, too. To convince him, Kalu took him on a barefoot nine-mile penitents’ pilgrimage to the Siddhivinayak temple in central Mumbai.

Which saints and gods to follow was something about which many road boys had strong feelings. Some said Sai Baba was quicker than fat Ganpati. Others contended that Shiva could open his third eye and explode both of them. Sunil’s mother had died before she could teach him about the gods, and he was too unsure of their respective merits to decide upon a favorite. Still, from what he had observed in Annawadi, the fact that a boy knew about the gods didn’t mean the gods would look after the boy.

ONE AFTERNOON
, Abdul’s mother arrived at the Dongri detention facility rain-soaked, the skin under her eyes dark as mango stones. Abdul was sulking when he came out of the barrack—kept his head down, kicked a hard clump of mud. She had come to take him home. A judge had decided he wasn’t the type to run away before his trial in
juvenile court, releasing him with strict instructions: Until the trial, report to Dongri every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to prove you haven’t absconded.

Abdul followed his mother down a long stinking hallway packed with children, across the courtyard, and out onto the street. The rain had turned to drips, and there was a weak sun, low and paling. “So when’s my trial?” he asked her. “When is my father’s trial?”

“No one knows, but don’t worry,” Zehrunisa said. “Just leave everything to God and keep praying. Now we have a lawyer who will say the right words, and then it will end, because the judge will pick up the truth.”

“Pick up the truth,” he repeated skeptically. As if truth were a coin on a footpath. He changed the subject.

“How is my father?”

“They don’t give medicine in Arthur Road Jail, and there’s no room to sleep. Oh, it is terrible to see him there—his face has become so small. But Kehkashan says it is not so bad in her jail. She prays a lot, for all of us. She says it’s what Allah wants, troubles coming at us from all four sides at once.”

“Why didn’t you get Father out first?” he asked. “It’s not right that I get out before him.”

Sighing, Zehrunisa told him of all the relatives and friends who had declined to help with the bail, and of her humiliation before the family of his supposed fiancée.

“For these others, what has happened to us is just entertainment—something to talk about when they’re bored,” Abdul said grimly. “Now we know for certain that no one cares about us.”

A rich silence followed. Then he asked his mother about his garbage business.

Under Mirchi’s supervision, it had collapsed. The scavengers all sold to the Tamil who ran the game parlor.

Abdul emitted a sound like an amplified hiccup. He might have guessed it. His parents had raised Mirchi for something better than garbage work. Even Abdul had wanted something better for Mirchi.

“Okay,” he said after a while, pressing a finger deep into his twitching lower lip. It was only mostly hopeless. He would start over, work harder than before, and try not to resent losing three days a week going back and forth to Dongri. Additional income would be forfeited to his decision to walk down the virtuous path recommended by The Master at Dongri, and to stay out of police interrogation cells for the rest of his life. He would no longer buy stolen goods.

His mother seemed fine with his decision. He hoped she’d actually been listening. She seemed half absent in her exhaustion, and definitely hadn’t been listening later, when he asked if his suffering might be rewarded with an iPod.

The scavengers found Abdul to be more talkative on his return from Dongri. At the scales, he kept asking whether they had procured their goods honestly. Between rounds of this newly interrogatory purchasing, he made weird little announcements: “Can I tell you something?” “This is the thing I have to say.” Upon which, he talked endlessly about a teacher at Dongri who had seen the
taufeez
, the refinement, in his nature.

Abdul claimed that he spoke to The Master all the time—that the guy had been so taken with Abdul that he’d given him his cellphone number. Everyone knew the garbage sorter was lying. Road boys didn’t mind deception; extravagant fabrications passed the time. They were just amused that he would lie about a friendship with a teacher. The only other boy who told that kind of loser-lie was Sunil, who liked to pretend to new boys that he was a fifth-grade student, top of his class.

Abdul had a fresh audience for his stories about The Master when
his semi-friend Kalu returned from the Karjat construction site in mid-September. Kalu had gained weight, on account of the shortage of Eraz-ex outside the city.

Zehrunisa, surprised to see Kalu back so soon, called him into the house for a plate of leftovers, of which there were more than usual, since the Husains were fasting for the month of Ramadan. Zehrunisa was fond of Kalu, thought he was in need of mothering. Kalu did not dispute this. He’d been calling Zehrunisa
Amma
, or Mother, for a year—an endearment that made Abdul a little tense.

“Your father is still there in the mountains?” she asked.

“Yes, but Amma, I had to leave it. I didn’t want to be out in the country now.” Mumbai was in the midst of the giddy festival in honor of his beloved Ganpati. Two days from now, to the sound of drumbeats and cheering, millions of citizens from across Mumbai would bring lovingly crafted idols of the elephant god to the sea to immerse them. It was a celebratory practice of which environmentalists took a dim view, but which marked the high point of Kalu’s year.

“You should have stayed,” Zehrunisa admonished him. “I can barely recognize you, you’re so healthy. Why forget your father like that? You’ll just slip back into your old bad ways, being here.”

“I’m not getting back into stealing,” he promised her. “I’m good and improved now, can’t you see?”

“Yes, good and improved now,” Zehrunisa agreed. “But can thieves really change? If they can, I haven’t seen it.”

The next day, Kalu scavenged for trash at the airport with Sunil. In the evening, after selling the trash to Abdul, they lingered with him outside the game shed. The three boys were ranging across the usual subjects—food, movies, girls, the price of waste—when a disabled man named Mahmoud, stoned and glassy-eyed, slugged Abdul in the chest for reasons known only to himself. Another raging One
Leg. Of course Abdul wasn’t going to fight him. He headed home to sleep. Sunil did, too.

Kalu had no home to retreat to. He decided to go to the airport, taking off across the thoroughfare toward the bright blue signs that lead the way to the international terminal.
ARRIVALS
down.
DEPARTURES
up.
HAPPY JOURNEY
.

The following morning, Kalu lay outside Air India’s red-and-white gates: a shirtless corpse with a grown-out Salman Khan haircut, crumpled behind a flowering hedge.

A hulking, mustachioed constable named Nagare rode his motorcycle into Annawadi, the disabled junkie who’d punched Abdul the previous night balanced on the seat behind him. The motorcycle braked hard in front of Zehrunisa, who was haggling with a scavenger. She began to shake when she saw the constable’s face. This Nagare did not wear the face a policeman usually wore when coming to ask for money. His was a tense, bad face she didn’t know how to read. So he would be bringing some fresh trouble to compound the trouble her family was already in.

No, she was being paranoid like Abdul. The constable simply wanted to know the whereabouts of Kalu’s relatives, and Mahmoud, the disabled junkie, had told him she was likely to know. Zehrunisa felt lightheaded with relief, until Nagare told her why he was asking.

“Boy’s dead,” he said with a frown, and she barely had time to grieve when he sped away, because the next thing she heard was the sound of Abdul breaking down.

For weeks her eldest son had tried to forget what had happened to him in the police cell. Now, in an instant, something sealed inside him had split open. He couldn’t remember the mechanics of breathing, and began to speak in a clipped, frantic tone. Kalu, his only sort-of friend: dead. So now he would be arrested for the murder. The police would trap him, just as Fatima had done. “I know it,” he kept saying. The addict, Mahmoud, would already have told the police that Abdul had been standing on the road with Kalu the night before. This would be the evidence on which Abdul would be convicted. There would be more police beatings and, after that, decades in Arthur Road Jail. He crouched and gulped, then rose and ran inside his hut, where even Kehkashan, now out on bail, could not console him. He felt he needed to go into hiding again, but not, this time, in his trash pile—

“Kalu got murdered! Eyes poked out! Sickle up his ass!”

Other boys, less traumatized by life, had run to see the body, and their reports now flew through the slumlanes. Sunil refused to believe them, needed to see for himself. He took off, dodging the cars on Airport Road.

The other boys had said that Kalu’s body was in the garden, but which garden? Two years into the aesthetic makeover of the airport, led by the conglomerate GVK, the place was choking with flowers. There were also gardens by the Hotel Leela, weren’t there? In his distress, Sunil’s mental map of his airport terrain got turned around.

When he finally arrived at the correct garden, Air India and GVK executives had gathered, and the police were keeping everyone else far away. Another boy told Sunil that crows had taken Kalu’s eyeballs and dropped them in the coconut trees.

Sunil watched from a distance as Kalu’s half-naked corpse was loaded into a police van. He watched the van drive away. All that remained to stare at was yellow police tape—dumb plastic ribbon twisting
through a stand of orange heliconia, their flowers like the open beaks of baby birds.

Sunil turned and walked home, past the immense pilings of the elevated expressway being constructed in the middle of Airport Road, past a line of signs GVK had planted that said
WE CARE WE CARE WE CARE
, past the long wall advertising floor tiles that stay beautiful forever. He felt small and sad and useless. Who had done such a thing to his friend? But the fog of shock and grief didn’t fully obscure his understanding of the social hierarchy in which he lived. To Annawadi boys, Kalu had been a star. To the authorities of the overcity, he was a nuisance case to be dispensed with.

Officially, the Sahar police precinct was among the safest places in Greater Mumbai. In two years, only two murders had been recorded in the whole precinct, which included the airport, hotels, office buildings, and dozens of construction-site camps and slums. Both murders had been promptly solved. “All murders we detect, 100 percent success,” was how Senior Inspector Patil, who ran the Sahar station, liked to put it. But perhaps there was a trick to this success rate: not detecting the murders of inconsequential people.

Succumbed to an “irrecoverable illness” was the swift conclusion of Maruti Jadhav, the inspector in charge of Kalu’s case. At the morgue of Cooper Hospital, the nature of the “irrecoverable illness” was decided. Fifteen-year-old Deepak Rai, known as Kalu, had died of his tuberculosis—the same cause of death tagged to the bleeding scavenger who had slowly expired on the road.

Active, fence-climbing boys don’t suddenly drop dead of tuberculosis; one thing Annawadians know as well as pathologists is that TB deaths are torturously slow. But the evidence of Kalu’s body was
swiftly turned to ash in a pyre at the Parsiwada Crematorium on Airport Road, the false cause of death duly noted in an official register that had been burned through the middle by a resting cigarette. Then photos of the boy’s corpse, taken in accordance with police regulations, vanished from the files at the Sahar station.

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise. The death did, however, provide the police with an opportunity to clear the airport grounds of other Annawadi road boys.

After Kalu’s death, five of the road boys were picked up and taken to the Sahar Police Station’s “unofficial” cell. They were beaten in the name of an investigation and released with the understanding that, if they didn’t stay away from the increasingly elegant airport, they might find themselves charged with Kalu’s murder. The boys didn’t know that the police had already filed away the case as a natural death.