Behind the Beautiful Forevers (27 page)

Given the risks, Sunil wanted to spend more nights watching the Taj guards through the hole, assessing the odds of getting caught. In the meantime, he got money for food by working the four-story car park nearing completion by the international terminal.

By now he knew the best way in: past rows of bright red-and-yellow barricades; past bulldozers and a generator, shrouded at night; past a checkpoint where guards with flashlights were opening car trunks; past an awesome mountain of gravel; past a bitter almond tree whose leaves had reddened, which meant the nuts had gone from sour to sweet; past two of the security bunkers.

One midnight in January when he visited the dark garage, he couldn’t make out which animals were scurrying underfoot. Rats or bandicoots, possibly, but he’d never encountered them in the car park before. Guards he had often encountered, but tonight he
couldn’t tell where they were. He moved carefully to a stairwell near an exterior wall made of horizontal steel slats. The slatted wall let in a bit of the blue-white light bathing the international terminal, where travelers were still hugging their families goodbye. Being near the light increased the risk of being seen by a guard, but it allowed for proper surveillance.

He was searching for what Annawadians called German silver—aluminum or electroplate or nickel. Lately, the term was spoken with reverence. The price for German silver had recently dropped from a hundred rupees per kilo to sixty, but the price for everything else had fallen further.

Sunil worked his way up the stairwell, taking care, on each landing, to peer through a small hole in the floor. He supposed that a water pipe would eventually run through the holes, but for now, they allowed him to ascertain whether guards were slinking up the stairs behind him. Nepali watchmen scared him most, because they were sort of Chinese, like Bruce Lee.

On the third tier, in a corner, were two long strips of aluminum. He darted out to grab them, surprised that some other thief hadn’t found them. He thought they might have been parts of a window frame, although the car park didn’t have windows. The practical function of the items he stole at the airport didn’t matter to his work, but he still wondered.

He carried the metal strips up to the roof, where the only German silver he’d ever found was inside a red cabinet marked
FIRE HOSE BOX
—a flimsy holder for a fire extinguisher, worth little. The roof was also where he was most likely to encounter watchmen, who went there to smoke. Still, he tried to get up to this roof on every visit. At four stories, it was the highest roof he’d ever been on, but what made it exhilarating was the vista of open space, a rarity in the city.

The roof had two kinds of spaces, really. One kind was when he
stood exactly in the middle and knew that even if his arms were thirty times longer he’d touch nothing if he spun around. That kind of space would be gone when the lot was open and filled with cars, a month from now. The space that would last was the kind he leaned into, over the guardrails.

He liked seeing red-tailed Air India planes taking off. He liked the bulbous municipal water tower. He liked the building site of the massive new terminal. He didn’t care for the smokestack of Parsiwada crematorium, where Kalu’s body had burned. Better to spot the glowing Hyatt sign and try to pinpoint which of the dark patches beneath it was Annawadi. Best, though, was watching the rich people moving in and out of the terminal.

Other boys who visited this roof liked watching the moving people because they looked so small. For Sunil, seeing the people from above made him feel close to them. He felt free to watch them in a way he couldn’t when he was on the ground. There, if he stared, they would see him staring.

Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once, he had believed he was smart and might become something—not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.

Enough time-pass: He had to get home with his German silver. He carried the aluminum strips down the stairs and, before leaving the building, unzipped his pants and slid the metal through the legs of his underwear. German silver against the skin didn’t feel good, but when he tried to carry it outside his underwear, it slipped around.

He limped, stiff-legged, past the security checkpoints and the Sahar Police Station. Soon he was at Annawadi, curling up to sleep in the back of a lorry. The next afternoon, he used the game-parlor
man’s tools to steal tire locks that the airport parking police clipped onto autorickshaws.

When he returned to the game shed after dark, everyone was talking about a woman who had just tried to hang herself, and failed. Her indebted husband had sold their hut, and she didn’t want to live on the pavement.

Too many Annawadi females wanted to die, it seemed to Sunil. He felt especially sad about Meena, who had been nice to him. And all for an egg, people said.

Abdul contended that what Meena had done was daring. People had called Kalu daring, too. Now the Tamil who owned the game shed said that he, Sunil, was Annawadi’s daring boy: “The number-one thief!” Sunil saw through the guy’s words to his motive. The Tamil was trying to bolster his confidence so that he’d do the theft at the Taj and sell him the goods. Sunil didn’t have that confidence tonight.

On the road outside the shed, his father was careening past, and Abdul was talking animatedly to another boy, who wasn’t listening. As Abdul talked, he was twisting his neck back and forth, same as a water buffalo standing behind him. Sunil laughed as he walked over. It was the kind of goofy behavior Kalu would have mimicked. Abdul and the buffalo were probably flinging back and forth the same killer mosquitoes.

“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?” Abdul was asking the boy who was not listening. He seemed to be in one of the possessions that came over him from time to time, ever since he got locked up at Dongri.

“Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that,” Abdul went on. “I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life.
Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.’ And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, ‘Don’t confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.’ ”

Sunil thought that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly—the kind that could be ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he’d come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.

In February, the impatient Taufeeq beat Sunil up and assumed control of the operation to rob Taj Catering Services. Sunil was relieved to be demoted to one of four soldiers. The boys went through the hole in the stone wall once a week for three weeks, acquiring twenty-two small pieces of iron. One night, when security guards came running, the boys pelted them with stones. Sunil now had enough to eat, plus ten extra rupees to buy a skull-shaped silver-plate earring that he’d seen outside the Andheri train station. He’d always wanted to own something shining.

There was more German silver in the car park, and in the industrial warehouses over the river. A ladder hoisted from a security kiosk was worth a thousand rupees, divided five ways. Weeks passed in which Sunil was mostly not hungry, and in which he was granted a wish for something greater than a silvery earring.

At first he didn’t believe it—thought it was a trick of shadow and light-slant on the wall of his hut. But standing back to back with Sunita, it was confirmed. He was taller. As a thief, Sunil Sharma had finally started to grow.

While Abdul’s father privately believed that the only Indians who went on trial were those too poor to pay off the police, he had raised his children to respect the Indian courts. Of all the public institutions in the country, these courts seemed to Karam the most willing to defend the rights of Muslims and other minorities. In February, his own trial approaching, he began to follow trials across India in the Urdu papers the way some other Annawadians followed soap operas. Though he disputed many a specific court resolution, and understood that some judges were corrupt, his relative faith in the judiciary obtained.

“In the police station, they tell us only to be silent,” Karam said to Abdul, who remembered enough not to need telling. “In the courts, though, what we say may get heard.” Karam was still more hopeful when he learned that his case had been assigned to the city’s Fast-Track Sessions Court.

In normal courts, five or eight or eleven years sometimes passed
between the declaration of charges and the beginning of a trial. To people without permanent work—the vast majority in India—every court appearance involved a forfeit of daily wages. Long trials were economically ruinous. But by fiat of the central government, the massive case backlogs were now being addressed by fourteen hundred high-speed courts across the country. In Mumbai, verdicts were flying out of fast-track courts so quickly that the number of pending trials, citywide, had declined by a third in three years. Many notorious cases, including organized-crime ones, went directly to fast track, since the public was presumably eager to see them resolved. But in addition to the publicized cases, which brought television trucks to the fast-track courthouse, were thousands of small, unnewsworthy trials, like the Husains’.

A judge named P. M. Chauhan had been assigned to decide whether Karam and Kehkashan had driven their neighbor to self-immolation. Abdul would have a separate trial in juvenile court at a later date and would not see the inside of Judge Chauhan’s courtroom. As such, the trial felt to him as if it were happening oceans away, no matter what his sister said about a sixty-minute bus-and-train ride to a south Mumbai neighborhood called Sewri. The matter was one of many in his life that he considered out of his hands. He simply counted on Kehkashan, a more reliable narrator than his father, to keep him apprised of how worried he should be.

The courthouse in Sewri had previously been a pharmaceutical company. “This hardly seems like a court,” Kehkashan said to her father, concerned, on the day the trial began. No teak banisters; nothing stately. The hallways were clotted with encampments—families of other accused people eating, praying, sleeping, leaning against a greasy tile wall upon which signs threatened fines of twelve hundred rupees for spitting. The whole place seemed to lack a resident crew of waste-pickers. In the courtroom, empty plastic bottles and cans
wreathed the base of the high platform from which Judge Chauhan presided.

“This lady judge is strict,” a police officer had said. “She does not let the accused go free.” Kehkashan saw at once that this Judge Chauhan was impatient. Pursing her dark red lips, the judge shouted at her father, who had shown up this first day without a lawyer. “It’s a
bhaari
case, a grave one! Don’t delay me, start it fast, get it going!”

The impatience was structural. Like most fast-track judges, Chauhan conducted more than thirty-five trials simultaneously. A given case wasn’t heard beginning to end, the way Kehkashan had seen on TV serials. Rather, it was chopped into dozens of brief hearings that took place at weekly or fortnightly intervals. On an average day, the judge heard bits of nine trials, so the accused bench where Kehkashan and her father sat, under police supervision, was a crowded affair. There were men on trial for murder, for armed robbery, and for electricity-thieving, many of them shackled. Karam was the oldest man on the bench, Kehkashan the solitary female. Their seats were against the back wall of the courtroom, behind a great assembly of white plastic chairs for witnesses and observers and two tiers of metal desks where a proliferation of clerks, prosecutors, and defenders paged through files. To Kehkashan, the witness stand and the judge with the lipstick seemed very far away.

At the next lightning-fast hearing, the Husains’ lawyer materialized, and a medical officer from Cooper Morgue testified, falsely, that Fatima had been burned over 95 percent of her body. Hearing over. “Now what? What’s next?” asked the judge, pulling out a new file and moving to another case.

Another week, a Sahar police officer testified about the conclusion of the station’s investigation: that the Husains had beaten Fatima and driven her to suicide. “Now what? What’s next?” asked the judge.

What came next was the part of the trial the Husains dreaded. Beginning this March day, and continuing in brief sessions for untold weeks, would be the testimony of neighbors whom the police had chosen to interview from Annawadi, and whom the prosecution had chosen to make its case.