Behind the Beautiful Forevers (29 page)

When Judge Chauhan called her forward, she stood pole-straight, confidently announcing her name and the new profession of social work. Only when the prosecutor began asking questions did her head start to cock.

This prosecutor was nothing like the prosecutors in the movies. He wasn’t looking at her intently, despite her spectacular sari. He seemed as bored by the trial as the judge.

Cynthia’s brows knitted together. She felt the prosecutor was rushing her. Didn’t the judge want to hear the details of the fight she was pretending to have seen? Her story about how she’d helped break down the door to save her smoldering friend? She’d barely warmed up when the prosecutor’s questions stopped coming, and the Husains’ private defender rose for the cross-examination.

This guy
did
seem like a lawyer in the films. Uncharacteristically alert in the face of a dubious witness—the last witness of a tedious trial—he sprang.

Yes, she admitted to his questioning, her family business had failed as the Husains’ had prospered.

Yes, she said, she lived in a hut some distance from the Husains, in another slumlane.

Yes, her home was far from where the fighting had taken place. Yes, she had been home chopping vegetables for dinner.

So how could you have seen what happened? the defender wanted to know.

“But I saw it,” she insisted, frowning. “She was my neighbor!”

“I don’t think so,” the defender said. “You said earlier that you saw the fight, but that wasn’t true. You lied.”

The judge repeated for her inept stenographer a nonsensical combination of this question and answer: “I lied and I saw the fight.” Cynthia’s eyes went wide.

Cynthia’s son had studied English in a Catholic school, and she’d picked up a little as she helped him study. What she understood was that the judge had told the stenographer to write that she had admitted she was a liar. She wanted a correction. She wanted time to think, regroup. “Wait,” she cried so loudly that Kehkashan and her father heard her over the din of the street. But this was fast-track court—a nothing case in fast-track court. No one was going to wait.

Her witness services were no longer required. Judge Chauhan was calling another case. A policeman was gesturing toward the door. But how could she leave the stand, having been misunderstood? How could she get this false iteration of her own false words out of the stenographer’s computer? She shook with anger. But at whom? The judge? The lawyers? The justice system? She decided to blame the Husains, hunched on the accused bench in the back.

“I will show you!” she yelled as she left the courtroom, raising her fist in high
filmi
style. But her performance was over, and no one was filming. The misconstrued witnesses and the mystified accused all got on the same train to return to their regular, contentious lives in Annawadi, where they would stew about what they thought had happened but couldn’t know for sure. Closing arguments were to come in two weeks.

One afternoon, Abdul, Mirchi, and their parents stood, hands behind backs, contemplating a motley cache of garbage in the storeroom. They’d tried to forestall a trip to the recycling plants because prices were so low, but now they had no choice. They had sold the storeroom to pay for the lawyer. Although Abdul had been working maniacally on the days he didn’t have to report to Dongri, he was making little money. The Sahar Police had effectively put the Husains out of business.

As the trial proceeded, the whole family had tried to follow the virtuous path of Abdul’s teacher at Dongri: not buying anything that might have been stolen. Although this decision reduced the family income by 15 percent, it didn’t decrease the attention of the police. Officers came to demand money every day now—“licking at us like dogs, sucking what is left of our blood,” Zehrunisa cried one afternoon. Unable to accuse the family of possessing hot goods, the officers threatened to arrest Abdul for sorting his garbage on the maidan.
A usurpation of public space! A crime against Annawadians’ quality of life!

The officers hinted that a new charge might be used to show the judge that the family had a pattern of criminality. So Zehrunisa paid bribe after bribe, as her husband searched for a storeroom in another police district where officers might not know about the court case.

Karam tried to be optimistic about what they would make by selling off the last of their recyclables. “There must be five kilos of German silver here,” he said. “Maybe two kilos of copper.”

“Bullshit,” snapped Zehrunisa. “It is much less than that. Like father like son—Mirchi is like you. Doesn’t want to work, only wants to eat. Both of you want everything for free.”

Mirchi winced. Growing up, he’d been the first to call himself lazy. He’d liked to show his friends a bleached-out photo of Abdul and himself as toddlers. “See how Abdul is moving while I am sitting? It was like that even then!” But the family catastrophe had changed him. He’d become a fast, competent garbage sorter and taken every other job he could find.

He’d worked construction with his best friend, Rahul, finishing two swimming pools in a new boutique hotel on Airport Road. Then he scored the temp work of his dreams: setting up for parties at the Intercontinental hotel. A subcontractor had liked the looks of him and handed him a clip-on bow tie and a uniform coat. The coat’s cloth was as black and glossy as a crow’s wing; his mother had grown silent when she touched it. At the end of the workweek, though, the subcontractor reclaimed the beautiful coat and paid him only a fifth of what he’d been promised. When Mirchi traveled across the city to the man’s office to collect the remainder, security guards turned him away.

His next temp job was at Skygourmet, which made meals served on airplanes. Arriving at work, Mirchi stood under a blower that
blasted the city dirt from his body, then loaded food onto pallets inside a cavernous freezer. It was miserable labor, carrying heavy containers when he was too cold to manage his limbs. Ice formed inside his runny nose, and when his flesh touched metal, it stuck. Still, he made two hundred rupees a day, until management cut back the temp staff.

Many businesses dependent on the airport were downsizing as the effects of the terror attacks and the recession persisted. Asha’s political party, Shiv Sena, had been protesting these cuts, sometimes violently. After layoffs at the Intercontinental, a Shiv Sena gang smashed up its elegant lobby, demanding more work for the Maharashtrians—a rampage of which Rahul was one beneficiary. He secured a six-month stint cleaning air-conditioning ducts. Mirchi was happy for Rahul, and only a little resentful that his own parents’ best connections were with scavengers.

“There’s this guy who counts cars in a parking lot, and he said he saw the talent in me,” Mirchi reported one evening at home, breathless in his hope that this new contact might lead to steady work. But there were millions of other bright, likable, unskilled young men in this city.

As the Husains waited for closing arguments in their case, the rest of Mumbai began following another fast-track trial. The lone surviving gunman of the terror attack, a twenty-one-year-old Pakistani named Ajmal Kasab, had his hearings in a dedicated, high-security courtroom at Arthur Road Jail.

Abdul’s father said that what Kasab had done was wrong—that the Koran didn’t entitle Muslims to kill innocent civilians, some of whom had also been Muslim. Still, Kasab seemed lucky to Abdul. “They will probably beat him lots in the jail,” Abdul said one day,
“but at least Kasab knows in his heart that he did what they said he did.” That had to be less stressful than being beaten when you were innocent.

The popular rage about Kasab didn’t seem to transfer to other Muslims in Mumbai, Abdul was relieved to find on the three days a week he traveled by train to Dongri. In the clammy, crowded train cars, he was no one’s proxy. The Hindus were just going where they had to go, as he was. Like him, they were coughing, eating lunch, looking out windows at billboards on which Bollywood heroes hawked cement and Coca-Cola. They were bent protectively over prized documents in prized plastic bags like his own, which said,
TAKE A BREAK, HAVE A KIT KAT
. It was all as it had been, which was hopeful.

Mumbai’s wealthy were also hopeful in the months after the terrorist attacks. Many had begun to engage in politics for the first time, intent on bringing about government reform. Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.

The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.

Ten young men had terrorized one of the world’s biggest cities for three days—a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didn’t know how to use their weapons,
and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital—a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. By the time the commandos arrived in south Mumbai, the killings were all but over.

Parliamentary elections would be held at the end of April, and middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, were registering to vote in record numbers. Affluent, educated candidates were coming forward with platforms of radical change: accountability, transparency, e-governance. While independent India had been founded by high-born, well-educated men, by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had.

Another garbage trader had set up shop at Annawadi, filling the niche created by the demise of the Husains’ business. Abdul now spent his days in a tiny rented storage shed at the edge of the Saki Naka slums. His efforts at trading came to little. The Saki Naka scavengers had preexisting allegiances. But sitting idly in the doorway of the new shed, looking out over an alien maidan, Abdul found that he felt light. Annawadi tragedies did not rank here. No one knew of Fatima, or of his family’s trial, or of Kalu’s death, or that Sanjay and Meena had eaten rat poison. Afternoons, a man turned a small Ferris wheel with a hand crank, and children took rides for a rupee. The
police came to take bribes from other businesses but left him alone, probably because any fool could tell he wasn’t making money. He had almost as much time to think as he’d had at Dongri, and maybe because of the boiling April sun, he thought about water and ice.

Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably little different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him—the police officers and the special executive officer and the morgue doctor who fixed Kalu’s death. If he had to sort all humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of.

He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.

It wasn’t easy to believe, just now. The lawyer for Kehkashan and Karam had been confident about exoneration after Cynthia’s ragged performance as a prosecution witness. But just before closing arguments, Judge Chauhan had been transferred to a court on the other side of the state. A new judge would have to be appointed and, using the flawed court transcript, try to pick up where the first judge had left off.

The Husains were crushed, a fact not lost on the special executive officer with the gold-rimmed spectacles. She came for a third time to try to extort payment from them, this time accompanied by Fatima’s husband.

The new judge was severe and likely to find the Husains guilty, the special executive officer said. Fortunately, Fatima’s husband was willing to take back the case. He would cancel his testimony and the
testimony of his late wife, upon which the trial would shut down. The price for ending the trial would be two lakhs—more than four thousand dollars.

The special executive officer seemed to be banking on the ignorance of slumdwellers: that the Husains wouldn’t understand that the case against them was a criminal one, brought by the state of Maharashtra, and that Fatima’s husband didn’t have the power to call it off, no matter how much the Husains paid.