Behind the Beautiful Forevers (31 page)

In newspaper interviews, Gaikwad spoke of his search for unschooled children and his hope of giving them the sort of education that would lift them out of poverty. His less public ambition was to divert federal money to himself. Working with community development officials across the city, he found frontmen to receive government funds in the name of educating children. Then he and his colluders would divvy up the spoils.

Later, Asha wished that she had come to the attention of Gaikwad because of her intelligence, or even her looks. But his interest was based on something more mundane: the fact that she had a nonprofit organization. In 2003, another man with another scheme had set up the nonprofit for her, promising a city sanitation contract that had failed to materialize.

“Properly registered?” Gaikwad wanted to know.

“Yes, properly.” And on that basis she was chosen to help him defraud the central government’s most important effort to improve the lives of children.

Government officials prepared documents attesting that for several years her nonprofit had been running twenty-four kindergartens for poor children. The government would pay her 4.7 lakhs, or more than ten thousand dollars, for this fictitious work. More money would come later in the year for her supposed management of nine bridge schools for former child laborers. From this windfall, Asha would write checks to a long list of names that Gaikwad provided—theoretically teachers and assistants at the schools. What business was it of hers to ask who they were? Her business was to hand-deliver twenty thousand rupees in cash to Bhimrao Gaikwad, plus five thousand rupees to the community development official who had helped to fix the contract.

In the first year, Asha wouldn’t make big money after all the payoffs. But Gaikwad had assured her that there would be more money in the years ahead.

A minor hitch occurred when the first installment of government money—429,000 rupees—showed up in the bank account of the moribund nonprofit. The checks to be dispersed required a co-signer, but the neighbor whom Asha had named long ago as the nonprofit’s secretary was in a state. “Will we be rich?” the woman asked, and then, tearfully, “What if we get caught?” She resisted signing the checks, so Asha fired her and appointed a more compliant secretary. The checks went out, and the government officials got their cash.

Triumphant, Asha felt confirmed in a suspicion she’d developed in her years of multi-directional, marginally profitable enterprise. Becoming a success in the great, rigged market of the overcity required less effort and intelligence than getting by, day to day, in the slums. The crucial things were luck and the ability to sustain two convictions: that what you were doing wasn’t all that wrong, in the scheme of things, and that you weren’t all that likely to get caught.

“Of course it’s corrupt,” Asha told the deferential new secretary of the nonprofit. “But is it
my
corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people did all the papers—when the big people say that it’s right?”

The new secretary nodded at Asha’s analysis, but ever since she had co-signed the checks, her mouth had been slightly tight. How could she argue? Asha was her mother.

“Now you don’t have to do a real job once your studies are finished,” Asha told Manju of the empire of schools they were pretending to be running. “You’ll take it over from me. I’ll have to put your name down as the person in charge anyway, since all these schools are supposed to be run by someone with an education.”

Although Manju was troubled by this legacy, she wasn’t about to refuse the secondhand computer that soon came through the door. Meena had been the hot resister of daughterly responsibilities, not she. Asha also provided a dial-up Internet connection, which Rahul used to join Facebook, though his interest in social networking receded when his red Honda motorcycle arrived.

Manju loved her computer, as did the children she had taught in her slum school. They popped in regularly to contemplate its splendor. The children still called her “Teacher” and looked at her expectantly, unwilling to believe that their education was over. But the schools Asha and Manju were pretending to run made the income derived from a real school unnecessary.

Manju had recently memorized a plot summary of
Dr. Faustus
, which told of an ultimate reckoning—the moment when a “person who wanted to be the supreme person” discovered that the payment for a good life, badly acquired, had come due. Though this Christian hell was something she couldn’t quite picture, she felt that punishment might be in the offing.

One quiet evening, shortly before the day on which she graduated from college, she looked up from her keyboard, alarmed. There were two, no, five eunuchs at the door! The eunuchs were nothing like the lithe and beautiful one who had once mesmerized her in the temple by the sewage lake. These she-males had hairy hands, mustache traces, and a practice of coming to the doors of families who’d had good luck and throwing down a curse to reverse it.

She was terrified, and the eunuchs felt bad, making her tremble like that. They had come on different business. Asha being the most powerful person they knew, they hoped she would help them register to vote in the election, a week away. Like most Annawadians, they wanted to be part of the exhilarating moment when politics was forced from its cryptic quarters and brought into the open air.

The parliamentary elections would be the largest exercise of democracy in the history of the world: nearly half a billion people standing in line to vote for their representatives in Delhi, who would in turn select the prime minister. The parliamentarian who would represent Annawadians was hardly in doubt. It would be the incumbent from the Congress Party, Priya Dutt, a kind, unassuming woman who personified two historical weaknesses of the Indian electorate: for
filmi
people and for legacies. Her parents had been Bollywood superstars, and her father had held the parliamentary seat before her.

The previous week, a Congress Party truck had pulled up outside Annawadi, and workers unloaded eight stacks of concrete sewer covers. A crowd amassed on the road, excited at the pre-election gift. Thanks to Priya Dutt’s party, the slumlanes would have no more open sewers.

A few days later, the Congress Party workers returned in the truck. Instead of installing the sewer covers, they reclaimed them. The covers were needed in one of the district’s larger slums, where the prop might influence a greater number of voters. Older Annawadians laughed as they watched the truck depart. The blatancy was refreshing.

The eunuchs, who were migrants from Tamil Nadu, saw little difference among the political parties, but they were eager to vote nonetheless. Their problem was that district elections officials sometimes failed to process registration forms submitted by migrants and other reviled minorities. While Asha and her husband had voter cards and I.D. numbers that allowed them each two votes, in two different precincts, many non-Maharashtrians in Annawadi had yet to secure their one vote. Zehrunisa and Karam Husain were local record holders in
disenfranchisement, having spent seven years trying unsuccessfully to register to vote.

To the excluded Annawadians, political participation wasn’t cherished because it was a potent instrument of social equality. The crucial thing was the act of casting a ballot. Slumdwellers, who were criminalized by where they lived, and the work they did, living there, were in this one instance equal to every other citizen of India. They were a legitimate part of the state, if they could get on the rolls.

The tallest eunuch bowed toward Asha, then crouched at her feet. “Teacher,” the eunuch said, “one year ago we went to register at the office but still we have not received our voting cards. We have done the needfuls but then, nothing. The election is so near. Will you take our forms and give them to the right people and make them give us a vote?”

Asha picked up a hand mirror.

The eunuch coughed. “Can you help? Teacher?”

Manju furrowed her brow. Her mother was acting as if the eunuchs were not even there. Asha picked up a tub of moisturizing cream and rubbed her face, slowly. She poured talc on her palms and massaged it onto her cheeks. She was getting ready to go someplace else.

“What! Putting on makeup!” hissed one of the eunuchs to another, too loudly. But in the someplace for which Asha seemed already to have departed, she didn’t hear.

Asha had quit being slum boss. She was done with politics. Done with disenfranchised eunuchs and all the other inhabitants of Annawadi, “finished with all these small deals that keep me running here and there.” Whether the Husains went to prison or an entire slumlane expired of TB or Fatima’s ghost got bored with her hauntings and took it upon herself to clean the toilets, which badly required
it: not of interest. Asha might have to live in this slum, for the time being. But she was a member of the overcity now: the director of a charitable trust, a philanthropic organization with a city vendor number, and maybe, someday soon, foreign donors. She was a respectable woman in the land of make-believe, who also happened to be late for a date.

“At the petrol pump,” the man had said on the phone. “In the pink housedress, the one I like.”

So behind the lace curtain, smiling, Asha wound around her body a silk sari in a tasteful black-and-white print. What
she
liked. The person she had become.

“You look good,” said Manju, upon consideration. “Better than that pink.”

“Oh ho, nice,” concurred one of the eunuchs sullenly, as the new Asha stepped into the dark.

In mid-May, the election results came in. The reform-minded elites had not turned out to vote, after all. Most of the incumbent parliamentarians were reelected, they returned the prime minister to office, and the radical improvements in governance promised before the voting were quietly shelved. A few weeks later, the bulldozers of the airport authority began to move across the periphery of Annawadi.

The Beautiful Forever wall came down, and in two days, the sewage lake that had brought dengue fever and malaria to the slum was filled in, its expanse leveled in preparation for some new development. The slumdwellers consoled one another, “It’s not us yet, just at the edges.” The demolition of airport slums would occur in phases over several years, so there was still plenty of time for the residents to unite to ensure that the businessmen and politicians who’d been buying
up huts wouldn’t be the only beneficiaries of the promised rehabilitation.

In the meantime, the earth-flattening at Annawadi’s borders gave the children something to do. They stood where the sewage lake used to be, rapt, as the bright yellow bulldozers churned the ground. The machines were unearthing the recyclable remainders of an earlier city: a suede oxford, once white; rusty screws and other bits of plastic and metal. Salable commodities, all.

One Saturday afternoon, the little Husains wandered out with Fatima’s daughters to join other child prospectors at the edge of the site. As the children kept their eyes on the shovels, they debated what was going to be built on the newly reclaimed land.

“A school,” someone said.

“No, a hospital is what I heard it is going to be.”

“One of those hospitals for babies being born.”

“No, fool. What they’re doing is for the airport. A taxi stand. And planes will come here also.”

“That ground is too small for planes. They are making a place for us to play cricket only.”

Fatima’s younger daughter tensed. Something was gleaming at the edge of a new gash in the earth. She sprinted out toward a bulldozer, darting under a lowering shovel.

“Don’t,” yelled a woman passing by. The little girl did: crouched and tugged, jumped back just in time to avoid getting clocked, and, after the bulldozer passed, squatted again to dig. It was a whole, real something—a heavy steel cooking pot! She seized it and tore back to Annawadi, beaming, her bare feet kicking up dirt clouds as she ran.

The old pot was worth at least fifteen rupees, and at the sight of it two women in the maidan began to laugh. From progress and modernization,
at least one Annawadian would make a profit. Fatima’s daughter lifted her treasure high for all of her envious peers to see.