Behind the Beautiful Forevers (32 page)

A few weeks later, the children found a still more exciting diversion: journalists bearing cameras with long black snouts. Suddenly, Annawadi was in the news.

The proximate cause was a cheerful, if illegal, June tradition—a Sunday afternoon horse-and-carriage race on the gleaming Western Express Highway. Small bets were placed, and people lined the highway to watch.

The deposed slumlord, Robert the Zebra Man, was running two of his horses harnessed to an undermaintained carriage, freshly painted red and blue. Late in the race, as the pretty cart reached the crest of an overpass, one of its wheels rolled away. The carriage veered, harnesses broke, and the unnerved horses plunged off the bridge. A newspaper photographer was on hand to capture their grisly landing on the road below. And so began a campaign to find and penalize their negligent owner—Robert having fled the scene, leaving only a false address behind.

Public outrage built, and newspaper headlines multiplied. “On the Dead Horse Trail: An Exclusive Investigation.” “Minutes After Horses’ Death, Cops Knew About It; No Case Even Now!” “Exclusive! Where the Two Horses Lived Before Their Painful Death.”

One day, Sunil, Mirchi, and other children watched as activists from a group called the Plant & Animals Welfare Society, or PAWS, brought in the media and representatives of the city’s Animal Welfare League for a “raid” on Robert’s horse shed. Several horses were determined to be malnourished. Cuts and sores were found on painted zebras. The Animal Welfare League spirited the neediest of the beasts
to a therapeutic horse farm. “Horses Rescued!” was the headline of the following day.

The persistent activists then turned their attention to Robert’s prosecution. The officers at the Sahar police station, having enjoyed a long, mutually profitable relationship with the former slumlord, declined to register a charge of cruelty to animals (“Culprit Goes Scot-Free!”). So the animal-rights group took its photographic evidence to the commissioner of the Mumbai Police. Finally, the former slumlord and his wife were charged under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act for failing to provide adequate food, water, and shelter to their four-legged charges.

The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.

They weren’t thinking about the uninvestigated deaths of Kalu and Sanjay. Annawadi boys broadly accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all. The boys were simply puzzled by the fuss, since they considered Robert’s horses the luckiest and most lovingly tended creatures in the slum.

The activists had been few in number but, working together, they’d made their anger about the horses register. At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now; the quashing of voter applications at the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborers’ pay. Abdul was one of many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret
comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad
together
—not even about the airport authority.

Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

As the rains began in June, the new judge presiding over the trial of Kehkashan and her father started calling witnesses. This judge, C. K. Dhiran, had bony hands and sleepy eyes behind his spectacles, and he ran through cases even faster than the first judge had. Approaching his courtroom, on the top floor of the building, Kehkashan turned her head to a small window, where over an expanse of wet tile roofs she could make out the Arabian Sea.

What was the point of trying to mind-read another judge? She was still weak from jaundice and tension, and as the weeks passed it seemed futile to try to understand what was being said or to predict whether or not she and her father would go to prison. Her mother was worried enough for all of them, with her terrible dreams and her
new habit of running across the maidan in her sleep. Kehkashan simply sat on the bench with the other accused people and murmured prayers until she was free to join the rest of the family in devising new ways to make money. As Mirchi put it, they were now “down to earn-and-eat.”

They had given up on the idea of restarting their garbage business in Saki Naka. The rent on the shed there had been greater than Abdul’s monthly income. So Abdul now spent his days driving the rattletrap three-wheeled truck from slum to slum, looking for jobs transporting other people’s waste to recyclers. Mirchi took the temp jobs he could find, in addition to discreetly trading garbage at Annawadi when the police were not around. Their younger brother Atahar dropped out of school, paid for fake papers that said he was of working age, and broke rocks on the road. Atahar said he didn’t mind quitting school to help his family, but Kehkashan minded, very much.

On the last day of July, the prosecutor and the defender made their closing arguments. The judge looked at Kehkashan for what seemed to her to be the first time, and cracked a joke about her burqa: “Are we certain this is the accused? It could be someone else. Who can recognize her, dressed like this!” When the judge finished laughing and the lawyers finished saying whatever it was they were saying to the judge, in English, the judge told Kehkashan and her father to come back in ninety minutes. There would be a verdict.

As they left the courtroom, the judge was saying, “Now I am only waiting for the pay hike to take effect and then I should retire. Maharashtra is such a narrow-minded state—only here they ask for the receipts and bills from judges. In Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, the judge receives the petrol money along with the salary without having to produce bills.…”

Outside the courthouse, a city garbage truck rolled over a dog. It yelped and died, and Kehkashan and her father decided the courthouse
canteen was a better place to wait. Kehkashan sat on the floor and stared at her shoes, which were new and plastic and hurt her. When she walked back into the courtroom she was limping and barefoot.

“What do you do?”

At the witness stand, Kehkashan answered the first and last question that the judge had directed to her.

“Housewife,” she said. She wasn’t about to tell him about leaving her husband and the photos of the other woman in his cellphone.

“And what is your business?” the judge asked Karam, who had clasped his hands to stop them from trembling.

“Sir, I am of plastics,” Karam replied. He thought it sounded better than “of empty water bottles and polyurethane bags.”

“Well, because of you,” the judge said, “one woman’s life has gone.”

“No, sa’ab!” Karam cried out. “She did what she did by herself.”

The judge said nothing for a while, then looked to the prosecutor with the stiff orange comb-over.

“So what to do with these ones, then? Should I sentence them to two years or three years?”

Kehkashan froze. Then the judge smiled and held up his hands.

“Go, leave them,” he said to the lawyers.
“Jao, chhod do.”
He declared the Husains not guilty. It was over.

The judge’s conclusion was succinct. “There is nothing on record to show that the accused in any manner instigated the deceased to commit suicide. Thus, prosecution has miserably failed to establish guilt against accused beyond reasonable doubt.”

Move along now. The judge had other cases to hear, and wanted to clear the witness stand, to which Kehkashan and her father appeared to be glued. “You can go,” the defense attorney said a second time, more emphatically, and Kehkashan and her father flew.

——

Now only Abdul’s trial in juvenile court—the judgment on
his
honor—remained. In September 2009, the clerk at the juvenile court said, “Next month it is likely to start.” In October, the word was, “Three months’ time, maybe.” A Sahar police officer whom Abdul kept running into at Dongri was at least consistent. “Admit you did those things to the One Leg! There is a solution to everything! Your case will go on forever if you don’t admit it, and if you do admit it, they will let you go today.”

As 2009 drew to a close, Zehrunisa was taking special measures to hasten Abdul’s trial and vindication. She visited a Sufi mystic on Reay Road who specialized in improving futures, relieving tensions, removing curses, and appeasing ghosts—the latter an important part of the draw for Zehrunisa, who thought Fatima’s ghost might be behind Abdul’s legal limbo. The mystic tied a red thread on Zehrunisa’s wrist and sent her to tie another red thread around a tree in a courtyard where her fellow pilgrims were spinning and chanting to drumbeats. The spirits would be friendlier now, the mystic had promised, taking the money. Still, Zehrunisa thought it couldn’t hurt to go to the mosque and do a mannat in Abdul’s name, for seven Fridays.

As 2010 progressed and Zehrunisa’s efforts bore no fruit, the special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra resurfaced to suggest that money would start a trial faster than prayer. Zehrunisa rewarded the suggestion with some of the finest curses she had ever invented.

By the end of 2010, she and Abdul had concluded that a suspended state between guilt and innocence was his permanent condition.

Abdul still looked for The Master when he went to Dongri. He wanted to tell the teacher that he had tried to be honorable in his
final years as a boy, but wouldn’t be able to sustain it now that he was pretty sure he was a man. A man, if sensible, didn’t make bright distinctions between good and bad, truth and falsehood, justice and that other thing.

“For some time I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting,” was how he put it. “But now I’m just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.”

With three Husain boys earning, the family was slowly gaining again, and when Annawadi was demolished, they believed they just might get one of the rehabilitation flats: 269 square feet for a family of eleven, far from the airport and its garbage, but considerably better than pavement. Abdul grew dark only when he thought back to the start of 2008, his business thriving, the first installment made on a small plot of land outside the city. The Vasai plot had now been sold to another family, and the Husains’ deposit had not been returned.

Abdul’s father had developed an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: “It’s moving past and you think you’re going to miss it but then you say, wait, maybe I won’t miss it—I just have to run faster than I’ve ever run before. Only now we’re all tired and damaged, so how fast can we really run? You have to try to catch it, even when you know you’re not going to catch it, when maybe it’s better just to let it go—”

Abdul wanted no part of this malaise. Fortunately, he had hauling work to do. Early mornings, he would start humbling up to supervisors at sheds in large industrial slums: “Anything to take to the recyclers?” He was learning all the back roads and spiny byways of the city, since three-wheeled vehicles like his own were barred from some of Mumbai’s smooth new thoroughfares.

There were days when he spent more on gasoline, looking for work, than he earned from commissions, but there were good days,
too, humping down the road, his tiny truck overloaded with trash. There was no place he wouldn’t go for money, the farther from Annawadi the better. He went over the state border to Vapi, in Gujarat. He went to Kalyan, to Thane. But mostly he stayed in Mumbai.

Driving his circuit late at night, he sometimes imagined not returning to his family in a slum he now thought of as “just another kind of prison”—imagined pressing forward and disappearing into some distant, perhaps better, unknown. Eventually, though, his city would jerk him back to his senses. The buses and SUVs barreling toward him, swerving. The children stepping obliviously from the roadsides into traffic, as Fatima’s daughter was always doing, as if they didn’t know the value of their lives.

“One mistake at the wheel, and it will finish me,” Abdul would complain to his mother upon the inevitable return to Annawadi. “It’s so much tension out there—the mind cannot wander. Every second you have to be alert.”

In truth, he felt powerful moving through midnight traffic, his tired eyes narrowed to pinpoints. If there was no mastering this vast, winking city, he could still master a few feet of gummy road.

Early one morning, Abdul was perched on a black garbage bag by the video shed, contemplating another fruitless trip to Dongri and the “Anything to move?” routine of the evening to follow, when Sunil nestled into the garbage bag beside him. They hadn’t seen each other in a while, with Abdul away, driving. Sunil leaned in close, as an almost-friend will sometimes do.

“Lend me two rupees for something to eat?”

Abdul reared back. “Ugh! Talking to me so close and you haven’t washed your mouth! It’s horrible. And your face. Go wash your face! I get scared just looking at you.”

“Okay, okay, I will,” Sunil said, laughing. “Just got up.”

“Early for a thief.”