Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  It was as the scavengers always said of Abdul’s mother: Ten men pulling couldn’t get her purse out of her pocket. As tears filled the Bihari woman’s eyes, Zehrunisa cradled Lallu and began to sing to him. The scavengers said this, too: She wore that big, spoiled baby like a shield. And so the Bihari men were on the pavement, and the wife and children were on the three-day train ride back home.

  “She said listen to your heart, and I did,” Zehrunisa told Abdul a few days later. “My heart said if we let the money go, how will we pay the next installment on this land in Vasai? What if your father goes back to hospital? Finally we are making a little money, but once we start to think we’re safe, we’ll be stuck in Annawadi forever, swatting flies.”

  “New people will come after the monsoon,” Abdul told Sunil and the other scavengers, because that is what his father told him. “Where else are they going to go?” The city was rough on migrants, terrible sometimes, and also better than anywhere else.

  For decades, the airport on which Annawadi livelihoods depended was a realm of duct tape, convulsing toilets, and disorganization. Now, in the name of global competitiveness, the government had privatized the place. The new management consortium, led by an image-conscious conglomerate called GVK, was charged with building a beautiful, hyperefficient new terminal—a piece of architecture that might impress on travelers Mumbai’s rising status as a global city. The new management was also deputized to raze Annawadi and thirty other squatter settlements that had sprouted on vacant airport land. Though the airport-slum clearance had been proposed and postponed for decades, GVK and the government seemed poised to get it done.

  Securing the airport perimeter was one reason to reclaim the land from the roughly ninety thousand families squatting there. The value of the land was another, since the huts sprawled across space that could be developed vertically at enormous profit. The third reason, in an airport branded “the New Gateway of India,” with a peacock-feather logo, was national pride. For among the things that breakneck globalization had changed about India was its sensitivity about its slums.

  As big banks in America and Britain failed, restless capital was looking eastward. Singapore and Shanghai were thriving, but Mumbai had profited less handsomely. Though it, too, had an abundance of young, cheap, trainable labor, there were opportunity costs attached to the fact that the Indian financial capital was alternatively known as Slumbai. Despite economic growth, more than half of Greater Mumbai’s citizenry lived in makeshift housing. And while some international businessmen descending into the Mumbai airport eyed the vista of slums with disgust, and others regarded it with pity, few took the sight as evidence of a high-functioning, well-managed city.

  Annawadians understood that their settlement was widely perceived as a blight, and that their homes, like their work, were provisional. Still they clung to this half-acre, which to them was three distinct places. Abdul and Rahul lived in Tamil Sai Nagar, the oldest and most salubrious section, which was anchored by the public toilets. Sunil’s stretch of Annawadi, poorer and cruder, had been built by Dalits from rural Maharashtra. (In the Indian caste system, the most artfully oppressive division of labor ever devised, Dalits—once termed untouchables—were at the bottom of the heap.) Annawadi’s Dalits had christened their slumlanes Gautam Nagar, after an eight-year-old boy who had died of pneumonia during one of the airport authority’s periodic demolitions.

  The third side of Annawadi was a cratered road at the slum’s entrance where many scavengers lived. This side had no huts. Scavengers slept on top of their garbage bags to prevent other scavengers from stealing them.

  Petty thieves slept on the rut-road, too. Their main targets were construction sites around the airport, where builders were sometimes careless with screws, rods, and nails. Before the airport was privatized, many of the thieves had worked there, carrying travelers’ luggage to cars in exchange for tips. But as part of the makeover that had made the grounds of the international terminal nearly as lush as those of the luxury hotels, the ragtag loaders had been banished, along with the mothers who held up babies and begged for milk money, and the children hawking pocket gods.

  The luggage-loaders-turned-thieves made a bit more money than waste-pickers like Sunil, and spent most of it on chicken-chili rice from a Chinese woman’s Airport Road stall. They typically topped off their dinners with Eraz-ex, the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out. People in the office buildings threw out the bottles prematurely. Annawadi road boys knew the value of the dregs. Dilute with spit, daub onto a rag, inhale: an infusion of daring for after-midnight work.

  Sniffing Eraz-ex was problematic in the long run, though. As Abdul pointed out to Sunil, the addicts were either thin as match-sticks or had big, troubling balls in their bellies.

  Abdul felt vaguely protective of the undersized scavenger. The boy got excited about unusual things, like a map of the city he’d recently seen outside an airport workers’ canteen. Back at Annawadi, Sunil talked about that map as if it were a gold brick he’d found in the gutter, and seemed surprised when other scavengers took no interest. Abdul recognized this tendency to get punchy about discoveries to which other people were indifferent. He no longer tried to explain his private enthusiasms, and figured Sunil would learn his own aloneness, in time.

  As for Sunil, he couldn’t help noting that the stoned thieves were having more fun than sober, drudgy Abdul. When spring came, they amassed raucously at Annawadi’s first entertainment center, a shack on the road with two hulking red video-game consoles inside.

  The game parlor was a loss leader for an old Tamil man who had begun competing with Abdul for the scavengers’ goods. The Tamil was nearly as clever as Asha. He lent the scavengers the one rupee it cost to play Bomberman or Metal Slug 3. He lent them bars of soap and money for food. To the thieves, he lent tools for cutting concertina wire or wedging off hubcaps. Indebted, the scavengers and thieves had to sell their goods to him.

  The Husains considered this unfair competition, and one night, seeking revenge, Mirchi broke into the game shed and cleaned out the consoles’ coin boxes. When the Tamil discovered the culprit, he laughed. The game-shed profits were negligible against his larger return from stolen goods.

  To Sunil, one road boy stood apart from the others: an antic fifteen-year-old named Kalu, who was the closest thing Abdul had to a friend. Kalu mocked the game-parlor man for wearing his lungis too short, and disputed his contention that Muslims like Abdul were cheats with magnets hidden under their scales. Kalu’s specialty as a thief was airport recycling bins, which often contained aluminum scrap. Though the bins were in compounds secured by barbed-wire fences, his tolerance for pain was a thing of legend. Thanks to Eraz-ex, which was also the local balm for concertina-wire wounds, he could make three round-trips over the fences in a night. After selling his metal to Abdul, he sometimes slipped Sunil a few rupees for food.

  Like Sunil, Kalu had lost his mother when he was young, and he’d been working since age ten. One of his jobs had been polishing diamonds in a heavily guarded local factory, contemplation of which drove the other boys batshit.

  “Why didn’t you put a diamond in your ear?”

  “Or ten diamonds up your asshole!”

  They weren’t convinced by Kalu’s description of the diamond-detecting machines he’d had to pass through at the end of each day.

  What Sunil loved about Kalu were his inspired enactments of movies he’d seen, for the benefit of kids who’d never been to a theater. With a high-pitched approximation of Bengali, Kalu would become the possessed woman in the Bollywood thriller Bhool Bhulaiya. With a guttural approximation of Chinese, he’d be Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. He refused to do King Kong anymore, despite popular requests. Becoming Deepika in Om Shanti Om pleased him more. “Arre kya item hai!” he’d say, sashaying. “Only she can pull off those old-style outfits!”

  Kalu himself was plain, if you broke the face down to features: small eyes, flat nose, pointy chin, dark skin. When other road boys gave him
his nickname—Kalu, meaning “black boy”—they hadn’t meant it as a compliment. But he had status, not just for the pain tolerance but for his ability to manufacture fun. When bored with mimicking film stars, he’d act out the leading freaks of Annawadi, including the lipsticky One Leg who walked with her butt stuck out and who was lately screwing a heroin-addicted road boy when her husband went to work. That a road boy was getting sex, even with a defective like the One Leg, was immense.

  Sunil often eavesdropped on Kalu’s conversations after dark, and in this way learned that policemen sometimes advised the road boys about nearby warehouses and construction sites where they might steal building materials. The cops then took a share of the proceeds. One midnight, Sunil overheard Kalu, uncharacteristically serious, tell Abdul about a thieving expedition he’d botched near the airport.

  A police officer had turned him on to an industrial site with metal lying on the ground and no barbed-wire fences—a place Kalu called “the workshops.” He went at 11 P.M. and found some pieces of iron, but a security guard had come after him. Ditching the metal in high weeds, he’d run back home.

  “If I don’t get the iron before morning, another boy will find it,” Kalu told Abdul. “But I’m too tired to go back now.”

  “So ask one of these boys out here to wake you later,” Abdul suggested.

  The other boys were high, though, and anyway had a loose sense of time.

  “I could wake you,” Sunil offered. The rats in his hut left him sleepless.

  “Good,” said Kalu. “Come at three A.M., and if you don’t, I’ll be finished.”

  Kalu said finished lightly, the way he said most things, but Sunil took it hard. He lay down on the maidan, a few feet from Abdul, and tracked the time by the movement of the moon. At his best guess of 3 A.M., he found Kalu curled up asleep in the backseat of an autorickshaw. Rising, the fifteen-year-old wiped his lips and said, “The boy who was going to go with me is too stoned. Will you come?”

  Sunil was startled, then honored.

  “Are you afraid of water?” Kalu asked.

  “I can swim. I swim at Naupada.”

  “Do you have a bedsheet?”

  A bedsheet was one thing Sunil had. He ran to fetch it, then followed Kalu out onto Airport Road. As the boys crossed the street, Sunil wrapped the sheet around himself. He felt shivery, though this was not a cool night. Kalu turned and laughed. “You’ll scare people like that! They’ll think you’re a walking ghost!” Reluctantly, Sunil gobbed his sheet under his arm as they gained the road leading up to the international terminal.

  Cars were still coming out of the airport. Arrivals from Europe and America, Kalu said; he’d learned the flight schedules and the names of many world cities while loading luggage. He said the best tippers were Saudis, Americans, and Germans, in that order.

  Past a glittery DEPARTURES sign and some security barricades that read HAPPY JOURNEY, the boys sprinted down a half-paved road used by construction vehicles, then veered onto a narrower, pitch-dark lane. Sunil could navigate it blind. After some high fences behind which airplane meals got made was an open-air toilet where he’d often found empty water bottles. The boys skipped quickly over this wasteland. Now they were standing at the edge of a wide gully that took runoff from the Mithi River. Sunil came here from time to time to catch mangoor fish to sell back at the slum. When he was young, the water had been blue—“like swimming-pool water,” he said. It had since turned black and reeking, but the fish still tasted sweet.

  Across the gully to his right were towering security fences, protecting floodlit hangars. Jets were rolling in for the night. The far left side of the gully, where Kalu said they were going, was dim and still. Sunil could make out one spindly Ashoka tree, and behind it, indistinct, several large, shedlike buildings. Kalu jumped into the fetid water and paddled toward them. Sunil swam too, then waded when he saw Kalu wading. The current in the trench was gentle, the monsoon being nine months past. Still, Sunil’s stomach felt liquid as he scrambled up the opposite bank.

  What Kalu called “the workshops” was a large new industrial estate. Smelting. Plasticizers. Lubricants. A concern called Gold-I-Am Jewels Unlimited. Bluish lights in front of a few of the warehouses illuminated the figures of uniformed guards, whose shadows seemed thirty feet long.

  Sunil wanted to dive back into the water. But Kalu had planned a circuitous route to the weeds where he’d hidden the iron. “The guards won’t see,” he said. “It will be easy.” Which was how it turned out. The iron in the weeds looked like barbells to Sunil, and felt like barbells when lifted. This posed the sole dilemma of the night: How much weight could the two boys manage, swimming? Making their bedsheets into slings, they decided to carry three irons apiece.

  They staggered away with their loads, and fifteen minutes later they were back in Annawadi, sopping. When Abdul woke at dawn, he bought the iron for 380 rupees, and Sunil got a cut of one-third. What the police officers got, Sunil couldn’t say. Kalu seemed quietly satisfied with his profit. For Sunil, it was the first disposable income of his life.

  To Pinky Talkie Town, then. Kalu led the way to the movie theater, where Sunil was mesmerized by the carpet and the clean. The noon film was an American one, its lead actor a man named Will Smith who, on the screen, seemed to be the lone human survivor of a plague in New York City. A she-dog had also survived this plague, and became the hero’s friend. The dog was yellow with a large spot like a saddle on her back, and the man spoke to her as if she could understand everything. Then, near the end, the man strangled her.

  Sunil figured the hero had a motive for murdering his only friend. In addition to the plague, there had been a ghost and an explosion, and while these events no doubt contributed to the hero’s decision, Sunil couldn’t work out the chain of logic. When he emerged from the dark theater into the sunblast of a spring afternoon, he felt sickened by the betrayal of the she-dog. He partially recovered after eating until his belly was full.

  A few weeks later, Kalu asked for his help again, and as Sunil considered other thieves devouring plates of chicken-chili rice, he began to weigh this potential career path against the waste-picking that led to maggots, boils, and orange eyes. But for now, he thought, he’d stick with his dumpsters and his ledge.

  Abdul seemed relieved at this choice, though Sunil could never read all of what that old man of a boy was thinking. Kalu didn’t press him either, which was good, because Sunil wasn’t sure that his reasoning would make sense to anyone else. It had something to do with the fact that, on the most profitable day of his life, he’d failed to reach the state of exhilaration that other boys called “the full enjoy.” The strangled she-dog had been only part of it. He sometimes said of being a scavenger, “I don’t like myself, doing this work. It’s like being an insult.” He thought he might like himself even less, being a thief. Moreover, Kalu’s dealings with the Sahar Police made him uneasy.

  Later, Sunil would come to understand the extent of the power that Mumbai police officers had over Annawadi road boys. But now, as good as he was at divining motives, he could only conclude that the workings behind Kalu’s night jobs were beyond a twelve-year-old’s ability to grasp.

  The plot of this novel, Mrs. Dalloway, made no sense whatsoever to Manju. Doing her college reading, Asha’s daughter felt so sluggish that she feared she’d caught dengue fever or malaria again—hazards of living thirty feet from a buzzing sewage lake. No, she decided. It was simply the weather: Only spring and already the sun was scorching, a knifing white force that made the eyes ache and sent Annawadi water buffalo prematurely into heat. Manju thought her mother looked wan, too, but this was possibly because Corporator Subhash Sawant—the man Asha hoped would make her slum boss—had been accused in court of electoral fraud.

  When Manju first asked about the rumor, Asha had shrugged it off. Her patron had previously made two murder charges disappear. “Court cases can be managed in Mumbai,” as the Corporator put it. So why did his bulk seem to be slipping f
rom his chest to his belly? The clamminess around his collar seemed imperfectly correlated to the weather.

  Just as the Indian government allowed only women to stand for certain elections, it reserved other elections strictly for low-caste candidates, to increase the presence of historically excluded populations in the country’s political leadership. In the previous year’s elections, restricted in Ward 76 to low-caste candidates, the Corporator had won handily. Subhash Sawant wasn’t low-caste, though. He’d simply manufactured a new caste certificate, a new birthplace, and a new set of ancestors to qualify for the ballot. At least ten candidates in other city wards, mostly Shiv Sena, had done the same.

  But the Congress Party candidate for Ward 76, a genuine low-caste who had finished second, was now papering the High Court with evidence of Subhash Sawant’s falsifications, asking the judge to overturn the election. Suddenly, the Corporator felt the need for citizen homage. He’d been running this ward for more than a decade, could barely recall the autorickshaw-driving and petty thuggery that came before. So he’d begun visiting the ward’s slums to receive the love of his constituents, in hopes that it might somehow trump a paperwork discrepancy.

  Annawadi’s turn next. Asha and Manju would assemble the slumdwellers in a pink temple by the sewage lake in order to pray with him for a victory in court.

  Asha winced when he gave the order. It was the season of school exams, and parents were reluctant to leave their huts and risk having their children abandon their textbooks. She had to bring all her influence to bear to ensure a respectable attendance.

  At sunset on the designated night, Subhash Sawant strode into Annawadi in an impeccable white safari suit, accompanied by an entourage. Sunil and the other scavengers gaped from a distance. The Corporator had one of those spread-leg policeman strides—as if his thighs were too muscled for normal walking. And there was enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.