Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  Manju wasn’t too interested in money. She hungered for virtue, a desire that was partly a fear. When studying, she sometimes fingered the scar on her neck from a night, years ago, when she’d stolen money from her mother to buy chocolates. Asha had responded with an axe. But Manju’s desire to be good was also rebellion—a way of chastising a mother who was said to have acquired the television set and other advantages by behaving badly.

  Manju’s instrument for demonstrating her decency was the school she ran out of her hut every afternoon. The school was financed by central government money, funneled through a Catholic charity, and Asha was the teacher, officially. But her mother was busy with Shiv Sena, so Manju had been running the class since she was in seventh grade, displaying a commitment her mother found annoying. Although Asha was pleased with the small stipend the school brought to the household, she thought Manju should conduct the class only on days when the supervisor came to check, the way a lot of other hut-school teachers did.

  The central government called schools like Manju’s “bridge schools.” Her brief was to provide two hours of daily lessons to child laborers or girls kept home by household responsibilities, in order to get them acclimated to, and excited about, formal education. Sparking enthusiasm wasn’t hard. As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education. Several dozen parents in the slum were getting by on roti and salt in order to pay private school tuition.

  In the last five years, more than one hundred schools had opened around the airport—some excellent and expensive; some fraudulent; some, like Manju’s, taught by unqualified teenagers. But all were understood to be better than the free schools like Marol Municipal, where Asha was a contract teacher. Nearly 60 percent of the state’s public school teachers hadn’t finished college, and many of the permanent teachers had paid large under-the-table sums to school officials to secure their positions. The Corporator was among the politicians who preferred to capitalize on these abysmal schools instead of reforming them. He’d opened his own private school, using a front man.

  “At Marol, we play, take recess, play again, then have lunch,” was how the Nepali boy, Adarsh, described the municipal school curriculum. The free lunches were the big draw. Adarsh came to Manju’s school after his regular school day, since she was always teaching something—often, the plot summaries she was trying to memorize for college. Her students didn’t understand the plot of Mrs. Dalloway any better than Manju did, but they got that Othello was distrusted because of his dark skin.

  Now one of the other students flew into her hut with such velocity that a poster of Bal Thackeray, Shiv Sena’s aging founder, fluttered off its tack on the wall. “Devo! You’re early!” Manju protested. “And you forgot to take off your shoes!”

  Her eyes then moved from the mud tracks on the floor to his face, which was covered in blood.

  “Oh,” the boy said, holding his head. “A taxi …”

  Annawadi kids were always getting hit on the chaotic roads—usually, while crossing a treacherous intersection to get to Marol Municipal School. New drivers talking on new cellphones could be a lethal combination. Manju leaped up, grabbed the turmeric by the stove, and poured the yellow powder over Devo’s head. Turmeric, as good for wounds as for brides before weddings. She rubbed the spice until it blended with the blood into a bright orange paste, then pressed down hard. She was checking to see if she’d stanched the bleeding when Devo’s one-eyed, widowed mother came through the door, brandishing a foot-long piece of metal.

  “No car will kill you! No god will save you! You went in the road, roaming loose like that, and now you will die at my hands!”

  Devo darted under a wooden cupboard where Manju’s family stored their possessions, and emitted a stricken, anticipatory howl. Pulling him out, his mother began to beat him with the strip of metal.

  “No!” Manju said. “Not the head! Not where he’s hurt!”

  “I’ll break your teeth! I will turn your flesh red,” Devo’s mother shouted. The fastest way to financial ruin in Annawadi was injury or illness, and the woman was already in debt to the loan shark who had financed the final hospital stay of her late husband. “If the driver had hurt you worse, how would I have paid the doctor? Tell me, Devo. Do I have one rupee to spend to save your life?”

  “Stop,” Manju cried, trying and failing to catch the woman’s hand. Rahul, awake now, rolled his eyes; he considered the hut school a magnet for family histrionics. In calmer moments, Manju could argue that parents were terrified of losing control of their children in a city where dangers seemed to be multiplying—a city they didn’t fully understand. And as much as Manju hated violence of any stripe, the odd thrashing, like the odd axe blow, could be effective in keeping a child close to home.

  Devo’s mother had now moved past the point of constructive teaching, however. Manju lunged between mother and son, managing to capture Devo’s mother in a hug.

  “Promise,” Manju said to Devo, panting. “You will not go in the road again.”

  “Will not,” he got out between heaving sobs. “Now I won’t make such a mistake.”

  Fixing her one eye on Manju before departing, his mother said, “Tomorrow if he does not sit with you and study, I will break his legs and pour kerosene on his face.”

  Manju was stanching the boy’s wound for a second time when a little girl said accusingly, “Teacher. You’re late for school.”

  Manju untied her dupatta, which was streaked with blood and spice. “Come, let’s get the others.” Left unattended in the house, her students could be as extravagant as her brothers with the Fair and Lovely.

  Manju always looked angry when emerging from her hut. Everyone who left her house got tight in the lip unless they wanted a mouthful of flies, the only creatures in the slum enthusiastic about the stale goods in her mother’s new store. “Class, come,” she called out as she crossed the maidan, stepping lightly around the piles of trash being sorted by Abdul. She knew who he was because Rahul hung out with his brother, Mirchi, but of course she didn’t speak to him. The garbage boy didn’t speak to anyone, as far as she could tell.

  “Children, quickly now,” she called, clapping her hands as she turned into one of the slumlanes. “Phut-a-phut! It’s late!” Her official position was that having to round up her students was a bother. Shouldn’t they show up voluntarily?

  In fact she liked being outside, peering into doors and collecting snatches of neighborhood gossip, in these minutes when the mantle of teacher protected her from rumor. Today’s raging controversy involved clipboards that advertised Honda motorcycles, from a dealership in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. The World Vision charity had intended them as gifts to three dozen children it sponsored in Annawadi, but the clipboards were being hoarded by the social workers assigned to hand them out. Manju was always relieved to hear of local scandals in which her mother played no pivotal role.

  One by one her students, mostly girls under age twelve, emerged from their huts. Several of their sun-bleached dresses had broken zippers, exposing bony backs. Manju didn’t worry about little Sharda. The girl was born spiny, like her mother, who’d broken rocks on the road before her lungs went. Lakshmi was the painful case. Her stepmother reserved the food of the house for her own children. The brothelkeeper’s eleven-year-old daughter, kitted in tight black bicycle shorts and dangling earrings, had her brother in tow. Both children liked to be out of their hut when visitors came to have sex, especially when the sex was with their mother. For many of these children, Manju’s little school was no bridge. It was all the education they would get.

  The troupe then marched to the hut of Manju’s secret pupil, her friend Meena. Meena’s parents kept the old ways about girls and education: Too much learning reduced a girl’s compliancy. Manju had been teaching Meena English on the sly.

  Meena, fifteen, had been the first girl born in
Annawadi, arriving two years after her parents helped turn the swamp into a slum. She was a Dalit; Manju belonged to the Kunbi farming caste, a backward caste but higher. Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets.

  Now, seeing Manju in her doorway, Meena flashed a smile that was not her wide, thrilling film-star smile—the one that other girls tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Today’s smile was the go-away version, which indicated that she was on lockdown, allowed out only to fetch water or use the toilet. Her crime, as usual, was a failure to hold her tongue with her brothers and parents. Why couldn’t she listen to the boys in the maidan when they were talking about the hotels? Why couldn’t she go to school? During the day, she did her household duty, but at night fury sometimes overcame her, and her mother and brothers would feel compelled to beat it out of her. Such behavior could sabotage the marriage being arranged for her in their Tamil Nadu village.

  Manju routinely advised Meena to keep her discontents to herself, as Manju did. Still, the Tamil girl’s defiance spoke to something inside Manju. This morning as Manju was getting ready for college, the small silvery bindi she was putting on her forehead slipped and caught in the small of her neck. It glinted prettily there. Asha had already left for work. Manju let it stay. A girl could be virtuous without being perfect.

  Back in the hut, her students arranged themselves on the bloody floor.

  “Good afternoon, students,” she said in English.

  “Good afternoon, teacher,” the children called back at deafening volume.

  She paused, uncertain of what to do next. She didn’t grasp enough of The Way of the World to practice its plot with her students. That would have to be internalized later, while she cooked dinner, and before her mother started fighting with her father about being drunk. The day’s official class assignment was the English names of fruits—apples, bananas, mangoes, papayas. She’d work to it gradually, after a review of a previous lesson on cars, trains, and planes. But first, since the children were poking each other, there would be ten energy-depleting minutes of “Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes.”

  Her students’ singing rang out across the maidan, as it always did at this hour. Sunil, the young scavenger, liked to eavesdrop when he brought his goods to sell to Abdul. He’d sat in on Manju’s class for a few days in January, mastering the English twinkle-star song, before deciding that his time was better spent working for food. He was now taking the position that Manju’s school was two-bit games in a hut.

  Abdul, who considered Manju the most-everything girl in Annawadi, could only wonder at the small boy’s sense of superiority. One of Abdul’s own arrogances, in these weeks before the One Leg burned and everything changed, was that he could predict the fates of other people, especially scavengers. But Sunil’s future was hard to make out. Although contempt was a force that changed a person, being a waste-picker hadn’t yet infected Sunil’s mind, if he still thought memorizing “A Is for Apple” might make some difference in his life.

  At first, Fatima the One Leg, loved her poor, older husband in the brother-sister way. She learned other ways of love after marriage. This taste of affection was too much a revelation to be hidden. At thirty-five, more or less, she had become known in Annawadi for a sexual need as blatant as her lipstick. Had she been another sort of woman, her affairs might have been a scandal; that she was disabled made them a joke. As were her spectacular rages, which enlivened many an Annawadi evening.

  Fatima had refined her verbal arsenal early, given the insults about the leg she was born with, which turned into a flipper past the knee. By thirty, she could out-curse even Zehrunisa. When a government program provided her with metal crutches, she was doubly armed. Strong in the shoulders, she brought the crutches down hard on neighbors she considered disrespectful. She threw the crutches, too, with uncanny aim. Desi liquor, some people whispered, by way of explaining her fits, though there wasn’t enough liquor in all of Annawadi to keep Fatima as mad as she was.

  She was damaged, and acknowledged it freely. She was illiterate—acknowledged that, too. But when others spoke of her fury as an ignorant, animal thing, that was bukwaas, utter nonsense. Much of her outrage derived from a belated recognition that she was as human as anyone else.

  Sometimes, the afternoon men left her money; most were too poor to do so. But even the poorest of them helped her grasp what her parents had taken from her—those ashamed and shaming parents who’d hidden an imperfect daughter in their hut.

  It had been daily punishment, watching her siblings run off to school and return to suck up their parents’ affection. “I had such hate for myself, back then,” Fatima told Zehrunisa, whom she alternately relied on and resented. “All I heard was that I had been born wrong.” Nowadays, when her mother took the train across the city to visit, she couldn’t help but pass around a glamour photo of Fatima’s younger sister—that two-legged marvel with a sparkling jewel in her nose. “This one is a good girl,” the mother liked to say. “See how nice she looks, and fair?”

  “The One Leg could say worse, be worse, the way she grew up,” Zehrunisa told Abdul, though she privately considered it self-indulgent for a grown woman to complain about her childhood. Zehrunisa could barely stand to speak of her own early years of water-and-wheat-husk soup in Pakistan, before an arranged marriage sent her across the border. Few women in Annawadi could look back on a honeyed youth. But Fatima thought wretched early years should be rounded out by a few good ones, which she had yet to have.

  She had no interest in playing the shuffling, grateful role that the charitable types expected of the disabled. It was hard enough maintaining her pride in a slum where even hardy women grew exhausted running a household. In the monsoon, Fatima’s mornings sometimes started like this: one leg, two crutches, twelve-pound vessel of pump-water, mudslick, splat. Add to this young daughters whom she couldn’t chase after—needy, rambunctious creatures who laid her deficiencies bare. Only in the hours when the men came—husband at work, daughters at school—did the part of her body she had to offer feel more important than the part of it she lacked.

  June, the beginning of the four-month monsoon season, made every sensible Annawadian pensive. The slum was a floodbowl, surrounded as it was by high walls and mounds of illegally dumped construction rubble. In a 2005 deluge that brought the whole city to a standstill, Fatima’s family had lost most of what they owned, as had the Husains and many other Annawadians. Two residents had drowned, and more would have, had not a construction crew building an addition to the Intercontinental hotel supplied ropes and pulled slumdwellers through the floodwaters to safety.

  This year, the clouds broke early, and for a week the rain came down like nails. Outside Annawadi, construction projects stopped, and daily-wage workers braced for hunger. Hut walls grew green and black with mold, the contents of the public toilet spewed out onto the maidan, and fungi protruded from feet like tiny sculptures—a special torment to those whose native customs involved toe rings.

  “I’m going to die of these feet,” said a woman whose fungus fanned out like butterfly wings as she lined up in the rain for water. “The way my children eat, the rice I’ve stored won’t last two weeks,” said the woman behind her, as the seasonal complaints gathered momentum. “I don’t want to be stuck inside with my husband for all these months.” “At least you’re not married to Mr. Kamble—heart valve day and night.” But just as the women settled into the rhythm of monsoon grievance, the rains ceased, replaced by a syrupy yellow sun. Then the women wished the rains would start again; it seemed unnatural for them to quit for so many days.

  The children saw the break in the rains differently. While the school year would soon resume, a clear sky permitted a final orgy of play. Abdul’s brother Mirchi started a giant game of ring toss in the maidan, using the flagpole and busted bicycle tub
es from Abdul’s storeroom.

  “It’s a fluke,” Mirchi said to Rahul, whose inner tube had juddered down the flagpole.

  “What fluke?” protested Rahul, as other boys cheered and thumped his back. “Watch me—I can do it again!”

  Zehrunisa came out to watch the game, wiping away tears as she considered her exuberant son. Mirchi seemed to have forgotten the pall he’d brought over the household by failing ninth grade. She considered him her brightest child, had even imagined him becoming a doctor. Now his unexpected failure brought the tally of Husain household crises to three. Her husband was in the hospital, struggling to breathe, and her eldest daughter, Kehkashan, had run away from her husband of a year.

  Mirchi’s cheerfulness had much to do with the return of his sister. All of the Husain children had been elated to see her. It wasn’t just that she could cook and clean in place of their mother, who spent most of her days at the hospital. To her younger brothers and sisters, Kehkashan had been a second mother—a more organized, less exhausted version of the original. But she’d returned home with heartbreak in her eyes.

  Kehkashan’s husband was also her cousin; Zehrunisa and one of her sisters had arranged the marriage when their children were two. But Kehkashan felt that the intimate photos in her husband’s cellphone—of a woman not more beautiful than she—resolved a question that had troubled her since the wedding. Why didn’t her new husband want to make love? “He told me once, ‘It’s because you go off to sleep too early,’ so I would stay up late,” she told her mother. “Then he stopped coming home at night. He says, ‘Don’t correct me, you don’t have any rights over me.’ What kind of life is this?” The women in her husband’s family kept strict purdah—stayed inside the house unless accompanied by a man. “So I sit at home, entirely dependent on this man,” she said, “and then it turns out his heart was never with me.”

  Zehrunisa hoped that her sister would be able to bring the husband back in line. But to her daughter’s urgent question—“How is it possible to force someone to love me?”—she had no answer, because the faults of her own husband did not include a lack of love.