Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  The Hindu cricketers took note of Kehkashan’s return, deciding that the Muslim girl’s resplendent looks trumped the taint of her goat-eating and dwelling amid garbage, especially now that she was presumed not to be a virgin. Boys stared into her hut. Kehkashan averted her eyes. She sometimes wished, for peace’s sake, that she was plainer.

  Zehrunisa blamed Fatima for drawing such dogs in heat to the family doorstep. She’d managed to beat away one of Fatima’s lovers, who kept drifting over to leer at her daughter, but he was frail from a heroin habit. Other men might fight back. Fatima would sit on her neck, too. With Kehkashan crushed, Mirchi a failure, toddlers to chase after, her husband in the hospital, and a fever she couldn’t get rid of, Zehrunisa lacked the energy for a fight with the One Leg.

  Zehrunisa tried not to judge the private morality that Fatima had developed; she knew the woman craved affection and respect. But especially when Zehrunisa considered Fatima’s children, her own respect drained away. Recently, Fatima had gone at her eight-year-old, Noori, so hard with the crutches that Zehrunisa and another woman had had to tackle her. And then there was Fatima’s two-year-old, Medina. After the little girl got TB, Fatima had become obsessed about catching the disease herself. Then Medina had drowned in a pail.

  “I was in the toilet when it happened,” Fatima had claimed to Zehrunisa. But shared walls leak secrets, one of which was that when Medina drowned in a very small hut, Fatima and her mother were there. Fatima’s six-year-old daughter, Heena, had also been on hand, and said afterward, “Medina was a very nice sister until that day.”

  Zehrunisa had paid for the funeral shroud and the burial plot, and tried to convince herself that Medina’s death had in fact been an accident. She thought about her own children, and how she didn’t know what they were up to half the time.

  The police came to Annawadi one day to ask about Medina’s death, an inquiry quickly closed. Young girls in the slums died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth. Sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.

  One-year-old Danush, who lived two lanes over from the Husains, had gotten an infection in the filthy public hospital where he was born. His skin peeled off, and the touch of a sheet made him scream. His family took loan after loan at usurious interest, spending fifteen thousand rupees trying to cure him. Then one night in March, his father had beaten back his wife and emptied a pot of boiling lentils on the baby in his sari-sling cradle. Asha’s son Rahul had jumped smack into the middle of that horror show—had run to get the police. Zehrunisa admired the hell out of Rahul for that. Danush reached a hospital and survived. Now Zehrunisa ached every time she saw him: that grave, unblinking eye in a burn-mapped face.

  After Medina drowned, Fatima seemed oddly liberated. Other women said the worst of her, and she found that she didn’t much care. She drew on dramatic black eyebrows, shellacked her cheeks with powder—“spent fifty rupees to turn into a white lady,” the Husain boys whispered—and picked up a fresh set of lovers. “Did you see how that guy and his friend are looking at me?” she would say to Zehrunisa. “Are you jealous? No man looks at you.” The men she invited inside found her beautiful, she told her neighbor. Said there was no woman like her in all of India. Said she deserved a nicer life than she had.

  The Husains felt for Fatima’s husband, who sorted garbage in another slum, earning a hundred rupees for a fourteen-hour day. Mirchi put it bluntly: “She treats that old man like a shoe.” The shoe often came over to complain about his wayward wife, and one night Zehrunisa had teased him. “Idiot, you should have asked me before you married. I could have picked you a nice Muslim woman with two legs who would raise your children and run your household properly.”

  Mistake. Thin walls. Fatima was in her face, crutches waving. “Who are you to call me a bad wife!”

  Still, when Fatima and her husband fought, she would call out Zehrunisa’s name. And Zehrunisa would go, sighing, to separate the miserable couple, just as she sighed on Eid and other Muslim holidays before inviting them to share her mutton korma. The family of the child-abusing Fatima, the family of the skeezy brothel owner: This was the Muslim fellowship she had in Annawadi.

  “It’s easy to break a single bamboo stick, but when you bundle the sticks, you can’t even bend them,” she told her children. “It’s the same with family and with the people of our faith. Despite the petty differences, Muslims have to join up in big sufferings, and for Eid.”

  Black clouds hunched over the hills west of the city, but didn’t break. Annawadi children kept flinging their inner tubes toward the flagpole, and one July morning, Abdul’s father watched the game from his doorway, beaming. His shirt hung as loosely as ever off his shoulders, but Fatima and the other neighbors marveled when they saw his face. Garbage proceeds had financed a two-week stay in a small private hospital, where he’d breathed oxygen instead of foul slum air. Karam was shining. He looked naya tak-a-tak, brand new.

  “I can’t believe it,” the Tamil woman who ran the liquor still told Zehrunisa. “Ten years gone from his face, like that. He looks like some Bollywood hero—Salman Khan.”

  “He ought to look good,” said Zehrunisa. “We paid twenty thousand rupees to that hospital. But it’s true, he got so young—like a boy! I see him from the corner of my eye and I think, oh shit, I forgot that I had another child. Now I will have to arrange another marriage! Allah knows I have enough marriages to do already.”

  The next marriage would be Abdul’s. Though the financials remained to be worked out, she and her husband had settled on a likely girl, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a scrap dealer in Saki Naka, the industrial slum where Abdul sold his goods. The girl was pretty, no moles evident. Crucially, she was habituated to filthy men. She had come to the house three times, demure in a burqa, her younger sister in tow. From what Mirchi could make out, this younger sister was extremely hot, and in her honor, he painted a large red heart on the front of the family hut.

  Mirchi claimed to be eager for marriage. One day, well out of his father’s earshot, he said, “Mother, I want a wife just like you—she’ll do all the work, and I’ll do nothing.” But Abdul was as cautious about marrying as he was about everything else.

  “I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don’t feel it, and I myself don’t know why,” he fretted. “These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away—they cut their arms with a blade, they put a cigarette butt out in their hand, they won’t sleep, they won’t eat, they’ll sing—they must have different hearts than mine.”

  He told his parents, “You don’t hold a hot iron in your palm, do you? You let it cool. You think on it slowly.”

  “No, I think we should marry him quickly,” Zehrunisa told her husband as she cooked lunch a few days after his homecoming. He’d asked for meat to build his strength, and she was crouched on the floor breast-feeding Lallu while stirring a cartilaginous stew. “A marriage would make him happy, I think. So much turmoil inside him—I don’t think he’s been happy for a single day in Annawadi.”

  “Who is happy, living here?” her husband replied, fishing a silver-foil packet of prednisolone from a plastic bag of medicines he’d tacked on the wall. “Am I happy? All around us, third-class people and no one with whom I can relate. Does anyone here even know of the American war in Iraq? All they know of is each other’s business. But I don’t complain to you. Why is Abdul complaining?”

  “Do you know your own son? He says nothing—just does his work, does what we ask him. But why is it only his mother who sees that he is sad?”

  “He will be happier when we go to Vasai,” he replied.

  “Happier in Vasai,” she quietly repeated, with a sarcasm he chose to ignore.

  The small plot of land on which they’d made a deposit in January was an hour and a half farther outside the city
, in a community of construction suppliers and industrial recyclers. Many of its residents were Muslims from the Uttar Pradesh district in which Karam had been raised, on the Nepal border. He’d learned of the Vasai community from a Muslim developer so given to religious disquisition that Mirchi and Abdul called him the imam, rolling their eyes.

  The first time Karam visited the place, he’d been struck by a group of men clutching newspapers and speaking animatedly at a tea stall. He imagined they were discussing the black man in the United States who was trying to become the country’s president. Karam had heard that this Obama was secretly a Muslim, and was rooting for him.

  The dirt roads twisting upward from the tea stall had been giddy with chickens, which reminded him of his native village. He wasn’t sentimental about that village, in a district where there was little work except in sugarcane fields and children died at one of the highest rates in India. But he felt that urban slums surrounded by affluence turned children contemptuous of their parents—“because we can’t give the brand-name clothes, the car.” He considered it fortunate that Mirchi was merely lazy, not a defiant consumer of Eraz-ex, but there were six other children after Mirchi. To Karam, Vasai was the ideal village-city hybrid: a place where opportunity and parental respect weren’t mutually exclusive.

  “And at least there they would not be insulted for their religion,” he told his wife.

  Zehrunisa felt it premature to invest their dreams for their children in a part-owned bit of dirt that lacked even four bamboo poles and a tarp under which to sleep. “Our ghost house,” she’d taken to calling the property. She’d given him permission to make the deposit. He always consulted her on financial decisions, since the results had been dire the two times he ignored her advice. But it irritated her that he hadn’t yet taken her to see the land.

  “How can I take you, with all these children to care for?” he’d been saying all year. But Kehkashan was now here to help, and she still hadn’t seen the place. She wondered if the community was so like his native village that it had gotten him to thinking like the conservative Muslim men who lived there.

  Before her husband’s hospitalization, the developer had visited to discuss the property payments. She’d worn her burqa, served tea, then crouched in a corner, as her mother had done in Pakistan. Covered and unseen by men outside her family was the way Zehrunisa had expected to live out her adult life. But shortly after marriage brought her to Uttar Pradesh, she was working the sugarcane fields—at night, among men. She had prayed constantly for her husband’s TB to relent so that she could go back into purdah. “I couldn’t even speak in those days,” she told her children. “I was scared of the whole world.” Having a man to deal with that world on her behalf had seemed to her a fine thing.

  She had stopped praying for a return to purdah after Kehkashan was born. She believed in focusing her requests to Allah, troubling Him with only one matter at a time. So she prayed for the health of Kehkashan and then for the health of Abdul, who entered the world in a pile of dirt by the Intercontinental hotel. Her husband had brought the family to Mumbai in hopes of finding work less strenuous than farming. Renting a pushcart to transport waste to recyclers was the work he could find.

  Abdul had been a sulky infant—refused his mother’s breast as often as he took it. But he had survived, unlike the next boy. Then Mirchi came, fat and pretty, followed by six more, also healthy. Nothing in Zehrunisa’s life had brought her more satisfaction than the fact that her children took after her, not her husband, in their haleness. Not an undersized one in the lot, after Abdul.

  Soon, one of the younger boys would prove clever enough to take over her role in Abdul’s business—negotiating with scavengers, thieves, and police. Then she would gladly stay in the house. But to go back to purdah? It had belatedly dawned on her that this might be expected in Vasai. It would exacerbate her husband’s condescension, a quality sufficiently annoying that she had to snap at him from time to time.

  “Just because I can’t read, you pretend to everyone that you’re the hero in this family and I am the nothing,” she’d said to him recently. “Like I would have been stuck in my mother’s womb without you to get me out! Go, act like this big-time shareef, but it is I who have been managing everything!”

  Annawadi’s lack of censorious, conservative Muslims allowed her to call out her husband when necessary, just as it had allowed her to work to feed her children. Such freedoms would be painful to give up.

  “In your mind, you’ve already moved to Vasai,” she told her husband, ladling out the stew and handing it over with the economy of motion people develop when living in small, overpopulated huts. “Maybe you should pack up and go. And then go to Saudi—oh, there you can really relax! But this house is where your wife and children live. Look at it. You also felt ashamed when that imam came over.”

  Walls bloated and watermarked from flooding. Uneven stone floor with a hoard of recyclables in every corner, and more recyclables beneath an iron bed they’d recently purchased because Karam’s breathing improved when he slept a foot higher than the trash. But had he slept like a bat on the ceiling, there would be no escaping the smell: trash, stale cooking smoke, and the olfactory traces of eleven human beings who lacked sufficient water to get clean.

  “I’d like to leave this place, too,” Zehrunisa said. “But where do your children grow up? In the ghost house?”

  He looked at her, confused. All last night, all morning, she had been affection itself.

  But Zehrunisa had had an idea, and sensed an auspicious moment when her husband came out of the hospital. It had nothing to do with the position of the moon and the stars. It had to do with the shortness of life and a break in the rains.

  “Do you remember how anxious you were in the hospital?” she said. “Thinking, what if you were to leave this family?” He had told her, then, “I fear God is inviting me in.”

  Karam nodded, frowning. “So?”

  “He let you out this time.” She paused. “Do I work hard for this family? Do I ask for jewelry?”

  “No,” he admitted. “You don’t ask.”

  She was less and less sure she wanted to go to Vasai, less and less sure her husband would live to get there. She wanted a more hygienic home here, in the name of her children’s vitality. She wanted a shelf on which to cook without rat intrusions—a stone shelf, not some cast-off piece of plywood. She wanted a small window to vent the cooking smoke that caused the little ones to cough like their father. On the floor she wanted ceramic tiles like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever wall—tiles that could be scrubbed clean, instead of broken concrete that harbored filth in each striation. With these small improvements, she thought her children might stay as healthy as children in Annawadi could be.

  Before she’d even finished making her petition, her husband had assented, setting into motion the chain of contingency that would damage two families forever. The Husains would spend some of their savings to make a decent home. The next day, typically, Karam was acting as if the renovation had been his own idea. In this instance, a happy wife let her husband’s nonsense go.

  The little Husains grasped the seriousness of the house renovation when their parents kept them home from school, now back in session. For the next three days, even six-year-old hands would have assignments, the first of which was to drag everything in their hut onto the maidan. The rusty bed came out first, and Karam and Zehrunisa settled in, guarding their possessions from passersby while watching Abdul direct his sibling labor crew.

  “Finally, my kitchen!” Zehrunisa said, leaning into her husband, her head scarf slipping down to her shoulders.

  “Look at Atahar,” said Karam after a while. Their third son was furiously stirring cement to keep it from hardening in the day’s oppressive heat. “I despair because he has no brains—eighth grade and can’t write the number 8. But he works hard. Like Abdul, not afraid of labor.”

  “He’ll be okay,” Zehrunisa agreed. Her fifth son, Safdar, w
as the child she worried about. He was dreamy and impractical, like her husband. He loved frogs, and in pursuit of them sometimes swam the sewage lake. No one liked to sleep next to him after he did that.

  Asha’s husband, Mahadeo, materialized at the bedside. Slight and weathered, he was monosyllabic when sober, as he’d been since Asha found a cleverer hiding place for her purse. In hopes of relieving this painful condition, he offered his construction skills to the Husains for a hundred rupees.

  Abdul, who didn’t quite know what he was doing, was glad for Mahadeo’s help. Asha was the only one in that family who unnerved him. “I think she’s mad in her ambitions,” Abdul’s father had said a few nights earlier. “She wants a shining public life, wants to be some big politician, when her private life is so shameful. Does she think other people can’t hear her fight with her husband at night?” Their fights were indeed as loud as the ones between Fatima the One Leg and her husband. Asha, it was rumored, always won.

  As Mahadeo and the Husain children worked, some of Manju’s students wandered over, curious. Manju would soon be calling them to class, but in the meantime they perused the Husain possessions, piled up on the maidan. Adults also came to look. Only a handful of neighbors had been inside the Husains’ hut, but to judge by the piles, the Muslim garbage people were less poor than had been assumed.

  Many Annawadians recalled how much the Husains had lost in the 2005 deluge. Their youngest daughter had nearly drowned, and their clothing, rice stores, and savings of five thousand rupees had washed away. Now they had a roughly carpentered wooden cupboard for their clothing—a cupboard twice as large as Asha’s. A small television, bought on an installment plan. Two thick cotton quilts, one blue-and-white checked, one chocolate brown. Eleven stainless steel plates, five cooking pots. Fresh cardamom and cinnamon, superior to the spices most Annawadians used. A cracked mirror, a tube of Brylcreem, a big bag of medicines. The rusty bed. Most people in the slum, Asha included, slept on the floor.