Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  Other scavengers whispered that she’d sold the room in the back of the family hut to pay for a lawyer. Sunil hoped that whatever she was doing for Abdul would spring him from custody, since Mirchi was useless as Abdul’s replacement at the weighing scales. The younger Husain boy didn’t know the value of anything, and when Sunil and the other waste-pickers tried to help him, he made fun of their boils.

  Scavengers were sensitive about their boils, and the worth of their goods. The business of the Husains’ competitor, the Tamil man with the video-game parlor, surged accordingly.

  Zehrunisa saw that Mirchi’s inexperience was hurting the business, but she was too busy with the criminal case to negotiate with the scavengers herself. She was too busy to bathe or feed her young children. Those children, too, became Mirchi’s responsibility, since the relatives before whom Zehrunisa needed to prostrate herself were scattered in slums across a rain-wrecked city. “Please, will you put up bail to get my sick husband, son, and daughter out of jail?”

  In each hut, she’d had to sit through an hour of clucking sympathy and excuses before moving on to the next humiliating visit. Only one begging session had been brief. She’d practically had to swim through Saki Naka slum in the damned burqa in order to reach the hut of Abdul’s soon-to-be-former fiancée. The girl’s father looked at her as if she’d spent the morning at the local liquor still, and that was that.

  Her problem was that she lacked collateral to secure the jail bonds. Since she couldn’t read, Mirchi had reviewed the official documents that her husband had stored in a gray plastic case along with some Iqbal poems and a racy Urdu paperback thriller. Mirchi had unearthed a document for each of the five possessions that had changed the family fortunes. A pushcart that had allowed his father to carry garbage to the recycling plants, and thus to become a buyer of scavengers’ goods. The family hut, purchased from a migrant who’d given up on Mumbai. The storeroom next to the hut, which allowed the family to forestall selling their goods when market prices were low. The three-wheeled jalopy with a truckbed that could transport more than the pushcart. The deposit on the land in Vasai. Only Karam Husain’s name was on these papers.

  “Mother, be calm. I’m fine here,” lied Kehkashan when her mother came to the women’s wing of the Byculla Jail to explain why she couldn’t post bail.

  Karam was less understanding when she arrived at Arthur Road Jail, the city’s largest, most infamous detention center. She’d had to queue for four hours in order to see him, paying off guards and officers long before she’d gotten through the gates. Behind those gates, there were four times as many inmates as official capacity.

  “I am desperate,” her husband told her. His cell had so many bodies that no one could lie flat. He couldn’t breathe because of the crowding. He couldn’t choke down the food. He yelled at her for starting the fight with Fatima, then yelled at her to get him out. As if she hadn’t been trying. As if he hadn’t been the idiot who had threatened to beat Fatima. As if he hadn’t been the one to leave his wife’s name off the family papers.

  She’d been furious at her husband as she left the jail, but she couldn’t sustain it. Arthur Road Jail was a name that terrified every sentient Mumbaikar, and also Zehrunisa, who was not strictly sentient at this time. That her sick husband would have a fight and become an Arthur Road inmate, facing a ten-year felony sentence, was an eventuality for which neither of them had prepared.

  One morning, she was outside prison gates in a turbid downpour, Lallu cursing because the burqa impeded his access to her breast. She switched him to her other arm in order to answer her husband’s cellphone, now in her care: Officer Thokale, her only ally in the Sahar police station, more furious than Lallu. How had other people at Annawadi come to hear that he’d taken money from her to help with the case?

  And what could Zehrunisa say? She had been babbling everything to anyone, waddling around half mad in the weeks since the arrests. Hearing her eldest son screaming as he got beaten at the police station. Seeing her gentle daughter escorted by officers into jail—a moment in which the single word in Zehrunisa’s head was qayamat, the end of the world.

  She couldn’t sleep after that. She couldn’t sleep before that. She barely knew which jail she stood in front of this morning. With the rain had come a snaking white fog. Lallu was saying, “I will have that dog bite your body!” Bicycle boys were whirring past, delivering tiffin lunches to office workers. The Saifee Ambulance Day and Night seemed to have a flat tire.

  The officer on the phone was still shouting.

  “Yes but no, sa’ab,” she told Thokale, frantic. “I am outside. I am in the hospital. Who said all that? No, sa’ab, no. They’re just giving you this false story, instigating all this, making you angry at me. I am in the hospital and my health is very bad. Please listen to me: Such tension about my son, about my daughter. No sir, I am indebted to you. Whoever is saying all this must be crazy. No sir, I said nothing at all.”

  At sunset, clouds distended, the monsoon sky corded red, she would be on her knees outside the station, begging the officer’s forgiveness. Allah only knew what an angry officer might do to further hurt her family.

  The trial might be years away, and what she’d made from selling the back room of the hut was gone. Mirchi’s earnings from garbage covered food and little else. Should she sell the storeroom next? With the imprisonment of her husband, she was the decision-maker, and every choice she’d made thus far seemed to be the wrong one. Maybe she was the zero she’d insisted to her husband she was not.

  She should have paid Asha to calm Fatima down, that day at the police station. She should have paid the special executive officer who claimed to control the witness statements. She should have kept silent about paying Thokale to stop the beatings and postpone her daughter’s arrest. There was only one decision about which she felt confident, which was the decision that she had made for Abdul.

  The police were going to charge Abdul as an adult, because he looked like one, and because Zehrunisa lacked any proof of his age. Hence he would be sent to Arthur Road Jail along with his father.

  Zehrunisa didn’t know Abdul’s age herself. Seventeen was what she’d said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.

  Asha had invented her children’s birthdays and now marked them with parties and cake. In January, Manju had celebrated her eighteenth for the second year running—one of Asha’s tricks to preserve her daughter’s value as a bride. Abdul had never asked for a birthday party. What he’d wanted was a date and a year. His mother could tell him only what she knew:

  “Before you were born, Saddam Hussein had been killing a lot of people somewhere. Maybe a year before, or two, I don’t know. Oh, you beat me up when you were inside me, worse than any of your brothers and sisters afterward, and I cried out so often that people started saying I had another Saddam in my belly. When you came out, you were so small, like a rat’s son, not any Saddam. Still we picked a peaceful name for you, because we worried that what people had said might be true. Abdul Hakim, a person who cures others just by his own understanding. I was relieved when you were a little older and there was nothing in you like Saddam.”

  Had Abdul been more Saddam-like, she would have been less repulsed by the idea of his being in Arthur Road Jail with contract killers, pedophiles, and mafia dons. But she feared that for an argument she had begun, he would be victimized, perhaps raped, in Arthur Road. The only way she could think to prevent this was to pay someone to manufacture a record of his age, to ensure he would be charged as a juvenile.

  She went across the maidan to see the brothelkeeper, who had been accused of drug dealing, pimping, robbery, and who knew what else over the years, but had been imprisoned only twice. She thought he would know about efficacious bribery.

  T
he brothelkeeper acknowledged that this was one of his expertises, and was eager to help in exchange for financial consideration. However, age-related records weren’t part of his repertoire.

  Who else might know whom and how to bribe for such a record? Of course: the Sahar police. Belatedly, she realized that one constable had been dropping hints for days.

  Upon receiving his advice, she sent her money flowing through Marol Municipal School, and into the pocket of the constable. She returned home with just what she’d wanted: a fake school record showing that Abdul Hakim Husain, former student, was sixteen years old. Her son, who had hardly been a child, would at least now be treated like one by the criminal justice system.

  Mumbai’s detention center for juveniles was in Dongri, a neighborhood thirteen miles south of Annawadi. For the first leg of the journey there, Abdul had been smushed against two dozen others inside the back of a police van. But after a stop at a courthouse in Bandra, where his status as a juvenile was recorded, he’d come to Dongri in a taxi, a bored female civilian as his only escort. Past her shoulder, he could track the evening street life of a thriving middle-class Muslim neighborhood.

  On either side of a dark green mosque, storefronts were humming with commerce despite the rain. Halal butcher. Muslim furniture-wallah. Nazir chemist. Habib hospital. Kitchen shops with ladles dangling from hooks. A restaurant with a bright yellow door. Tattered pennants on poles advertising exam-prep courses and aspiring Muslim politicians. A man in a stall selling pinwheels, right before the street life blanked out.

  Immense and mossy stone walls encircled one city block. The front wall was broken by a single iron gate. The gate to Dongri detention center was a strangely small one—child-sized, Abdul supposed.

  He could have run instead of ducking through it; the mind of his escort seemed to be elsewhere, her hand barely gripping his own. But through the door he went, and down a dim passage with a wooden Hindu shrine built into the wall. At its end, he was surprised to find a pleasant courtyard with a palm tree.

  The juvenile facility was a congregation of handsome sandstone buildings erected by the British early in the nineteenth century, supplemented by newer constructions that were half bungalow, half shed. Indian and British criminals had been hanged here in colonial days, and their bloody bones were piled in the basements, or so other juvenile detainees informed Abdul upon his arrival. The ghosts of the hanged men were said to come out every night. Though Abdul had been as afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did not disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.

  Clothes confiscated, Abdul was handed a too-large uniform and escorted to one of the shedlike buildings, where he was locked in a room crammed with other new arrivals. Its windows were shuttered, breath and body smells fouled the air, and after an hour Abdul felt so suffocated that his mind began to go funny. If I stay here any longer, I will cut up a small child and eat him. Afterward, he was astonished that he’d thought this. When the doors finally opened and rotis were passed out, he felt too sick to eat.

  To the warden’s office, next, to be registered as a juvenile detainee. Here, mercifully, windows were open, and the bald, barrel-chested warden appeared tense, not cruel. A leading newspaper, The Times of India, had just run an exposé of the detention facility under the headline “Dongri Home Is a Living Hell.” Human rights activists had been making inquiries in regard to children without underpants who’d been forced to drink from toilets. Conditions were being hastily improved.

  Abdul sat on the floor in the back of the room with some other boys, waiting for the warden to call his name and enter his particulars into a brown paper file. Along the wall behind the warden were portraits of Indian eminences, and of ten faces Abdul felt certain of the names of three. Gandhi, of course, though his eyes were buggier in the portrait than they were on rupee notes. Abdul knew this Gandhi as the one who cared for poor people, who liked Muslims as well as Hindus, who took on the British and made India free. Abdul also recognized Jawaharlal Nehru, the founder of Independent India, who looked Fair-and-Lovely white and unlike any Indian Abdul had seen in real life. Bhimrao Ambedkar was the man in the red necktie and the black-framed eyeglasses—the one who’d fought for the right of the untouchable castes to be treated as human. At Annawadi, many Dalit families had dust-coated versions of this portrait tacked to the front of their huts.

  The other faces on the wall were as mysterious to him as the Hindu gods and goddesses whose statues populated the warden’s desk. He figured Mirchi would be able to name all of the Indian eminences. It was the kind of information a boy would have in his head if he were lucky enough to go to school.

  Registered, Abdul was taken to a barrack to lie with 122 other boys on a cool tile floor. Through a window came the decisive clatter of steel shutters; in the neighborhood outside the stone walls, shops were being closed for the night. He must have slept, for the next sounds he registered were sonorous calls to prayer—the amplified dawn azan of the neighborhood mosques. Allah-u Akbar. God is great.

  Abdul’s father considered it disrespectful to pray to Allah when you were dirty, so Abdul rarely did namaaz. “And even when I do pray, I am thinking about work,” he had confessed to Kehkashan recently. Still, he’d always felt soothed, hearing the muezzins as they summoned believers or announced that lost children in green shirts were at the mosque awaiting reclamation. Under the care of men with such voices, he figured all lost children would be safe.

  About Allah himself, Abdul had over time worked up an economics-based proof, since he lacked a strong internal sense of His existence. He put it this way: “It takes me longer than other people to understand things, but many smart people believe in Allah—the imams, the men who call out the azan, the rich Muslims who do all this charity. Would these people be doing this work and spending money for a God who wasn’t there? Such big people wouldn’t waste their rupees.” So there was definitely an Allah, and He would have a reason why Abdul had been locked up for a crime he hadn’t committed.

  A pockmarked guard was getting everyone up, handing out rags and buckets, ordering the inmates to a long row of taps. There was more water here than at Annawadi, and Abdul felt a little better after washing off the sweating he’d done in the police cell. But on his second morning at Dongri, when ordered to take a bath, he bridled.

  He’d seen no reason for a daily washup at Annawadi, since he was only going to get dirty again as soon as he dried himself off. Sometimes he’d get so ripe that his mother would wave a rag in his face: “You fool, it’s nice to get fresh!” Perhaps it was nice for other people. He personally found the bathing ritual not just pointless but self-deceiving. Getting fresh for a fresh day, in which something new might happen! He thought it better to start the day by acknowledging that it was going to be just as dull as the days preceding it. That way, you wouldn’t be disappointed.

  Abdul informed the guard that he would not take a bath. The guard replied, “No bath, no breakfast.” That was the rule at Dongri. Abdul decided to go hungry. In retrospect, this tantrum would seem foolhardy. But since Fatima burned, he’d been estranged from all known landmarks. Being dirty was the remnant of a former existence he had to cling to.

  On the third morning, the guard said that if he didn’t bathe, he’d miss breakfast and get put in the airless cell that had made him want to eat small children. He decided to accept the Dongri bathing rules. By the fourth morning, his knees and ears and neck were as clean as they’d ever been. The breakfasts received in exchange for this heroic capitulation were dismal. Stones in the rice. Bread so vile that, had his mother served it, he would have put it in his pocket until he could slip it to the pigs. Most of the other boys in his barrack were Muslim—across India, Muslims were overrepresented in the criminal justice system—and when they sat on the floor to eat, they laughed about the terrible food. They called the Children’s Home the chillar home, meaning small change, practically worthless.

  Mornings
, the barrack was unlocked, the chillar extracted. In the courtyard, the boys were ordered to run in a circle, then sing the national anthem, which they did at the top of their lungs. Afterward, they were sent back to the barrack, where they sat on the floor and did nothing at all. In the warden’s office, an official schedule of daily educational and vocational activities was posted prominently. Abdul wasn’t troubled by this discrepancy. Whatever happened to him at Dongri, or didn’t happen, he was safer than at Arthur Road Jail.

  The other detainees passed their free time telling stories and offering one another advice about their cases. There was one recurring counsel: “Just say you did what they say you did, and then you’ll be let out.” The lawyers who came from time to time also said this to their charges. Admit it, the case will be closed, and you can go home.

  Abdul wanted to go home so badly that he considered saying he’d beaten up Fatima before her suicide. He still found it strange to think of her as dead, because at Annawadi he hadn’t considered her fully alive. Like many of his neighbors, he had assessed her damage, physical and emotional, and casually assigned her to a lesser plane of existence. But as he’d learned in the police station, being damaged was nothing like being dead.

  One night in the barrack, a sixteen-year-old confessed to the other boys that he’d stabbed his father to death. It was a matter of honor, he said, after his father strangled his mother. The police were blaming him for both murders, though.

  It sounded like a film story to Abdul. To the other inmates, the boy’s guilt or innocence was less interesting than his claim that he’d come from a family with money—twenty-five lakhs, or fifty-six thousand dollars, in the bank. “So your parents are dead and you’re a rich boy now,” one of the other boys pointed out to the father-killer. Even after the boy explained how a double-murder conviction would interfere with the inheritance, the other children couldn’t stop talking about the cars and the clothes he could buy.