Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  One dawn in late July, Sunil found a fellow scavenger lying in the mud where Annawadi’s rut-road met the airport thoroughfare. Sunil knew the old man a little; he worked hard and slept outside the Marol fish market, half a mile away. Now the man’s leg was mashed and bloody, and he was calling out to passersby for help. Sunil figured he’d been hit by a car. Some drivers weren’t overly concerned about avoiding the trash-pickers who scoured the roadsides.

  Sunil was too scared to go to the police station and ask for an ambulance, especially after what was rumored to have happened to Abdul. Instead he ran toward the battleground of the Cargo Road dumpsters, hoping an adult would brave the police station. Thousands of people passed this way every morning.

  Two hours later, when Rahul left Annawadi for school, the injured man was crying for water. “This one is even drunker than your father,” one of Rahul’s friends teased him. “Drunker than your father,” Rahul retorted unimaginatively as they turned onto Airport Road. Rahul wasn’t afraid of the police; he’d run to them for help when his neighbor dumped boiling lentils on Danush, his sickly baby. The man on the road was just a scavenger, though, and Rahul had to catch a bus to class.

  When Zehrunisa Husain passed an hour later, the scavenger was screaming in pain. She thought his leg looked like hell, but she was bringing food and medicine to her husband, who also looked like hell far across the city in the Arthur Road Jail.

  Mr. Kamble passed a little later, milky-eyed and aching, on his tour of businesses and charities, still seeking contributions for his heart valve. He had once been a pavement dweller like the injured man. Now Mr. Kamble saw nothing but his own bottomless grief, because he knew miracles were possible in the new India and that he couldn’t have one.

  When Rahul and his brother returned from school in the early afternoon, the injured scavenger lay still, moaning faintly. At 2:30 P.M., a Shiv Sena man made a call to a friend in the Sahar Police Station about a corpse that was disturbing small children. At 4 P.M., constables enlisted other scavengers to load the body into a police van, so that the constables wouldn’t catch the diseases that trash-pickers were known to carry.

  Unidentified body, the Sahar Police decided without looking for the scavenger’s family. Died of tuberculosis, the Cooper Hospital morgue pathologist concluded without an autopsy. Thokale, the police officer handling the case, wanted to move fast, for he had business with B. M. Patil Medical College in Bijapur. Its anatomy department required twenty-five unclaimed cadavers for dissection, and this one rounded out the order.

  A few days later, a young scavenger working in the rains discovered another body at the airport: a disabled man lying on an access road to the international terminal, a handmade crutch beside him. Unidentified, no autopsy. A third body turned up on the far side of the sewage lake, in a hole where people went to shit. Everyone using the open-air toilet had noticed that the smell was worse than usual. The decomposed body was of an autorickshaw driver named Audhen, though he, too, was marked unknown, his cause of death recorded as “illness.” On airport scrubland across from the Hyatt, a fourth corpse turned up, head smashed flat: an Annawadi man who loaded luggage at the airport.

  Annawadians suspected that the One Leg had left a curse, and that the whole place was now ruined, rotten, barbad. There were rumors that Annawadi and the other airport slums would be demolished after parliamentary elections next year.

  Some Annawadians were confident that Corporator Subhash Sawant could delay the arrival of the bulldozers. But at a nearby crisscross, a political poster flapped, suggesting that deals were being made. “You pretend you’ve hit me. I pretend I’m crying. You people who live on airport lands are familiar with this phony drama. Now the other party says it will be the one to stop the airport from destroying your homes. So why are they meeting in secret with the government and the developers?”

  Sunil was spooked by the deaths and the rumors, but of more immediate concern was the fact that his younger sister had grown another inch, increasing the height gap between them. In the monsoon, there wasn’t nearly enough airport garbage to get him growing. He was never more dispirited than when he caught a glimpse of another scavenger boy from Annawadi, built like a blade of grass, lugging a sack so full that it bent him.

  This was Sonu Gupta, the blinky boy. He lived seven huts down from Sunil, and was two years older. A few years back, when scavenging at the airport had been less competitive, they’d worked the Cargo Road dumpsters together—a partnership that had ended when Sunil accidentally broke Sonu’s nose. Lately, though, Sonu seemed to be signaling his forgiveness. Sunil sometimes found him loitering on their slumlane before dawn, a look of let’s-work-together spreading over his face.

  The face itself was off-putting: wizened, with one of the blinky eyes rolling up. Sonu was half deaf, too, and on hot days his nose spurted blood—some birth disorder that ran in his family. Sunil was old enough now to imagine what other boys would say should he renew such a substandard alliance. Still, he was curious about how the blinky boy secured so much trash. In any season, let alone the monsoon, bad eyesight was a serious disadvantage for a scavenger.

  One day, Sunil followed Sonu as he worked. He was surprised to find that a kid with no friends in Annawadi possessed profitable relationships outside it—chiefly, with the security guards at one entrance of the vast Air India compound. In the predawn darkness, Sonu waited outside a set of gates on Cargo Road, a tatty broom in hand. Eventually, an Air India guard let him in, and he began to sweep with comical fury. He cleaned the walkways, the security kiosk, the walkways again, erasing the trace of his small footprints, bending so low that he inhaled the whorl of his sweeping.

  It was a display so abject that Sunil felt prepared to disdain it, until the guard emptied two large trash cans at Sonu’s feet. Then Sunil saw the cunning. In the middle of unruly, cutthroat Cargo Road, a slight teenaged boy had all to himself, behind security gates, a wealth of plastic cups, Coke cans, ketchup packets, and aluminum foil trays from a canteen where Air India workers ate.

  Somehow—his pathetic aspect?—blinky Sonu had achieved with the compound’s guards what Sunil had failed to achieve with the rich women who came to the orphanage. Sonu had distinguished himself from the raggedy mass. Soon, only a little embarrassed, Sunil was walking out of Annawadi beside him.

  Sunil had to shout at Sonu to be heard, and at first he barely bothered. A monosyllabic routine was sufficient for their days: sweeping at Air India, trying to secure bottles and trash from the managers of beer bars and food joints, then splitting up to cover more ground. Sunil excelled at scaling walls and running from airport guards who caught him too close to the terminal. Sonu had no interest in being beaten by guards. His skills were consistency and systematic planning. He’d paid the Air India guards to give him trash the first time, but then they’d stopped asking for money.

  The scavenger Sonu supplanted at Air India had beaten him up, and still cursed him when their paths crossed, but Sonu, having been a mockery-magnet all his life, didn’t worry about other people’s opinions. Finishing his daily rounds, he’d stand on Airport Road facing traffic, tightening the strings of his fat sack with crisp tugs, his whole body radiating pride.

  “You’ve taught me how to do this properly,” Sunil told Sonu one day. Sonu was kind enough to split their earnings down the middle: most days, forty rupees, or a dollar, each.

  They started to talk more as they worked. First, little stuff: that toes were almost as useful as fingers for judging the recyclability of goods; that Sonu’s family owned a radio that shocked your hand when you turned up the volume. Then bigger stuff, for Sonu liked to give concise lectures as he scavenged. Imbibing water from the sewage lake gives you jaundice, he argued, against Sunil’s contention that teasing people with jaundice gives you jaundice. Sonu also advised against any involvement with male tourists who stayed in the luxury hotels, given what had happened to his little brother. He suggested that Sunil might want to brush his teeth more than once in
a thousand years, since his breath smelled worse than that of the slum’s rotten-food-eating pigs.

  One day at the Mithi River, Sonu found a cigarette stub before Sunil could pocket it. Crouching, Sonu began to bash the precious stub with a stone. The tobacco came out, the filter shredded, and he nodded toward to the pulverized remains. “If I see you smoke again, Sunil? I will beat you with a stone like this.”

  Sonu objected with equal passion to Sunil’s fascination with Kalu, the garbage thief who acted out movies for the benefit of boys who could not afford to see them. “You stay up half the night listening to this Kalu, and I have to waste so much time trying to get you up the next morning,” Sonu complained. Sonu didn’t understand oversleeping. He pointed out, “Every morning, my eyes open on their own.” Sunil was unused to being worried over, and liked it.

  Sonu’s father was a more colorful drunk than Sunil’s father. Occasionally, he tore up the rupee notes he’d earned that day doing roadwork, saying, “Fuck this! What does money matter?” Sonu was fortunate in his mother, though. At night, she and her four children pulled the stringy manufacturing remnants from pink plastic clothespins—piecework for a nearby factory. During the day, she sold packets of ketchup and tiny jars of jam, past their expiration date, on a sidewalk near the Hotel Leela. Airline catering companies had donated the jam, along with plastic-wrapped packets of cake crumbs, to Sister Paulette, for her needy young wards. Instead the nun sold the expired goods to poor women and children, who in turn tried to resell them. Sonu resented Sister Paulette even more than Sunil did.

  Sonu was enrolled in seventh grade at Marol Municipal. Though he couldn’t go to class because of his work, he registered for school annually, studied at night, and returned at year’s end to take exams. Sonu thought Sunil should do the same. One morning he cocked his head as if to drain the deafness from his ear, and announced: “Educate ourselves, and we’ll be making as much money as there is garbage!”

  “You will, boss,” Sunil said, laughing. “And I’ll be the poor people, okay?”

  “But don’t you want to be something, Motu?” Sonu asked. Sonu had taken to calling Sunil “Motu”—Fatty—a description that fit Sunil only in relation to Sonu.

  Sunil did want to be something, but it didn’t seem to him that a municipal school education gave Annawadi boys better opportunities. Those who finished seventh or eighth grade just ended up scavenging, doing roadwork, or boxing Fair and Lovely lotion in a factory. Only boys who went to private schools had a chance to finish high school and go to college.

  When Sunil and Sonu returned to Annawadi from their garbage-gathering, they stopped talking, and their hips no longer bumped together as they walked. They were skinny kids making a little money—prey. Older boys slapped down the wet road, and suddenly Sunil and Sonu were facing a piledrive, getting a noseful of buffalo shit. A son of Robert the Zebra Man offered them protection from the older boys, for thirty or forty rupees a week. When they didn’t pay, he pummeled them himself.

  Sunil envied those children who seemed to have more than their share of protection. It was understood that a Shiv Sena gang would kick the ass of anyone who messed with Asha’s kids, so no one did. The Husain children had another sort of backing, a family the size of a cricket team. The Hindu boys said that Muslims fucked constantly, in order to make enough babies to outnumber the Hindus. Sunil considered big families of any religion a fine thing, since all he really had was the overgrown irritant Sunita.

  Kalu the garbage thief looked out for Sunil when he was around, though Kalu was pretty small himself. Late in the afternoon, he sometimes joined Sunil on a warm pile of rubble at the far side of the sewage lake, where the slant of light before dusk made the shadows of both boys gigantic. Here, well out of the blinky boy’s sight lines, Sunil could enjoy his daily cigarette in peace. Kalu smoked too, despite the tuberculosis he’d contracted a few years earlier.

  The two boys liked studying Annawadi from a hidden vantage, across the water. From the rocks, they could see how crazy-lopsided all the huts were against the straight lines of the Hyatt and Meridien hotels that rose up behind them. It was as if the huts had fallen out of the sky and gotten smushed upon landing.

  The other marvels on the far side of the lake were a little farm that felt like a secret in the city, and a jamun-fruit tree where parrots nested. Some of the other road boys had been capturing the parrots one by one to sell at the Marol Market, but Sunil brought Kalu around to the belief that the birds should be left as they were. Sunil listened for their squawks when he got up each morning, to make sure they hadn’t been abducted in the night. Sunil thought of Kalu as the parrot of road boys, although the older boy had recently seemed subdued. Even the movies he enacted were growing darker.

  Kalu’s expertise was in the recycling bins inside airline catering compounds. Private waste-collectors emptied these dumpsters on a regular basis, but Kalu had mastered the trash trucks’ schedules. The night before pickup, Kalu would climb over the barbed-wire fences and raid the overflowing bins. He’d managed to secure discarded aluminum serving trays from inside Chef Air, Taj Catering, Oberoi Flight Services, and Skygourmet. The Oberoi dumpsters, he said, had been the most ferociously defended.

  Kalu’s routine had become known by the local police, however. He kept getting caught, until some constables proposed a different arrangement. Kalu could keep his metal scrap if he’d pass on information he picked up on the road about local drug dealers.

  A white-suited cocaine dealer named Ganesh Anna did a galloping business at the airport, and twice a week sent some of his distributors—Annawadi men in their early twenties—to pick up the bulk cocaine in another suburb. Though Ganesh Anna paid the police to stay off his back, the constables weren’t satisfied with their cut. In return for good information about the time and place of drug buys, they would leave Kalu’s trash pilferings alone. Kalu kept a scrap of paper with the officers’ cellphone numbers in the side pocket of his cargo pants—red-and-brown camouflage, Mirchi castoffs.

  Kalu was equally afraid of the police and of Ganesh Anna. He felt like bait fish. He kept bringing up the film Prem Pratigyaa, in which a slum hoodlum feels so trapped by his life that he decides to kill himself with liquor—at which point the glorious Madhuri Dixit saunters to the rescue. Kalu routinely struck out with the girls who waited at the water taps, and both he and Sunil thought it unlikely that any new girl would appear, Madhuri-style, to extricate him from this entanglement. Getting out of Mumbai was the safer bet, and his estranged father had offered him a plausible escape.

  His father and elder brother, itinerant pipe fitters, had a hut in a nearby slum that hung perilously onto a hillside; Kalu sometimes cried about how unwanted he’d felt in that home before he came to live on the road outside Annawadi. “I grew up in a second when my mother died,” he told Sunil. “My father and brother didn’t understand me.” Being misunderstood was better than being trapped between a drug dealer and the police, however. His father and brother were decamping for a construction project in the hill country near Karjat, two hours away from Annawadi. Kalu had learned to pipe-fit as a child, and there would be work on the site for him, too.

  Sunil wished Kalu didn’t have to go. Annawadi would lose a lot of its color without him. It would lose the dramatic, hip-propelled reenactments of Om Shanti Om and the subtler entertainment of Kalu’s hair, which changed in accordance with his favorite movies. Recently he’d grown it long and lank like the crazy college boy played by Salman Khan in that old film Tere Naam.

  Moreover, thieves like Kalu had status that garbage-pickers lacked, and with Kalu’s departure, Sunil would be more firmly fixed in his own identity as a scavenger, like Sonu the blinky boy—the kind of person other people allowed to suffer unaided and die alone on the road.

  A few days before leaving, Kalu told Sunil, “My real name is Deepak Rai. Don’t tell anyone. Also, my main god is Ganpati.” He thought Ganpati, the elephant god, the remover of obstacles, should be Sunil’s main go
d, too. To convince him, Kalu took him on a barefoot nine-mile penitents’ pilgrimage to the Siddhivinayak temple in central Mumbai.

  Which saints and gods to follow was something about which many road boys had strong feelings. Some said Sai Baba was quicker than fat Ganpati. Others contended that Shiva could open his third eye and explode both of them. Sunil’s mother had died before she could teach him about the gods, and he was too unsure of their respective merits to decide upon a favorite. Still, from what he had observed in Annawadi, the fact that a boy knew about the gods didn’t mean the gods would look after the boy.

  ONE AFTERNOON, Abdul’s mother arrived at the Dongri detention facility rain-soaked, the skin under her eyes dark as mango stones. Abdul was sulking when he came out of the barrack—kept his head down, kicked a hard clump of mud. She had come to take him home. A judge had decided he wasn’t the type to run away before his trial in juvenile court, releasing him with strict instructions: Until the trial, report to Dongri every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to prove you haven’t absconded.

  Abdul followed his mother down a long stinking hallway packed with children, across the courtyard, and out onto the street. The rain had turned to drips, and there was a weak sun, low and paling. “So when’s my trial?” he asked her. “When is my father’s trial?”

  “No one knows, but don’t worry,” Zehrunisa said. “Just leave everything to God and keep praying. Now we have a lawyer who will say the right words, and then it will end, because the judge will pick up the truth.”