Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  “Oh, shit!” said Asha. “You’ve got to force her to swallow tobacco right away. That will make her puke everything out.”

  But what would people say if Manju was seen buying tobacco? Manju chased down some Tamil women on Meena’s slumlane, hoping they would have a better idea. “She poisoned herself!” she hissed. “Help me! I don’t know what to do!”

  They shook their heads. “So many fights in that family lately,” someone said.

  “No!” Manju cried, forgetting to be quiet. “Don’t be calm! You have to do something!”

  Meena had come over, was standing beside her.

  “Did you really swallow it?” one of the women asked.

  “I did,” Meena said, her voice mild.

  “Did you take all of it?” Manju demanded. A woman on this slumlane had recently consumed half a tube of the same brand of poison, Ratol, and survived.

  “All of it,” Meena said, then leaned forward to gag, spirals of hair spilling over her face. When the gagging stopped, she started to talk very fast. That the Ratol cost forty rupees at the Marol Market. That she had stolen change from her brothers and father to buy it. Something about always getting beaten. Something about her brother and an omelet, but not just about that. She wasn’t acting out of anger, as Fatima had done. She’d thought it through—had consumed two tubes of rat poison on two other days, but had started to vomit, which led her this time to mix the poison with milk. She hoped the milk would keep the poison in her stomach long enough to kill her.

  This was one decision about her life she got to make. It wasn’t a choice easily shared with a best friend.

  Meena sat again with a heaviness that had nothing to do with her weight. A woman materialized with a bowl of water and salt. “This will make her vomit,” she said, tipping back Meena’s head. She swallowed. Everyone waited. Dry heaves. Nothing.

  Water and laundry soap, another woman suggested, running home to chop up a foul-smelling bar of Madhumati. Meena held her nose as the second brew went down her throat. Finally, she vomited a jet of bright green froth.

  “I feel better,” Meena announced, eventually. “It’s all out.” Her face slick with sweat, she stood unsteadily, and her mother led her inside to sleep off the effects of the poison. As the door shut behind them, the women of the slumlane exhaled. Feminine discretion had averted a scene, perhaps saved a wedding. Meena’s future in-laws might not come to hear that they’d chosen an impetuous bride.

  The shopkeeper two huts down kept selling milk and sugar, unaware. Construction workers returning from work tramped through soapy green vomit. Manju registered through a screen of exhaustion that it was evening and that she needed not to be standing, disheveled, outside her friend’s closed door. She needed to wash her face and get the goddess Durga.

  As she and Asha left to pick up the idol, Meena’s elder brother arrived home, learned that his sister had consumed rat poison, and beat her for it. Meena wept and went to sleep. Just before midnight, she started to cry again. Eventually her father realized that this was not sad crying.

  On the first night of Navratri, as the young people of Annawadi, minus Manju, danced in the illuminated clearing, Meena answered the question of a police officer who had come to her bedside at Cooper Hospital. Had anyone incited her to attempt suicide? “I blame no one,” said Meena. “I decided for myself.”

  On the third night of Navratri, Meena stopped talking, at which point Cooper Hospital doctors extracted five thousand rupees from her parents in the name of “imported injections.”

  On the sixth day of Navratri, Meena was dead.

  “She was fed up with what the world had to offer,” the Tamil women concluded. Meena’s family, upon consideration, decided that Manju’s modern influence was to blame.

  The lights of Navratri came down. Rahul tried to make Manju laugh again, and thought she’d smiled a little the day he pointed out that Meena’s younger brother had lost something, too. “That boy will never want to eat an omelet again.”

  In a certain morning light, Manju could see the name MEENA traced faintly in a broken piece of cement just outside the toilet. “Only in that light,” she said, “and even then, it’s barely there.” Another, lesser Meena lived in Annawadi, and a man who loved that Meena had once carved her name on the inside of his forearm. Manju thought he’d probably written MEENA in the wet cement, too. It stood to reason. But she preferred to believe that Meena’s own finger had made the letters, and that the first girl born in Annawadi had left some mark of herself on the place.

  In November, the waste market in free fall, the Tamil who owned the game shed tried to help the scavengers grasp why their trash was worth so little. “The banks in America went in a loss, then the big people went in a loss, then the scrap market in the slum areas came down, too”: This was how he explained the global economic crisis. A kilo of empty water bottles once worth twenty-five rupees was now worth ten, and a kilo of newspaper once worth five rupees was now worth two: This was how the global crisis was understood.

  The newspapers Sunil collected said that a lot of Americans were now living in their cars or in tents under bridges. The richest man in India, Mukesh Ambani, had also lost money—billions—although not enough to impede construction on his famed twenty-seven-story house in south Mumbai. The lower stories would be reserved for cars and the six hundred servants required by his family of five. Far more interesting to young slumdwellers was the fact that Ambani’s helicopters would land on the roof.

  “Things will get better soon,” Abdul told Sunil and the other scavengers, because that was what his father told him. Although the global markets were volatile, the behavior of tourists could be predicted. They inundated Mumbai in the winter. Indians who lived abroad began arriving in November, for the Diwali holiday. Europeans and Americans came in December. The Chinese and Japanese came soon after, and the hotels and airport boomed until January’s end. With the influx of travelers, Annawadians decided, the losses of monsoon and recession would be recovered.

  One night in late November, Sunil was in the game shed after an unprofitable day of scavenging, watching two boys at one of the red consoles play Metal Slug 3. On the video screen, guerrillas were fighting policemen and mutant lobsters in the streets of a bombed-out city. Outside the game parlor, other Annawadians started getting loud. Sunil eventually realized that the commotion was not the usual Eraz-ex bullshit. People were pressed against the window of the hut where the game-shed owner lived, watching a news report on the man’s TV. Muslim terrorists from Pakistan had floated in rubber boats onto a Mumbai beach, and were running loose in the city.

  The jihadis had taken over two luxury hotels, the Taj and the Oberoi, slaughtering workers and tourists. People were also dead at a place called Leopold Cafe, and reports of more than a hundred other casualties were coming in from the city’s largest train station. Before long, a photo of one of the terrorists filled the television screen. Black T-shirt. Knapsack. Running shoes. He looked like a college kid, except for the automatic weapon.

  The attacks were taking place seventeen miles from Annawadi, in the wealthy southern part of the city—to Sunil, a reassuring remove. He was interested when the television people said the terrorists might have bombs. The bombs in his second-favorite video game, Bomberman, were black and round with long sizzle-fuses. Circus music played when they exploded.

  But a taxi had blown up near Airport Road, and older boys were saying that the airport itself would be a logical target. Manju speculated that if the terrorists had invaded five-star hotels in south Mumbai, they might also come to the five-star hotels by the airport. Might even come through Annawadi to get to these hotels. Mercifully, her unit of the Indian Civil Defense Corps was not being called upon to aid in this particular crisis. She went into her house and shut the door.

  Abdul’s parents were afraid to do the same. What if Annawadi Hindus decided the slum’s Muslims were part of some plot? Door open, Karam Husain turned on the TV. As Abdul covered his head wit
h a sheet, one of his little brothers drew close to the screen. The architecture in the colonial part of the city was beautiful to the younger boy—the red turrets rising up behind the reporters at the Taj, the ornate façade of the train station. Here in Annawadi, every home looked a little like the family who had made it. But even when besieged, this south Mumbai seemed to him majestically coherent—“like a single mind made the whole place.”

  Early the next morning, Sunil and Sonu the blinky boy set off for work, only to discover that scavenging was out of the question. The airport perimeter was sealed, and military commandos with long black guns clustered on Airport Road. The boys ran back to Annawadi and the television of the man who owned the game shed. The Taj Hotel had been burning, terrorists and tourists were still inside, and the newscaster said people all over the world were following the drama. Outside the hotel, well-dressed people wiped away tears as they told reporters what the Taj meant to them.

  Sunil understood that the rich people were mourning the devastation of a place where they had relaxed and felt safe. In his equivalent place, the 96-square-foot game shed, no one cried about the siege of south Mumbai, or about the hundreds of people dead and injured. Instead, slumdwellers worried for themselves. By the time the attack ended, sixty hours after it had begun, many Annawadians had accurately predicted the chain of economic consequences.

  A city in which terrorists killed foreign tourists in hotels was not a place other foreign tourists would want to spend their winter holidays. There would not be a peak season in Annawadi this winter. The airport would be quiet, the hotels empty. When midnight came on January 1, there would be few partiers at the Intercontinental shouting “Happy New Year.”

  Instead, 2009 arrived in the slum under a blanket of poverty, the global recession overlaid by a crisis of fear. More Annawadians had to relearn how to digest rats. Sonu deputized Sunil to catch frogs at Naupada slum, since Naupada frogs tasted better than sewage-lake ones. The deranged scavenger who talked to the luxury hotels stopped accusing the Hyatt of plotting to kill him. Instead, he pleaded to its nonreflective blue-glass front, “I do so much work, Hyatt, and earn so little. Will you not take care of me?”

  One January afternoon, Sunil took a bath in an abandoned pit at the concrete-mixing plant. Pushing away the algae, he examined his reflection with care. He was a thief now, and Sonu said it showed in his face.

  Sunil knew what his friend meant. He’d seen a change come over the faces of other boys who turned to stealing—a change security guards recognized in an instant. He decided he still looked the same: same big childish mouth, wide nose, sunken torso. Same thick hair, sticking up and out now, but about which he had no complaint when he thought about his sister Sunita. Rats had bitten them both while they slept, and the bites had turned into head boils. But she had recently become a baldie, because her boils had erupted with worms.

  Sonu wanted Sunil to renounce his new line of work, and to that end had recently slapped his face four times, hard. Sunil neither slapped back nor changed his mind. Sonu was probably the most virtuous boy at Annawadi, but he also had a mother and younger siblings working to supplement the household income. Sunil, unable to feed himself by scavenging, had to consider his airport terrain afresh, and locals who fenced stolen goods were glad to help him. For Sunil’s first solo mission, a teenaged thief-wrangler, himself with a worm-bald sister, provided a bicycle for a high-speed getaway. By morning, the airport fire brigade was stripped of copper faucet valves. The game-shed man handed over his cutting tools, and metal supports disappeared beneath dozens of concrete sewer covers. As construction workers prepared a cavernous airport car park for its opening, Sunil set to dismantling bits of it, screw by screw.

  He was well suited to his work as a new-economy microsaboteur. His climbing ability had been honed on Airport Road coconut trees, his small size helped deflect suspicion, and he didn’t balk at calculated risks, like the ones he took when jumping down to the garbage-filled ledge above the river. The only problem was that his hands and legs shook every time he picked up a piece of metal—a nervous tic other thieves found hilarious.

  One of them, Taufeeq, had been asking him all month, “Should we go into the Taj tonight?” The Annawadi boys’ Taj was not the hotel that the terrorists attacked. Their Taj was Taj Catering Services, a squat building on airport grounds owned by the hotel company. Behind high stone walls topped with rows of barbed wire, meals to be served on flights got made. Recently, Sunil had noticed orange netting and iron scaffolding rising above the walls: an indicator that something was being built inside, and that there might be metal on the ground for the taking.

  In his day, Kalu had scaled the barbed wire to raid the dumpsters. Sunil cased the Taj for an easier way in, discovering a small hole concealed by brush at the base of one wall. The fact that the hole sat at the end of an unlit gravel lane made a stealing expedition practically compulsory. Sunil kept putting off the mission, though.

  His fellow thief, Taufeeq, complained that other boys would discover the hole if they hesitated any longer. But this Taj Catering made Sunil think of Kalu and of death, as did the military men in blue berets lately crouching behind bunkers, as did the Sahar Police, who seemed to have grown meaner in the months since the terror attacks. Recently, a guard at the Indian Oil compound had caught Sunil sneaking around in search of metal and delivered him to an inebriated constable named Sawant. At the station, the constable had stomped on his back and beaten him so viciously that another officer apologized to Sunil and brought a blanket to cover him.

  Given the risks, Sunil wanted to spend more nights watching the Taj guards through the hole, assessing the odds of getting caught. In the meantime, he got money for food by working the four-story car park nearing completion by the international terminal.

  By now he knew the best way in: past rows of bright red-and-yellow barricades; past bulldozers and a generator, shrouded at night; past a checkpoint where guards with flashlights were opening car trunks; past an awesome mountain of gravel; past a bitter almond tree whose leaves had reddened, which meant the nuts had gone from sour to sweet; past two of the security bunkers.

  One midnight in January when he visited the dark garage, he couldn’t make out which animals were scurrying underfoot. Rats or bandicoots, possibly, but he’d never encountered them in the car park before. Guards he had often encountered, but tonight he couldn’t tell where they were. He moved carefully to a stairwell near an exterior wall made of horizontal steel slats. The slatted wall let in a bit of the blue-white light bathing the international terminal, where travelers were still hugging their families goodbye. Being near the light increased the risk of being seen by a guard, but it allowed for proper surveillance.

  He was searching for what Annawadians called German silver—aluminum or electroplate or nickel. Lately, the term was spoken with reverence. The price for German silver had recently dropped from a hundred rupees per kilo to sixty, but the price for everything else had fallen further.

  Sunil worked his way up the stairwell, taking care, on each landing, to peer through a small hole in the floor. He supposed that a water pipe would eventually run through the holes, but for now, they allowed him to ascertain whether guards were slinking up the stairs behind him. Nepali watchmen scared him most, because they were sort of Chinese, like Bruce Lee.

  On the third tier, in a corner, were two long strips of aluminum. He darted out to grab them, surprised that some other thief hadn’t found them. He thought they might have been parts of a window frame, although the car park didn’t have windows. The practical function of the items he stole at the airport didn’t matter to his work, but he still wondered.

  He carried the metal strips up to the roof, where the only German silver he’d ever found was inside a red cabinet marked FIRE HOSE BOX—a flimsy holder for a fire extinguisher, worth little. The roof was also where he was most likely to encounter watchmen, who went there to smoke. Still, he tried to get up to this roof on every visit. At four stori
es, it was the highest roof he’d ever been on, but what made it exhilarating was the vista of open space, a rarity in the city.

  The roof had two kinds of spaces, really. One kind was when he stood exactly in the middle and knew that even if his arms were thirty times longer he’d touch nothing if he spun around. That kind of space would be gone when the lot was open and filled with cars, a month from now. The space that would last was the kind he leaned into, over the guardrails.

  He liked seeing red-tailed Air India planes taking off. He liked the bulbous municipal water tower. He liked the building site of the massive new terminal. He didn’t care for the smokestack of Parsiwada crematorium, where Kalu’s body had burned. Better to spot the glowing Hyatt sign and try to pinpoint which of the dark patches beneath it was Annawadi. Best, though, was watching the rich people moving in and out of the terminal.

  Other boys who visited this roof liked watching the moving people because they looked so small. For Sunil, seeing the people from above made him feel close to them. He felt free to watch them in a way he couldn’t when he was on the ground. There, if he stared, they would see him staring.

  Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once, he had believed he was smart and might become something—not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.

  Enough time-pass: He had to get home with his German silver. He carried the aluminum strips down the stairs and, before leaving the building, unzipped his pants and slid the metal through the legs of his underwear. German silver against the skin didn’t feel good, but when he tried to carry it outside his underwear, it slipped around.

  He limped, stiff-legged, past the security checkpoints and the Sahar Police Station. Soon he was at Annawadi, curling up to sleep in the back of a lorry. The next afternoon, he used the game-parlor man’s tools to steal tire locks that the airport parking police clipped onto autorickshaws.