Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  When he returned to the game shed after dark, everyone was talking about a woman who had just tried to hang herself, and failed. Her indebted husband had sold their hut, and she didn’t want to live on the pavement.

  Too many Annawadi females wanted to die, it seemed to Sunil. He felt especially sad about Meena, who had been nice to him. And all for an egg, people said.

  Abdul contended that what Meena had done was daring. People had called Kalu daring, too. Now the Tamil who owned the game shed said that he, Sunil, was Annawadi’s daring boy: “The number-one thief!” Sunil saw through the guy’s words to his motive. The Tamil was trying to bolster his confidence so that he’d do the theft at the Taj and sell him the goods. Sunil didn’t have that confidence tonight.

  On the road outside the shed, his father was careening past, and Abdul was talking animatedly to another boy, who wasn’t listening. As Abdul talked, he was twisting his neck back and forth, same as a water buffalo standing behind him. Sunil laughed as he walked over. It was the kind of goofy behavior Kalu would have mimicked. Abdul and the buffalo were probably flinging back and forth the same killer mosquitoes.

  “Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?” Abdul was asking the boy who was not listening. He seemed to be in one of the possessions that came over him from time to time, ever since he got locked up at Dongri.

  “Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that,” Abdul went on. “I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.’ And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, ‘Don’t confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.’ ”

  Sunil thought that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly—the kind that could be ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he’d come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.

  In February, the impatient Taufeeq beat Sunil up and assumed control of the operation to rob Taj Catering Services. Sunil was relieved to be demoted to one of four soldiers. The boys went through the hole in the stone wall once a week for three weeks, acquiring twenty-two small pieces of iron. One night, when security guards came running, the boys pelted them with stones. Sunil now had enough to eat, plus ten extra rupees to buy a skull-shaped silver-plate earring that he’d seen outside the Andheri train station. He’d always wanted to own something shining.

  There was more German silver in the car park, and in the industrial warehouses over the river. A ladder hoisted from a security kiosk was worth a thousand rupees, divided five ways. Weeks passed in which Sunil was mostly not hungry, and in which he was granted a wish for something greater than a silvery earring.

  At first he didn’t believe it—thought it was a trick of shadow and light-slant on the wall of his hut. But standing back to back with Sunita, it was confirmed. He was taller. As a thief, Sunil Sharma had finally started to grow.

  While Abdul’s father privately believed that the only Indians who went on trial were those too poor to pay off the police, he had raised his children to respect the Indian courts. Of all the public institutions in the country, these courts seemed to Karam the most willing to defend the rights of Muslims and other minorities. In February, his own trial approaching, he began to follow trials across India in the Urdu papers the way some other Annawadians followed soap operas. Though he disputed many a specific court resolution, and understood that some judges were corrupt, his relative faith in the judiciary obtained.

  “In the police station, they tell us only to be silent,” Karam said to Abdul, who remembered enough not to need telling. “In the courts, though, what we say may get heard.” Karam was still more hopeful when he learned that his case had been assigned to the city’s Fast-Track Sessions Court.

  In normal courts, five or eight or eleven years sometimes passed between the declaration of charges and the beginning of a trial. To people without permanent work—the vast majority in India—every court appearance involved a forfeit of daily wages. Long trials were economically ruinous. But by fiat of the central government, the massive case backlogs were now being addressed by fourteen hundred high-speed courts across the country. In Mumbai, verdicts were flying out of fast-track courts so quickly that the number of pending trials, citywide, had declined by a third in three years. Many notorious cases, including organized-crime ones, went directly to fast track, since the public was presumably eager to see them resolved. But in addition to the publicized cases, which brought television trucks to the fast-track courthouse, were thousands of small, unnewsworthy trials, like the Husains’.

  A judge named P. M. Chauhan had been assigned to decide whether Karam and Kehkashan had driven their neighbor to self-immolation. Abdul would have a separate trial in juvenile court at a later date and would not see the inside of Judge Chauhan’s courtroom. As such, the trial felt to him as if it were happening oceans away, no matter what his sister said about a sixty-minute bus-and-train ride to a south Mumbai neighborhood called Sewri. The matter was one of many in his life that he considered out of his hands. He simply counted on Kehkashan, a more reliable narrator than his father, to keep him apprised of how worried he should be.

  The courthouse in Sewri had previously been a pharmaceutical company. “This hardly seems like a court,” Kehkashan said to her father, concerned, on the day the trial began. No teak banisters; nothing stately. The hallways were clotted with encampments—families of other accused people eating, praying, sleeping, leaning against a greasy tile wall upon which signs threatened fines of twelve hundred rupees for spitting. The whole place seemed to lack a resident crew of waste-pickers. In the courtroom, empty plastic bottles and cans wreathed the base of the high platform from which Judge Chauhan presided.

  “This lady judge is strict,” a police officer had said. “She does not let the accused go free.” Kehkashan saw at once that this Judge Chauhan was impatient. Pursing her dark red lips, the judge shouted at her father, who had shown up this first day without a lawyer. “It’s a bhaari case, a grave one! Don’t delay me, start it fast, get it going!”

  The impatience was structural. Like most fast-track judges, Chauhan conducted more than thirty-five trials simultaneously. A given case wasn’t heard beginning to end, the way Kehkashan had seen on TV serials. Rather, it was chopped into dozens of brief hearings that took place at weekly or fortnightly intervals. On an average day, the judge heard bits of nine trials, so the accused bench where Kehkashan and her father sat, under police supervision, was a crowded affair. There were men on trial for murder, for armed robbery, and for electricity-thieving, many of them shackled. Karam was the oldest man on the bench, Kehkashan the solitary female. Their seats were against the back wall of the courtroom, behind a great assembly of white plastic chairs for witnesses and observers and two tiers of metal desks where a proliferation of clerks, prosecutors, and defenders paged through files. To Kehkashan, the witness stand and the judge with the lipstick seemed very far away.

  At the next lightning-fast hearing, the Husains’ lawyer materialized, and a medical officer from Cooper Morgue testified, falsely, that Fatima had been burned over 95 percent of her body. Hearing over. “Now what? What’s next?” asked the judge, pulling out a new file and moving to another case.

  Another week, a Sahar police officer testified about the conclusion of the station’s investigation: that the Husains had beaten Fatima and driven her to suicide. “Now what? What’s next?” asked the judge.

  What came next was the part of the trial the Husains dreaded.
Beginning this March day, and continuing in brief sessions for untold weeks, would be the testimony of neighbors whom the police had chosen to interview from Annawadi, and whom the prosecution had chosen to make its case.

  Peculiarly, most of these “witnesses” had not been on hand for the fight that had preceded the burning. Among them were Fatima’s husband and her two closest friends.

  On the accused bench, Kehkashan was glad for her burqa, which obscured the fact that she was dripping sweat. She’d contracted jaundice in jail, and a lingering fever had just shot up, which she attributed to her anxiety. She considered her family’s behavior on the crucial day to have been ragged and shameful. She wished she hadn’t said, during the fight with Fatima, that she would twist off her neighbor’s other leg; she wished her father hadn’t threatened to beat Fatima up. But ugly words were unlikely to send them to prison. They would go to prison if enough of the supposed witnesses backed Fatima’s revised hospital statement to the police about being throttled and beaten.

  Poornima Paikrao, special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra, had helped craft that hospital statement, after which she’d told Zehrunisa that the accounts of other witnesses would be equally damaging, unless the Husains paid her off. She’d made her second attempt at extortion this morning, right outside the courthouse.

  The Annawadi witnesses might remember new, devastating details of the night in question, the special executive officer had told Karam. She herself might have to testify about Fatima’s dying declaration in such a manner that a guilty verdict was all but guaranteed. The special executive officer didn’t want to do it. She wanted to help them. “But what else can I do?” she asked, palms up, as always. “Think again about what might happen. You and your children will go to jail. So what do you suggest?”

  “I won’t pay,” Karam had sputtered. “Already my son and daughter have seen the inside of the jail—the terrible things you threaten have already happened. But we’re paying the lawyer, not you, to fix it. The lawyer will make the judge see the truth. And if this judge doesn’t see it,” he had concluded with bravado, “I will take it all the way to the Supreme Court!”

  Awaiting the first of their neighbors in a trashed-out courtroom, both father and daughter hoped this belief in the Indian judiciary had a basis in reality.

  First to the wooden witness stand was one of Fatima’s two close confidantes, a destitute girl named Priya. Priya was probably the saddest girl in Annawadi, and Kehkashan had known her for years. This morning, the two young women had shared an autorickshaw from the slum to the train station, sitting thigh to dampening thigh, each in her own unhappy bubble. Avoiding Kehkashan’s eyes, Priya had hugged herself, repeating, “I will not go, I am not going.” Priya had avoided most people’s eyes since the burning. “Fatima was the only person who knew my heart’s pain,” she once said. A tougher girl might have been able to forget her friend’s cries for help, her thrashings. But at the stand, as in Annawadi, Priya wore her damage like a slash across the face.

  It wasn’t the kind of damage that turned a girl into a fabulist, though. Trembling, Priya told the prosecutor she hadn’t been on the maidan when the fight occurred, and had seen Fatima only after she’d been burned. Fatima provoked a lot of fights in the slum, Priya allowed to the defender before being dismissed from the stand.

  Succeeding her in front of the judge was a handsome, articulate man named Dinesh, who loaded luggage at the airport. Kehkashan had never spoken to him, but she’d heard rumors that his testimony would be damaging. She felt sicker than ever when she saw him take the stand with a clenched jaw, a livid face. Because he was speaking in Marathi, some minutes passed before Kehkashan figured out that his anger was not directed at her family but at the Sahar Police.

  Shortly after the burning, an officer had recorded a witness statement under Dinesh’s name describing the fight. The statement was false, Dinesh told the judge. He’d been at home in another slumlane, hadn’t seen the fight, and didn’t see why he’d been called as a key prosecution witness. He cared little about the Husains or whether they ended up in prison. What he cared about was having to forgo a day’s income because of an inaccurate police statement.

  The surprised prosecutor quickly wrapped up his questioning, the hearing came to an end, and Kehkashan and her father returned to Annawadi feeling almost giddy.

  Despite the insinuations of the special executive officer, the first witnesses hadn’t lied in order to ruin them. Looking back, Kehkashan would remember this afternoon’s shock of optimism, before the seams of the celebrated fast-track court began to show.

  By April, the case of the Husains was poking along in bitty hearings, and Judge P. M. Chauhan was annoyed. Her stenographer, adept in only the Marathi language, was hopeless at translating the slum Hindi of the Annawadi witnesses into the English required for the official transcript. Impatient at the translation delays, the judge began telling the stenographer what to write. And so a slumdweller’s nuanced replies to the prosecutor’s questions became monosyllabic ones—the better to keep the case moving along. At the end of a particularly tedious hearing, the judge rose for lunch and sighed to the prosecutor and defender, “Ah, fighting over petty, stupid, personal things—these women. All that and it reached such a level they made it a case.” It was becoming apparent that the outcome of the trial mattered only to the people of Annawadi.

  For Kehkashan and her father, ten years of incarceration were at stake. But as the weeks progressed, they found it impossible to understand what was being said for or against them in the front of the courtroom. The windows had been opened on account of the April heat, so instead of hearing the testimony upon which their liberty depended, they heard the cacophony of an industrial road. Car horns. Train horns. Throttling engines. The beep-beep of trucks reversing. This outside noise seemed to be sucked in by the ceiling fan, churned and flung outward by its metal blades. Hearing over. Next hearing. Now something had gone wrong with the fan, and its whirring had become a loud clatter.

  What was the policeman telling the judge? What was the judge telling the prosecutor? The prosecutor had an orange comb-over, stiff with hair spray, and when he nodded vigorously, one clump of hair came loose and traveled upward. More vigorous nodding and it was straight in the air, like a finger pointing to the heavens. Hearing over. Come back in a week. Kehkashan stopped leaning forward, started sagging in her seat. She was so poised the day Fatima’s husband took the stand.

  A few months back, Fatima’s husband, Abdul Shaikh, had brought his daughters to the Husain home for Eid, the holiest day of the Muslim year. Young Abdul had dejugulated a goat on the maidan, and old Abdul had worked with him shoulder to shoulder, stripping back the muscle to mine the meat for the feast. Same as they’d always done at Eid. A good goat this year, a good time. But the trial was a matter of honor for Fatima’s husband, just as it was for the Husains.

  The old garbage sorter had been able to hear more than the Husains could, from his seat in the middle of the courtroom. As the trial progressed, he realized that Fatima’s deathbed account of a beating and a throttling was being undermined. Witnesses kept saying the fight had been one of hot words. Abdul Shaikh was disturbed by this contradiction of the first and last official statement of his wife.

  He and Fatima had not been happy, after the first warm year. They’d fought regularly about her lovers, the force with which she beat the children, the force with which he beat her when drunk. He didn’t have it in him to prettify their history. But day in and day out since Fatima’s death, he had had to live beside the Husains, hearing Zehrunisa singing to her daughters, hearing Mirchi making everyone laugh. Fatima’s suicide had thieved him of the chance, however remote, of finding peace with his wife and giving his beloved daughters a happy home.

  He wanted to blame someone other than his wife for this loss of future possibility. He wanted the judge to convict the Husains. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what the Husains had or hadn’t done to Fatima, and
had said so in his original statement to the police. He’d been at work, arriving home only to see his wife grotesquely injured. His daughters, underfoot during the fight, had told him that no one had hit anyone. But where did that leave those girls? He didn’t want them to grow up knowing that their mother had burned herself, lied, and died.

  His daughters were back at Annawadi now. He’d removed them from Sister Paulette’s care upon finding bruises on their arms and legs. They’d been elated to leave. “Always we had to say ‘Thank you, Jesus’ to a picture of a white man,” his younger daughter said. “It was so boring!” Since coming home, they hadn’t once asked about their mother, but Noori, who’d seen the burning through the window, had changed. She’d stand in the road as if she wanted the oncoming cars to hit her, and had developed a nervous habit of chewing her head scarf.

  Today, though, she’d been excited to take the train across the city to the courthouse, and especially enthusiastic about the television cameras set up outside. “Some big trial must be happening today,” Abdul Shaikh had told his daughters, who’d run in front of one camera to smile and wave. Other Annawadians said the younger daughter, Heena, smiled just like her mother. Abdul Shaikh thought this was correct, though he didn’t have a great mental reserve of Fatima smiles to reflect on.

  “Will they show us on TV now?” Noori had asked as the three of them went through a low metal security gate. Turning to answer, Abdul Shaikh banged his head hard on the gate. He still felt dazed an hour later, standing in the wooden witness box.

  In his right hand he clutched a creased plastic bag containing his wife’s death certificate, two photos of her dressed nicely—the pink outfit and the blue—and the government document about her disability that had secured her metal crutches, free of charge. These remainders of her presence stank of mildew and contained words he couldn’t read, but he wanted them in his hands as he gave the testimony he hoped would put the Husains in prison.