Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  The previous week, a Congress Party truck had pulled up outside Annawadi, and workers unloaded eight stacks of concrete sewer covers. A crowd amassed on the road, excited at the pre-election gift. Thanks to Priya Dutt’s party, the slumlanes would have no more open sewers.

  A few days later, the Congress Party workers returned in the truck. Instead of installing the sewer covers, they reclaimed them. The covers were needed in one of the district’s larger slums, where the prop might influence a greater number of voters. Older Annawadians laughed as they watched the truck depart. The blatancy was refreshing.

  The eunuchs, who were migrants from Tamil Nadu, saw little difference among the political parties, but they were eager to vote nonetheless. Their problem was that district elections officials sometimes failed to process registration forms submitted by migrants and other reviled minorities. While Asha and her husband had voter cards and I.D. numbers that allowed them each two votes, in two different precincts, many non-Maharashtrians in Annawadi had yet to secure their one vote. Zehrunisa and Karam Husain were local record holders in disenfranchisement, having spent seven years trying unsuccessfully to register to vote.

  To the excluded Annawadians, political participation wasn’t cherished because it was a potent instrument of social equality. The crucial thing was the act of casting a ballot. Slumdwellers, who were criminalized by where they lived, and the work they did, living there, were in this one instance equal to every other citizen of India. They were a legitimate part of the state, if they could get on the rolls.

  The tallest eunuch bowed toward Asha, then crouched at her feet. “Teacher,” the eunuch said, “one year ago we went to register at the office but still we have not received our voting cards. We have done the needfuls but then, nothing. The election is so near. Will you take our forms and give them to the right people and make them give us a vote?”

  Asha picked up a hand mirror.

  The eunuch coughed. “Can you help? Teacher?”

  Manju furrowed her brow. Her mother was acting as if the eunuchs were not even there. Asha picked up a tub of moisturizing cream and rubbed her face, slowly. She poured talc on her palms and massaged it onto her cheeks. She was getting ready to go someplace else.

  “What! Putting on makeup!” hissed one of the eunuchs to another, too loudly. But in the someplace for which Asha seemed already to have departed, she didn’t hear.

  Asha had quit being slum boss. She was done with politics. Done with disenfranchised eunuchs and all the other inhabitants of Annawadi, “finished with all these small deals that keep me running here and there.” Whether the Husains went to prison or an entire slumlane expired of TB or Fatima’s ghost got bored with her hauntings and took it upon herself to clean the toilets, which badly required it: not of interest. Asha might have to live in this slum, for the time being. But she was a member of the overcity now: the director of a charitable trust, a philanthropic organization with a city vendor number, and maybe, someday soon, foreign donors. She was a respectable woman in the land of make-believe, who also happened to be late for a date.

  “At the petrol pump,” the man had said on the phone. “In the pink housedress, the one I like.”

  So behind the lace curtain, smiling, Asha wound around her body a silk sari in a tasteful black-and-white print. What she liked. The person she had become.

  “You look good,” said Manju, upon consideration. “Better than that pink.”

  “Oh ho, nice,” concurred one of the eunuchs sullenly, as the new Asha stepped into the dark.

  In mid-May, the election results came in. The reform-minded elites had not turned out to vote, after all. Most of the incumbent parliamentarians were reelected, they returned the prime minister to office, and the radical improvements in governance promised before the voting were quietly shelved. A few weeks later, the bulldozers of the airport authority began to move across the periphery of Annawadi.

  The Beautiful Forever wall came down, and in two days, the sewage lake that had brought dengue fever and malaria to the slum was filled in, its expanse leveled in preparation for some new development. The slumdwellers consoled one another, “It’s not us yet, just at the edges.” The demolition of airport slums would occur in phases over several years, so there was still plenty of time for the residents to unite to ensure that the businessmen and politicians who’d been buying up huts wouldn’t be the only beneficiaries of the promised rehabilitation.

  In the meantime, the earth-flattening at Annawadi’s borders gave the children something to do. They stood where the sewage lake used to be, rapt, as the bright yellow bulldozers churned the ground. The machines were unearthing the recyclable remainders of an earlier city: a suede oxford, once white; rusty screws and other bits of plastic and metal. Salable commodities, all.

  One Saturday afternoon, the little Husains wandered out with Fatima’s daughters to join other child prospectors at the edge of the site. As the children kept their eyes on the shovels, they debated what was going to be built on the newly reclaimed land.

  “A school,” someone said.

  “No, a hospital is what I heard it is going to be.”

  “One of those hospitals for babies being born.”

  “No, fool. What they’re doing is for the airport. A taxi stand. And planes will come here also.”

  “That ground is too small for planes. They are making a place for us to play cricket only.”

  Fatima’s younger daughter tensed. Something was gleaming at the edge of a new gash in the earth. She sprinted out toward a bulldozer, darting under a lowering shovel.

  “Don’t,” yelled a woman passing by. The little girl did: crouched and tugged, jumped back just in time to avoid getting clocked, and, after the bulldozer passed, squatted again to dig. It was a whole, real something—a heavy steel cooking pot! She seized it and tore back to Annawadi, beaming, her bare feet kicking up dirt clouds as she ran.

  The old pot was worth at least fifteen rupees, and at the sight of it two women in the maidan began to laugh. From progress and modernization, at least one Annawadian would make a profit. Fatima’s daughter lifted her treasure high for all of her envious peers to see.

  A few weeks later, the children found a still more exciting diversion: journalists bearing cameras with long black snouts. Suddenly, Annawadi was in the news.

  The proximate cause was a cheerful, if illegal, June tradition—a Sunday afternoon horse-and-carriage race on the gleaming Western Express Highway. Small bets were placed, and people lined the highway to watch.

  The deposed slumlord, Robert the Zebra Man, was running two of his horses harnessed to an undermaintained carriage, freshly painted red and blue. Late in the race, as the pretty cart reached the crest of an overpass, one of its wheels rolled away. The carriage veered, harnesses broke, and the unnerved horses plunged off the bridge. A newspaper photographer was on hand to capture their grisly landing on the road below. And so began a campaign to find and penalize their negligent owner—Robert having fled the scene, leaving only a false address behind.

  Public outrage built, and newspaper headlines multiplied. “On the Dead Horse Trail: An Exclusive Investigation.” “Minutes After Horses’ Death, Cops Knew About It; No Case Even Now!” “Exclusive! Where the Two Horses Lived Before Their Painful Death.”

  One day, Sunil, Mirchi, and other children watched as activists from a group called the Plant & Animals Welfare Society, or PAWS, brought in the media and representatives of the city’s Animal Welfare League for a “raid” on Robert’s horse shed. Several horses were determined to be malnourished. Cuts and sores were found on painted zebras. The Animal Welfare League spirited the neediest of the beasts to a therapeutic horse farm. “Horses Rescued!” was the headline of the following day.

  The persistent activists then turned their attention to Robert’s prosecution. The officers at the Sahar police station, having enjoyed a long, mutually profitable relationship with the former slumlord, declined to register a charge of cruelty to animal
s (“Culprit Goes Scot-Free!”). So the animal-rights group took its photographic evidence to the commissioner of the Mumbai Police. Finally, the former slumlord and his wife were charged under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act for failing to provide adequate food, water, and shelter to their four-legged charges.

  The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.

  They weren’t thinking about the uninvestigated deaths of Kalu and Sanjay. Annawadi boys broadly accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all. The boys were simply puzzled by the fuss, since they considered Robert’s horses the luckiest and most lovingly tended creatures in the slum.

  The activists had been few in number but, working together, they’d made their anger about the horses register. At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now; the quashing of voter applications at the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborers’ pay. Abdul was one of many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together—not even about the airport authority.

  Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.

  What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

  As the rains began in June, the new judge presiding over the trial of Kehkashan and her father started calling witnesses. This judge, C. K. Dhiran, had bony hands and sleepy eyes behind his spectacles, and he ran through cases even faster than the first judge had. Approaching his courtroom, on the top floor of the building, Kehkashan turned her head to a small window, where over an expanse of wet tile roofs she could make out the Arabian Sea.

  What was the point of trying to mind-read another judge? She was still weak from jaundice and tension, and as the weeks passed it seemed futile to try to understand what was being said or to predict whether or not she and her father would go to prison. Her mother was worried enough for all of them, with her terrible dreams and her new habit of running across the maidan in her sleep. Kehkashan simply sat on the bench with the other accused people and murmured prayers until she was free to join the rest of the family in devising new ways to make money. As Mirchi put it, they were now “down to earn-and-eat.”

  They had given up on the idea of restarting their garbage business in Saki Naka. The rent on the shed there had been greater than Abdul’s monthly income. So Abdul now spent his days driving the rattletrap three-wheeled truck from slum to slum, looking for jobs transporting other people’s waste to recyclers. Mirchi took the temp jobs he could find, in addition to discreetly trading garbage at Annawadi when the police were not around. Their younger brother Atahar dropped out of school, paid for fake papers that said he was of working age, and broke rocks on the road. Atahar said he didn’t mind quitting school to help his family, but Kehkashan minded, very much.

  On the last day of July, the prosecutor and the defender made their closing arguments. The judge looked at Kehkashan for what seemed to her to be the first time, and cracked a joke about her burqa: “Are we certain this is the accused? It could be someone else. Who can recognize her, dressed like this!” When the judge finished laughing and the lawyers finished saying whatever it was they were saying to the judge, in English, the judge told Kehkashan and her father to come back in ninety minutes. There would be a verdict.

  As they left the courtroom, the judge was saying, “Now I am only waiting for the pay hike to take effect and then I should retire. Maharashtra is such a narrow-minded state—only here they ask for the receipts and bills from judges. In Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, the judge receives the petrol money along with the salary without having to produce bills.…”

  Outside the courthouse, a city garbage truck rolled over a dog. It yelped and died, and Kehkashan and her father decided the courthouse canteen was a better place to wait. Kehkashan sat on the floor and stared at her shoes, which were new and plastic and hurt her. When she walked back into the courtroom she was limping and barefoot.

  “What do you do?”

  At the witness stand, Kehkashan answered the first and last question that the judge had directed to her.

  “Housewife,” she said. She wasn’t about to tell him about leaving her husband and the photos of the other woman in his cellphone.

  “And what is your business?” the judge asked Karam, who had clasped his hands to stop them from trembling.

  “Sir, I am of plastics,” Karam replied. He thought it sounded better than “of empty water bottles and polyurethane bags.”

  “Well, because of you,” the judge said, “one woman’s life has gone.”

  “No, sa’ab!” Karam cried out. “She did what she did by herself.”

  The judge said nothing for a while, then looked to the prosecutor with the stiff orange comb-over.

  “So what to do with these ones, then? Should I sentence them to two years or three years?”

  Kehkashan froze. Then the judge smiled and held up his hands.

  “Go, leave them,” he said to the lawyers. “Jao, chhod do.” He declared the Husains not guilty. It was over.

  The judge’s conclusion was succinct. “There is nothing on record to show that the accused in any manner instigated the deceased to commit suicide. Thus, prosecution has miserably failed to establish guilt against accused beyond reasonable doubt.”

  Move along now. The judge had other cases to hear, and wanted to clear the witness stand, to which Kehkashan and her father appeared to be glued. “You can go,” the defense attorney said a second time, more emphatically, and Kehkashan and her father flew.

  ——

  Now only Abdul’s trial in juvenile court—the judgment on his honor—remained. In September 2009, the clerk at the juvenile court said, “Next month it is likely to start.” In October, the word was, “Three months’ time, maybe.” A Sahar police officer whom Abdul kept running into at Dongri was at least consistent. “Admit you did those things to the One Leg! There is a solution to everything! Your case will go on forever if you don’t admit it, and if you do admit it, they will let you go today.”

  As 2009 drew to a close, Zehrunisa was taking special measures to hasten Abdul’s trial and vindication. She visited a Sufi mystic on Reay Road who specialized in improving futures, relieving tensions, removing curses, and appeasing ghosts—the latter an important part of the draw for Zehrunisa, who thought Fatima’s ghost might be behind Abdul’s legal limbo. The mystic tied a red thread on Zehrunisa’s wrist and sent her to tie another red thread around a tree in a courtyard where her fellow pilgrims were spinning and chanting to drumbeats. The spirits would be friendlier now, the mystic had promised, taking the money. Still, Zehrunisa thought it couldn’t hurt to go to the mosque and do a mannat in Abdul’s name, for seven Fridays.

  As 2010 progressed and Zehrunisa’s efforts bore no fruit, the special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra resurfaced to suggest that money would start a trial faster than prayer. Zehru
nisa rewarded the suggestion with some of the finest curses she had ever invented.

  By the end of 2010, she and Abdul had concluded that a suspended state between guilt and innocence was his permanent condition.

  Abdul still looked for The Master when he went to Dongri. He wanted to tell the teacher that he had tried to be honorable in his final years as a boy, but wouldn’t be able to sustain it now that he was pretty sure he was a man. A man, if sensible, didn’t make bright distinctions between good and bad, truth and falsehood, justice and that other thing.

  “For some time I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting,” was how he put it. “But now I’m just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.”

  With three Husain boys earning, the family was slowly gaining again, and when Annawadi was demolished, they believed they just might get one of the rehabilitation flats: 269 square feet for a family of eleven, far from the airport and its garbage, but considerably better than pavement. Abdul grew dark only when he thought back to the start of 2008, his business thriving, the first installment made on a small plot of land outside the city. The Vasai plot had now been sold to another family, and the Husains’ deposit had not been returned.

  Abdul’s father had developed an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: “It’s moving past and you think you’re going to miss it but then you say, wait, maybe I won’t miss it—I just have to run faster than I’ve ever run before. Only now we’re all tired and damaged, so how fast can we really run? You have to try to catch it, even when you know you’re not going to catch it, when maybe it’s better just to let it go—”

  Abdul wanted no part of this malaise. Fortunately, he had hauling work to do. Early mornings, he would start humbling up to supervisors at sheds in large industrial slums: “Anything to take to the recyclers?” He was learning all the back roads and spiny byways of the city, since three-wheeled vehicles like his own were barred from some of Mumbai’s smooth new thoroughfares.