Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  Over time, of course, many shock absorbers lost their spring. But who was to say that a woman, a relative novelty, wouldn’t prove to have a longer life? Asha had a gift for solving the problems of her neighbors. Now that she had the Corporator’s ear, she could fix more such problems, on commission. And when she had real control over the slum, she could create problems in order to fix them—a profitable sequence she’d learned by studying the Corporator.

  Guilt of the sort that had overcome Robert was an impediment to effective work in the city’s back channels, and Asha considered it a luxury emotion. “Corruption, it’s all corruption,” she told her children, fluttering her hands like two birds taking flight.

  As Asha arrived home from her teaching job one afternoon, her step didn’t quicken when she saw supplicants lined up against the wall of her hut. From the Corporator she had learned the psychological advantage of making people wait and stew. With barely a nod to her visitors, she stepped behind a lacy curtain at the back of her hut and unraveled the deep red sari she’d worn to work.

  Now that she was older, her eyes drew more attention than her breasts. She could weaponize them in an instant, and boys caught gaping at her magnificent nineteen-year-old daughter, Manju, would reel backward as if they’d been struck. When Asha thought about money, her eyes narrowed. She thought about money most of the time; Annawadians called her Squint behind her back. But the real distinction of her eyes was their brightness. Most eyes dulled with age and disappointment. Hers looked far more radiant now than they did in the photograph she possessed of her youth. A tall, stooped, emaciated farm girl with sun-darkened skin, freshly embarked on a disastrous marriage: When Asha looked at that photo, she laughed.

  She emerged from behind the curtain in a shapeless housedress, another strategy picked up from the Corporator. He often presided over his lavender-walled, lavender-furnished living room in an undershirt, legs barely covered by his lungi, while his petitioners flop-sweated in polyester suits. He might as well have said it aloud: Your concerns are so unimportant to me that I haven’t bothered to dress.

  Settling on the floor, Asha accepted the cup of tea brought by Manju and nodded for the first of her neighbors to speak. An old woman with a creased, beautiful face and matted coils of silver hair, she hadn’t arrived with a problem. She was weeping in gratitude, because on this date, three years earlier, Asha had helped her secure a temp job with the city government, extricating trash from clogged sewers for ninety rupees a day. Before Asha had learned better, she had performed many such kindnesses for free.

  From her pay, the older woman had bought Asha a cheap green sari. Asha didn’t care for the color. Still, it was good for the other visitors to hear the old woman’s blessings, see the way she pressed her forehead to Asha’s bare feet.

  Another weeper spoke next: an overweight exotic dancer who had lost her job in a bar and was now getting by as the concubine of a married policeman. She had to service the officer in the hut she shared with her mother and her children, which was prompting family hysterics. “He says he’s going to stop coming, because of the drama. Then what will we eat?”

  Asha clucked. A morals campaign had driven most of the sex trade out of the airport area, and Annawadi’s “outline women,” as they were known, now had three bad options for satisfying their clients: in their family huts; behind a line of trucks parked nightly outside of Annawadi; or in the goaty, one-room brothel.

  Briskly, Asha issued her advice: Explain more clearly to your family the long-term advantages of the liaison. “Maybe the officer doesn’t give you too much now, but later, he might fix your house. So tell them to stay quiet and wait and see.”

  As she spoke, she ran her fingertips over her new orange ceramic floor tiles. Eight years back, when Annawadi was a flimsy encampment, her three children had jumped truckbeds to steal the wood and aluminum scrap from which the family had hammered up a shack. Now the hut had plaster walls, a ceiling fan, a wooden shrine with an electric candle, and a high-status, if nonfunctioning, refrigerator. The place was narrow and cramped, though. That had been the trade-off. To finance the improvements that might persuade her neighbors of her rising status, she’d rented bits of her living space to some of the continual stream of newcomers to Mumbai. Migrant tenants were holed up in a side room, a back room, and on the roof.

  Although Shiv Sena was hostile to such migrants, Asha had always been more practical than ideological, and considered no financial opportunity too small. “Why do you care if other people call us misers?” she asked her children. As they said in her village, drops of rain fill the lake.

  “Be quick, I have people waiting,” Asha said into her cellphone. It was her younger sister, of whom she was jealous. Her sister’s husband was a hardworking chauffeur, and their hut in a nearby slum had a stereo system and four fluffy white dogs, just for fun. Asha’s consolation was that her sister’s daughter was plain and slow and nothing like Manju, the only college-going girl in Annawadi, who was now kneading bread dough for dinner and pretending she wasn’t eavesdropping on her mother’s conversations.

  Asha’s sister had been trying to enter the fixing business, and saw an opening in the fact that a Hindu girl in her slum had run off with a Muslim boy. Asha stepped outside her house and lowered her voice. “The main thing,” she advised her sister, “is that you take money from the family of the girl, but never say it’s you who is asking for money. Tell them the police are asking for it. I have to go.”

  An old friend, Raja Kamble, stiffened when Asha came back in, for his turn to speak had come. Asha and Mr. Kamble had come to Annawadi at the same time; their children had grown up together. Now Mr. Kamble was painful to look at, kneeknobs and eyesockets mainly. He was counting on Asha to save his life.

  Mr. Kamble had grown up even poorer than Asha: abandoned infant; dweller on pavement; doer of hopeless jobs, among them trudging office to office trying to sell scented cloths to slip into the earpieces of telephones, on the tiniest of commissions. “A perfumed phone cloth, sa’ab? To hide the hot-season stink?” In his thirties, though, he’d had a bolt of fortune. While he was working at a train-station food kiosk, a regular customer, a maintenance worker for the city government, had come to like and pity him. In short order, the man offered Mr. Kamble his own surname, a bride, and the grail of every poor person in Mumbai: a permanent job, like his own.

  That job had been to clean public toilets and falsify the time sheets of his benefactor and other sanitation workers, so that they could take other jobs while collecting their municipal pay. Mr. Kamble felt honored by this responsibility. He and his wife had three children, bricked the walls of their hut, and on one wall installed a cage for two pet pigeons. (In his pavement-dwelling years, he’d developed a fondness for birds.) Mr. Kamble had been one of Annawadi’s great successes—a man deemed worthy of titles like ji or mister—until the day he collapsed while cleaning a shitter.

  His heart was bad. The sanitation department laid him off, saying that if he got a new heart valve and a doctor’s clearance, he could return. Mumbai’s public hospitals were supposed to do such operations for next to nothing, but the hospital surgeons wanted under-the-table money. Sixty thousand rupees, said the surgeon at Sion Hospital. The doctor at Cooper Hospital wanted more.

  For every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge. But Mr. Kamble still had hope. For the last two months, he’d been dragging his betrayal of a body out on the streets, asking politicians, charities, and corporations to donate to his heart-valve fund. The Corporator had pledged three hundred rupees. An executive at a paint factory had pledged a thousand. After hundreds of pleas, he was still forty thousand rupees short.

  Now he clenched a smile at Asha—ten square yellow teeth that appeared huge in his wasted face. “I don’t want a handout,” he said. “I want to fix my heart so I can keep working and see my children married. So could you fix one of the government loans for me?”

  He had learned that Asha was
a minor player in a scam involving one of the many anti-poverty schemes the central government in New Delhi had enacted in order to bring more citizens into its growth story. The government was lending money at subsidized rates to help poor entrepreneurs start employment-generating businesses. These new companies could be fictions, though. A slumdweller would request a loan for an imaginary business; a local government official would certify how many jobs it would bring to a needy community; and an executive of the state-owned Dena Bank would approve it. Then the official and the bank manager would take a hunk of the loan money. Asha, having befriended the bank manager, was helping him select the Annawadians who would get loans—for her own cut of the loan money, she hoped.

  Mr. Kamble had decided his imaginary business would be a food stall like the one where he’d been working when his luck changed. If he got a loan of fifty thousand rupees, and from that paid five thousand each to Asha, the bank manager, and the government official, he would be only five thousand rupees short of the heart valve, and could go to a loan shark for the rest.

  “You can see my situation, Asha,” he said. “No work, no income, until I have the operation. And if I don’t have the operation—you understand.”

  She looked him over, made the ch-ch sound she often made when she was thinking. “Yes, I can see you are in a bad state,” she said after a minute. “What you should do, I think, is go to the temple. No, go to my godman, Gajanan Maharaj, and pray.”

  He looked stunned. “Pray?”

  “Yes. You should pray for what you want every day. A loan, good health—pray to this godman. Keep hope, tell him to help you, and you might get it.”

  Asha’s daughter Manju inhaled sharply. Growing up, she had sometimes wished that the gentle Mr. Kamble had been her father. And she knew, as Mr. Kamble did, that when Asha said go to the temple and the godman, it meant to come back with a better financial proposal.

  “But we are friends—you have known me, so I thought …” Mr. Kamble sounded as if he’d swallowed sand.

  “Fixing a loan is not a simple thing. It is because we are friends that I want the gods to help you. So you live a long good life.”

  As Mr. Kamble limped away, Asha felt confident that he’d come back to her before he would go to any temple. A dying man should pay a lot to live.

  Lately, Asha had been shirking the temple herself. She considered herself a religious woman, but in recent weeks she’d noticed that she got what she wanted from the gods regardless of whether she prayed or fasted. For some time she’d been meaning to pray for the downfall of a neighbor woman who said rude things about the nature of Asha’s relationship to the Corporator, but before Asha had gotten around to it, the woman’s husband fell ill, her elder son got hit by a car, and her younger son fell off a motorcycle. Asha concluded from this and other evidence that she had fallen into a cosmic groove of fortune. Perhaps the very groove that Mr. Kamble had recently vacated.

  Across the room, her daughter was throwing a tantrum—the quiet kind, the only kind Manju ever threw. She was flinging the chopped onions into the frying pan with such force that some bounced out and onto the floor. Asha raised an eyebrow. Later tonight, the girl would sneak out to meet her friend Meena in the eye-watering public toilet, no doubt to cry over her mother’s rejection of a dying neighbor. Asha wasn’t supposed to know about those toilet tell-all sessions, but little happened in Annawadi that didn’t get back to her eventually.

  Asha was pleased with Manju’s obedience, her locally heralded beauty, and the college studies that brought strange names like “Titania” and “Desdemona” to the household. But Asha considered it a failure of her parenting that Manju was sentimental. The girl spent her afternoons teaching English to some of the poorest Annawadi children—a job that had been Asha’s idea, since it brought in three hundred rupees a month—but now Manju was always talking about this or that hungry child whose stepmother beat her.

  Asha grasped many of her own contradictions, among them that you could be proud of having spared your offspring hardship while also resenting them for having been spared. When food was short in Asha’s childhood, the girls of the family went without. Although most people talked of hunger as a matter of the stomach, what Asha recalled was the taste—a foul thing that burrowed into your tongue and was sometimes still there when you swallowed, decades later. Manju looked at her mother with compassion, not comprehension, when Asha tried to describe it.

  As habitually as Asha sought a financial angle in her neighbors’ complaints, so far most were merely tedious—for instance, the bickering between the Muslim breeder, Zehrunisa Husain, and Fatima the One Leg over whose small child had pinched whose. Asha didn’t care for either woman. Fatima beat her children with her crutches. And Asha found Zehrunisa intolerably smug. Just three years back, in a killing monsoon, the Husains had no roof over their heads, at which time Rahul had perfected a wicked imitation of Zehrunisa, weeping. But now she and her morose son Abdul were rumored to be making money. “Dirty Muslim money, haram ka paisa,” was how Asha put it. Her own aspirations centered on anti-poverty initiatives, not garbage.

  A government-sponsored women’s self-help group looked somewhat promising, now that she knew how to game it. The program was supposed to encourage financially vulnerable women to pool their savings and make low-interest loans to one another in times of need. But Asha’s self-help group preferred to lend the pooled money at high interest to poorer women whom they’d excluded from the collective—the old sewer cleaner who had brought her a sari, for instance.

  Still, when foreign journalists came to Mumbai to see whether self-help groups were empowering women, government officials sometimes took them to Asha. Her job was to gather random female neighbors to smile demurely while the officials went on about how their collective had lifted them from poverty. Manju would then be paraded in as Asha delivered the clinching line: “And now my girl will be a college graduate, not dependent on any man.” The foreign women always got emotional when she said this.

  “The big people think that because we are poor we don’t understand much,” she said to her children. Asha understood plenty. She was a chit in a national game of make-believe, in which many of India’s old problems—poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor—were being aggressively addressed. Meanwhile the other old problems, corruption and exploitation of the weak by the less weak, continued with minimal interference.

  In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

  As Manju finished cooking, Asha flipped on her TV, which had been the first in Annawadi, though something had since gone wrong with the color. The newscaster was hot pink as he provided an update on the famous Baby Lakshmi, a toddler born with eight limbs and duly named after the multi-limbed Hindu goddess. A few months back, a crack team of Bangalore surgeons had undertaken her de-limbing. The news story followed the usual script: the marvel of medical technology, the heroism of the surgeons, a video clip of the two-year-old girl at home, supposedly happy and normal. But even on a bad TV screen, it was obvious that the girl was not fine. Asha thought the family could have done better, financially, if they’d left Lakshmi alone and run her as a circus act. Still, it was the kind of medical-transformation report that would get Mr. Kamble, who watched the same Marathi-language channel, further riled up.

  Everyone in Annawadi wanted one of the life-changing miracles that were said to happen in the New India. They wanted to go from zero to hero, as the saying went, and they wanted to go there fast. Asha believed in New Indian miracles but thought they happened only gradually, as incremental advantages over one’s neighbors were parlayed into larger ones.

  Her long-term goal was to become not just slumlord but the Corporator of Ward 76—a dream made plausible by progressive, international
ly acclaimed legislation. In an effort to ensure that women had a significant role in the governance of India, the political parties were required to put up only female candidates for certain elections. The last time Ward 76 had an all-female ballot, Corporator Subhash Sawant had put up his housemaid. The maid had won, and he had kept running the ward. Asha thought that he might just pick her to run in the next all-female election, since his new maid was a deaf-mute—ideal for keeping his secrets, less so for campaigning.

  Ward 76 contained many slums larger than her own, but Asha had just made her first move to develop a reputation beyond Annawadi’s boundaries: investing in a large plastic banner with her name, color photo, and a list of her accomplishments as a representative of Shiv Sena’s women’s wing. The banner was now strung up at an open-air market half a mile away. Unfortunately, she’d had to include the photos of three other Shiv Sena women. The Corporator had warned her more than once about hogging credit.

  “But I had to pay the whole whack,” she complained to her husband, who had appeared for dinner cheerful-drunk instead of fighty-drunk, a relieving change. “These other women, they still have the village mentality,” she told him. “They don’t understand that if you spend a little up front, you get more later.”

  Rahul and her youngest son, Ganesh, came in, too. Asha stood, laughing, to yank Rahul’s cargo shorts up from his hips. “I know, it’s the style, your style, American style,” she said. “All that, and it’s still foolish.” They each took a plate of lentils, soggy vegetables, and lopsided wheat-flour rotis, a meal whose tastelessness seemed intentional, and perhaps the product of Manju’s silent rage about Mr. Kamble.