Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  The Corporator approved of the poori bhaji that Manju and her friend Meena were cooking for the ceremony. He was pleased, too, with the decorations in the tiny temple, which was furnished with an old metal school desk. The Tamil construction workers who’d settled Annawadi, Meena’s parents among them, had erected this hut and consecrated it to Mariamma, the goddess who protects against plagues. With Subhash Sawant’s approval, Asha had helped wrest control of it for the Maharashtrians, after which the pink temple sat locked most days. But this afternoon, Meena and Manju had given it a proper scrubbing. The dead flies and rat turds were gone, the new idols shining.

  “Call people, and I’ll come after dinner to speak,” the Corporator told Asha before he and his entourage departed in their SUVs. Asha rang the temple bell at 8 P.M., and soon the place was packed. As a tabla player drummed quietly, Asha arranged herself by the school desk, the gold border of her best sari catching the light of a dozen votive candles.

  Almost every person in the temple, Asha included, was genuinely low-caste. Most were the migrants Shiv Sena wanted to banish from Mumbai. But the residents had come not just out of fear of angering Asha, but out of belief in the Corporator himself.

  They understood Subhash Sawant to be corrupt. They assumed he’d faked his caste certificate. “But he alone comes here, shows his face,” Annawadians said. Before each election, he’d used city money or tapped the largesse of a prominent American Christian charity, World Vision, to give Annawadi an amenity: a public toilet; a flagpole; gutters; a concrete platform by the sewage lake, where he usually stood when he came. And each time he visited, he told residents how hard he’d been fighting to hold off the bulldozers of the airport authority, which had razed huts here in 2001 and 2004. In the scheme of the airport modernization project, and of the governance of Mumbai, the Corporator was a bit player, a pothole-filler of a politician. But he loomed larger than the Indian prime minister in the political imaginations of Annawadians. He needed their votes; they needed to believe in his power to protect them.

  “When does he come?” people asked.

  “Soon,” Asha promised. The packed temple grew ripe with sweat. Slum dwellings, temples included, sucked in the heat of the city and held it, but in the first hour the misery went unexpressed. The next hour, the temple was teeming with sighs.

  Time was precious to Annawadians, even those not tense about their children’s exams. They had work at dawn, homes to clean, children to bathe, and above all water to get from the slum’s trickle-taps before they went dry, which involved standing in line for hours. The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.

  At 10 P.M., Asha’s sari blouse was soaked at the throat and armpits, but she’d finally reached Subhash Sawant’s chauffeur on the phone. “He’s on his way,” she told the crowd, then struck up a group prayer, so that when the Corporator arrived he would find the residents hard at their devotions.

  At 11 P.M., he still hadn’t come. Asha gestured to her daughter. “Get the food.” The dishes Manju had prepared were to be consumed after the ceremony, but people were starting to leave, and neither the Corporator nor the chauffeur was answering his phone.

  The would-be celebrants ate and went home, leaving only a dozen people, mostly sad-sack drunks, in the temple. Asha could not compose her face.

  The departees would say that Asha had promised to deliver the Corporator and failed. Worse, Subhash Sawant, a late-night type, would arrive to find an empty temple. It was a catastrophe for which she alone would be blamed. He would give her that smile that could not be read but as an insult. He would say that she didn’t have the respect of the residents, that Annawadi wasn’t ready for a female slumlord. No doubt he would mention how many people had gathered for how successful an evening at how many other slums.

  As Asha bitterly laid out these probabilities to her daughter, a beautiful young eunuch wandered into Annawadi. Seeing a drummer sitting idle in an empty temple glowing with light, he went inside and started to dance.

  The eunuch had long thick curls, lashes that touched his eyebrows, cheap metal bangles on his wrists, and hips that swiveled slowly, at first. He held his arms out, statue-still, while his legs became slithery things. The drummer came to life. Manju’s mouth fell open. It was as if the eunuch’s upper and lower body were being operated by separate controls. He paused to take a votive candle in his teeth, then launched into a spin that extinguished the flame.

  The eunuchs, or hijras, of Mumbai were feared and fetishized both. They had so much bad luck, being sexually ambiguous, that the bad luck was understood to be contagious. When eunuchs came to your doorstep, you had to pay them to go away. You paid a little more if you wanted them to throw a coconut in front of your enemy. But once the coconut was thrown, the evil eye would stick, even if your enemy hired a baba to burn three incense sticks in a glass of rice with a sprinkle of vermilion powder on top.

  Six eunuchs lived in Annawadi and wore hardship on their makeup-smeared faces. Some of them had come into the temple behind the young one. But this young eunuch, a stranger, was unblemished, his femaleness not a matter of dress and lip paint but of something in his face beyond naming. He did not want money to go away. He was now spinning so fast his locks were perpendicular to the ground, his sweat splattering the faces of the slumdwellers who had come back inside the temple, ensorcelled.

  Dropping down on all fours, he bucked, butt high in the air, then sang a clear, high note that reverberated with his jerking. His name was Suraj, and he was eighteen years old. Asha’s son Rahul guessed at once what others did not: Under his tight jeans, Suraj was intact. He had simply felt, for as long as he could remember, and to the heartbreak of his mother and sisters, that he was three parts girl, one part boy. Now he lived on the tips he earned going slum to slum, dancing so hard it gave him intestinal afflictions. Like Asha, he was trying to make his name in Ward 76.

  Two women pushed forward to spin with the eunuch, becoming sinuous red-and-green blurs. Then the eunuch collapsed on the floor. People gasped, suspecting a seizure, until he announced that a goddess inside him had something to say. “Yellamma says bring her a neem leaf, and she will answer your questions of the future!”

  Asha frowned. What if Subhash Sawant arrived to witness this performance? She decided it was better than his finding an empty temple. People were still arriving, jumping up to try to catch a glimpse of the eunuch over all the other heads. The road boys came out, as did the brothelkeeper and his customers. The sons of the zebra-tending Robert set two tires on fire in the maidan, compounding the excitement, while inside the temple, questions were put to the goddess lodged in the eunuch’s soul.

  “Should I take a loan to fix my house?” “Should I pay this man who says he can get me a job?” “How will I afford my daughter’s wedding?” “What will my son become?” There were several questions about whether children would pass their exams, one question about a heart valve, and many questions about the airport authority. “When are these airport people going to break our houses?” The goddess might know even more than Corporator Subhash Sawant.

  It mattered little that the eunuch’s responses were gibberish, or some goddess-tongue that no one understood. The voice, whether the goddess’s or the eunuch’s, was hypnotic and felt like a blessing in itself.

  People were now screaming their questions. Inside the Husain house, across the maidan, screaming could also be heard.

  “What is this! When will they shut up?” Abdul’s brother Mirchi cried, placing his forehead on his math book. How could he study for his ninth-grade exams? His father paced back and forth, cursing the Corporator and the Hindus of Annawadi. “These work-shirking idolators inflict their noise on us on a hundred h
olidays a year, and now, not even a holiday, they’ve lost their heads over this dancing … freak.”

  The most advanced student in Annawadi, a twenty-one-year-old named Prakash, lived four doors down from the temple. He sat at home with an economics book in his lap and his head in his hands. Two teardrops rolled between his fingers. His all-important final exams before college graduation, sabotaged by a spinning eunuch. He would flee to Bangalore, a city he considered more respectful of scholars, the first chance he got.

  At 1 A.M., the Corporator answered his phone. He wasn’t coming, was tied up with more important people. But he was pleased with Asha, for he assumed the glorious din he heard over the phone was all of Annawadi rallying in his honor.

  Asha’s lucky streak was continuing. “Inside now,” she said to Manju.

  “Coming,” Manju said vacantly, her eyes still fixed on the sweat-wet eunuch. “But, Mother? Never have I seen such a thing in my life.”

  Annawadians agreed that Manju was nicer than she had to be, given her looks, her mother’s political connections, and her punishing schedule. Mornings, she went to college. Afternoons, in the family hut, she ran the slum’s only school. In the other hours, she provided cooking, cleaning, water-collection, and laundry services to her household of five. These obligations were fulfilled by sleeping only four hours a night, and rarely impinged on her temperament. But this spring, her composure was being tested by a series of mysterious infections and fevers.

  Asha worried that her daughter’s body ran hot, which increased the risk that she’d lose her virtue. Manju was hardly in danger. She had spent her teenaged years turning herself into a model of proper and gentle deportment—deportment she thought her own mother lacked.

  One afternoon, her brother Rahul stood at a small mirror tacked on the wall of their hut. As he massaged his face with Manju’s Fair and Lovely skin-lightening lotion, he considered her through the brown freckled glass. She was kneeling on the floor, glossy braid flung over her shoulder, murmuring English words with an escalating desperation.

  “What a face you’re making,” Rahul said. Manju looked up.

  “Rahul, not so much cream!”

  The Fair and Lovely lotion was crucial to maintaining her light complexion, and thereby her status in the marriage market, but Rahul and their younger brother, Ganesh, applied it more liberally than she did.

  Rahul turned on the TV, where the cartoon mouse Jerry, disguised in shoe polish, was convincing Tom that he’d swallowed enough explosives to blow up a city. Manju watched for a minute, then sighed again. “I don’t know what I am doing,” she said. “My students will come in an hour, and I’m behind on my own work. My computer teacher said, ‘Ask your mother what she wants you to do—your Photoshop assignment or your housework?’ Else he will fail me. And did I tell you what happened yesterday in psychology class? I left my purse under the desk to go to the toilet and someone took my money. What sort of people! And the other girls have more money than I do. But why do I bother telling you? Your eyes are inside the TV—not even listening.”

  “I am listening,” Rahul protested. “You’re just sitting on so many tensions I don’t know which one to think about.”

  Rahul had his own tensions, balancing ninth-grade exams and late-night hotel temp work. By now he could expertly mimic the way the Intercontinental waiters fixed their faces when they got near a guest. There had to be both an upward tilt, saying I am alert and obliging, and a chin-down servile thing: I am invisible to you, sir, if you’d prefer that. His own face was open, with amusement-seeking eyes. Annawadi girls came around to it quickly. But he thought that a better-managed face might have spared him the humiliation he had suffered at a recent hotel party.

  The trouble had begun with a deejay who, after midnight, seemed to be reading his telepathic requests. A Christina Aguilera belter—I am beautiful, no matter what they say—segued into “Rise Up,” a dance song that was Rahul’s current favorite.

  Rise up! Don’t be falling down again

  Rise up! Long time I broke the chains.

  The lyrics, in English, were meaningless to him, the bass line irresistible. Every time he heard it, he vibrated inside. When the first echoing chords came through the hotel speakers, he might have smiled, or tapped a foot. Suddenly two young hotel guests were tugging his arm, asking him to demonstrate some “Mumbai moves.”

  Sozzled white people were known to be generous tippers. He began, discreetly he thought, to demonstrate a few steps—no shoulders and hands, just head and feet.

  “Have you gone mad, asshole?”

  A hotel superior grabbed him. Other managers came running from across the room. It was if he’d stabbed a Bollywood star with a fork. The permanent waiters sniggered as he was dragged on his heels into the trash room. Only later, recovering at home, did he find the line of argument he might have used to defend himself. If the first law of hotel work was not to stare at the guests, wasn’t the second law to give them whatever they asked for?

  As cartoon Tom blew a house to smithereens, Rahul turned back to the mirror, and Manju began her reading for her major, English literature. Today’s assignment was eighteenth-century Restoration drama and Congreve’s The Way of the World.

  Manju hadn’t read The Way of the World, nor did her professors expect her to. Except in the best colleges, dominated by high-caste, affluent students, Indian liberal arts education was taught by rote. At her mediocre all-girls college, founded by the Lions Club, she was simply required to memorize a summary the teacher provided for each literary work on the syllabus, then restate it on the test and, later, on state board exams. Manju had a gift for memorization—she called it “my by-hearting.” But she found the characters in The Way of the World hard to keep straight.

  “Millament, Mirabell, Petulant—have you ever heard such names? And there are so many more,” she told Rahul after a while. “Everyone is telling lies and tricking people to get money, but where my teacher wrote what the story means, I don’t understand.”

  “Love is subordinated” was the trouble spot. Although she had never held the hand of a boy her own age, love was an English word about which she felt confident. Subordinated, though, evoked only irritation at her mother, who hadn’t kept her promise to buy Manju an English-Marathi dictionary. Neither Rahul nor her mother knew English, and both took umbrage that the language of India’s former colonizers was considered requisite for decent jobs in offices and hotels, when Marathi was just as venerable a language.

  To Manju, the new importance of English was a by-product of something she generally welcomed: a more globalized, meritocratic India. It didn’t much matter whether a person learned the language by studying Congreve or by practicing Chase Manhattan Visa Card dialogue at Personaliteez Spoken English or one of the training courses for international call-center work. Competence in English—a credential bespeaking worldliness and superior education—was a potential springboard out of the slums. Her own English was still slow and wooden, though good enough to be the second-best in Annawadi.

  The best English was spoken by Prakash, the economics student who lived near the temple. In the intricate social hierarchy of Annawadi’s young people—something now based less on caste than on future economic prospects—Prakash was the guy at the top. He had once been middle class, studying in a good private school, before his father got hit by a train. In his spare time, he sold mutual funds for ICICI Bank, making cold calls for a paltry commission.

  Manju figured that Prakash would know the meaning of the word subordinated, but she had never spoken to him. A young woman in the slum had to weigh the value of each potential interaction with a male against the rumors it would inspire. Already people were gossiping about a cricket player who had secured her photo and laminated it in the shape of a heart. So as she went outside to scrub the laundry, she didn’t even glance at the fellow college student who was reading outside his hut, a few yards away.

  “Mirabell—beau. Millament—gallant. Mr. Fainall—cuckold.�
�� She murmured bits of plot summary as she applied the stone to her mother’s large panties, her father’s small shirt.

  “No, Mirabell is the gallant.” She took the wrung-out clothes inside and hung them on a string against the wall. Part of the wall stopped two feet from the roof, and her father had been promising to close the gap for ages, but that was as likely as her mother arriving home with an English-Marathi dictionary.

  As she cleaned the two-burner stove, she repeated, “Themes are love affairs, social position, and money.” Roaches, a hundred of them, scattered. Stepping over Rahul, now asleep on the floor, she took some food scraps outside and dumped them in the sewage lake, which the hot season had magicked into a thick mat of water-hyacinth weed.

  “Mirabell seeks social advantage through marriage to the beauty, Millament.”

  When Manju by-hearted, she often pictured herself in the role of the heroine, but this girl, Millament, left her cold—whining when she was rich and independent enough to be negotiating her own marriage. Manju wanted to be a teacher when she finished college, and her great fear was that, in a fit of pique, her mother would wed her to a village boy who didn’t think that a woman should work. That she’d die doing the things she was doing now: sweeping the dirt that had blown in from outside, mopping, then sweeping the new dirt that had blown in while she mopped.

  “In Congreve’s drama, money is more important than love.”

  This was her mother’s position, obviously. Manju’s younger brother Ganesh was at the front of the house, manning a small grocery that represented Asha’s latest entrepreneurial scheme, a failing one. To start the store, she had secured for herself one of the government loans that Mr. Kamble hoped would finance his heart valve. Asha had intended for her husband to run the store, but he’d been using the proceeds to get drunk while he worked. He was currently passed out at Ganesh’s feet.