Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.

  Abdul wasn’t sure how much money his family had left after fixing the house and paying his father’s hospital bill. But he thought that whatever remained should be paid, in order to be innocent. He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

  “But what if Fatima dies tomorrow,” Karam said. Abdul knew his father was talking to himself, not asking for advice. If they paid now, and Fatima died, their savings would be gone, and the police might still register a criminal case against them. Then how would they afford a lawyer? His father’s voice changed every time he said this bankrupting word, lawyer. Another man being held unofficially had been on trial before, and warned that if they used one of the city’s public defenders, they’d get sent away forever.

  As the days in detention went on, Abdul and his father stopped talking, which Abdul felt was just as well. What did he have to say, anyway? That if his parents had been as paranoid and alert as he was, they would have kept their mouths shut with the crazy One Leg? It was better to pretend that he and his father were too tired for talk, having answered all the questions of the lead investigator, Subinspector Shankar Yeram, whose lips Abdul had by now decided looked more like a monkey’s than a fish’s.

  Every day, sometimes twice a day, a haggard Zehrunisa appeared at the cell window to explain the compounding price of their freedom. Asha was saying it would cost fifty thousand rupees to make the police case go away. Not that she’d pocket the money herself, of course. She would pay the police and placate Fatima’s husband with a more modest sum.

  Zehrunisa had felt grateful to Asha in the first days after the burning. Despite her political antipathy toward Muslims and migrants, Asha had worked hard on behalf of the Husains, and for free. In addition to asking Fatima to retract her false statement, she’d accompanied Zehrunisa to the police station in order to impress upon the officers that Fatima had set herself on fire. This attempted intervention had gone badly. An officer had shouted, “What? Do you women think you are the police? Go away! We will do our own investigation!” For all Asha’s power in Annawadi, it was inconsistent beyond the slum’s boundaries.

  At the cell window, Zehrunisa told her husband, “The point is, for a few days Asha helped for free, but now she says I’m sitting on money and I have to open the purse strings. I would, to get you both out of here, but I’m not sure that paying her will do it.”

  Zehrunisa had already paid Officer Thokale, the man who’d asked her to settle her “account” with him while she was in the station after her own fight with Fatima. After the burning, he’d told her he could help ensure that the investigation was “fair” and that her husband and son wouldn’t be badly hurt during interrogations. “I told him I’d pay anything for that, and I think he feels terrible for us, really,” she told her husband. “He knows it is a frame-up. He could have taken so much more money than he did.”

  The special executive officer who took Fatima’s statement in the hospital also wanted money. She’d visited Zehrunisa to report that that statement, and the statements of other Annawadi witnesses, were under her control. She was as gentle with Zehrunisa as she’d been with Fatima, saying, palms open, “What do you want me to do? Good statements or bad statements? I am working for the government, so what I say will decide the matter. It is in your hands, and you will have to decide very soon.”

  Zehrunisa told her husband, “She’s like Asha. She says that whatever we pay won’t be for herself—that she would give the money to Fatima’s husband. But I’ve already told him directly that I’ll help his girls and get Fatima into a private hospital—pay for everything, bed, medicine, food. I’m scared to pay this witness-statement woman. What if she steals the money from the husband, and Fatima stays there at Cooper?”

  “What does the husband say when you ask about the private hospital?”

  “Not a word. He’s upset and can’t take a decision. It’s crazy. Does he want her to die, so he can get a new wife? Cooper is going to kill her, and then everything we have—”

  There was a rhyme that Zehrunisa had heard Mirchi sing: “People who go to Cooper, they go upar.” They go above, to heaven. If Fatima went upar, Zehrunisa’s husband, son, and daughter would face a decade or more in prison.

  Karam agreed that his wife should ignore the special executive officer and keep pressing Fatima’s husband about a private hospital.

  “I will,” she said, starting to cry. “But now you see what will happen. This government woman will be angry and get the investigators to take the statements of the people who want us to be fucked. If it were our own village, with our own people, we might hope the witnesses would care for us and tell the truth. But we are so alone in this city.”

  A light rain began to fall, and hearing it on the station roof one night, Abdul remembered an action movie he and Kalu had seen. Zinda. Alive. The hero had been imprisoned for years, not knowing why and going mad in his not-knowing.

  Kalu had liked the part at the end when the guy escaped, discovered why he’d been imprisoned, and hammered to death all responsible parties, despite the knife sticking out of his back. In the part Abdul remembered now, the man was still trapped in his cell, but after years of chipping away at a brick wall that was apparently sturdier than the one between the Husains and Fatima, he had managed to make a small hole. The prisoner stuck his hand through, cherishing the rain on his skin.

  At home, Abdul had never given his future much thought, beyond vague fantasies about living in Vasai and more concrete, health-related worries. Were his lungs going bad like his father’s? Did his right shoulder hunch forward? That tended to happen after a decade of squatting over scrap.

  Having accepted a life of sorting early on, he considered himself a separate species from Mirchi or the most-everything girl, Manju, or the other young people at Annawadi who believed they might become something different. Abdul had been aiming for a future like the past, but with more money. The rage of a neighbor with less money had played no part in his calculations.

  He didn’t know if his mother was right about an earlier, peaceful age in which poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly. He just knew that she didn’t really long for companionable misery. She’d known abjectness, loathed its recollection, and raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she’d made him understand that he had to rise. They’d lost a lot in the 2005 floods, but many other Annawadians had, too. He felt his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.

  Which day was this? How long had he been here? He was being beaten and phones were ringing in a room next door, which Abdul had concluded was some kind of control room, because of the radio squawks. The officers all spoke in Marathi, which he made the effort to follow. Trying to figure out what the officers were saying gave him something to do besides worrying the obvious problem of being innocent and beaten in a jail cell.

  The officers had been going after his hands, the body part on which his livelihood depended. Small hands, with the prominent veins, orange rust stains, and healed cuts that were standard in his profession, they had been seriously injured only once—a bicycle spoke that went deep.

  His mind broke a little. The phone conversations in the other room faded out. Only later, when the voices reestablished themselves, did he realize that one officer was speaking about him.

  “The ones who attacked the cripple … Not the father, the boy … But no one’s beating anyone, Asha.… No, nothing like that.”

  Annawadi’s Asha was on the phone. Abdul was terrified then. She was probably calling to make the beatings worse, so that his mother would change her mind about paying her off.

  Suddenly, Officer Thokale was standing in the unofficial cell.
“Asha says this boy didn’t set anyone on fire, doesn’t cause any trouble in Annawadi, so there’s no point in hitting him,” he told his colleagues with the straps. Abdul was let up, and neither he nor his father was beaten again. Abdul’s shackles came off, too.

  Abdul tried to make sense of this reprieve. Asha’s son Rahul was Mirchi’s best friend. Maybe Rahul had convinced his mother to protect Abdul. Or maybe Asha had noticed Abdul over the years, sorting his trash on the maidan—seen he was a hardworking kid, a quiet loser who didn’t deserve to be brutalized.

  Abdul’s father had a better guess. The call was probably a show conducted for father and son, who could be counted on to report it to Zehrunisa. Asha and Thokale often worked together. Now Thokale was demonstrating his power to ensure that Abdul and his father would not be severely injured in police custody—what he’d assured Zehrunisa in exchange for money. For Asha, the show would prove to the Husains that she did have influence at Sahar Police Station, and increase the likelihood that she would get a payoff, too.

  But Karam wasn’t about to explain the economics of reprieve to his traumatized son. He thought it better for the boy to believe that someone had noticed his frantic labor on behalf of his family and decided to defend him out of kindness.

  At sundown, four days after the burning, a Muslim fakir came to Annawadi with a peacock-feather broom to offer blessings and drive away evil spirits. Fakirs rarely came to Annawadi because the slum contained so few Muslims, the constituency most likely to pay for their extraworldly services. Abdul’s sister Kehkashan jumped up when she saw the old man. Her mother, fearing what might happen to a beautiful young woman in the police station, had pleaded with Officer Thokale to keep her out of custody as long as possible, but Kehkashan had now been ordered to turn herself in. She felt desperate for a fakir’s blessing.

  Taking a ten-rupee note from her bra, she closed her eyes as the fakir touched the top of her head with the broom. She was relieved he didn’t beat her with the broom, as some fakirs did when they performed the jhaad-phoonk. She hoped it was because he sensed no diabolical spirits hovering over her, and not just that he had adopted some modern, client-pleasing technique. As Kehkashan sat still, the better to allow his blessing to seep through her body, the fakir moved on to Fatima’s door.

  Fatima’s husband stormed out of the hut, wild-eyed. “Are you without hands? Are you without legs? You have come to me to beg? In the name of God! Go earn your living, go get a job!”

  The fakir looked at the sky, fingered the golden zari threads in the pocket of his kurta, and backed away.

  Now Kehkashan was distraught. “Allah! To turn away a fakir, to take his curse?” Fatima’s husband had set himself up for bad luck, the way he’d spoken to the fakir, and the bad luck most likely to befall him would be a ruination of the Husains as well.

  “What has happened to that man,” the fakir wanted to know.

  “His wife burned herself,” Kehkashan said in a low voice.

  “So when did she die?”

  “No! No!” Kehkashan cried out. “Pray that she lives, else we will be in a grave situation.”

  Fatima’s daughter Noori leaned against Kehkashan. The girl had been clinging to Kehkashan ever since she’d seen her mother burning. “I am playing a boy today,” Noori said. “Talking like a boy, too.”

  “Like my sister Tabu,” Kehkashan replied, distracted. “She only wants to wear boy clothes or she’ll cry.” Kehkashan was resolved not to cry herself.

  “Get the rice so I can clean it,” she said to Mirchi, rising and brushing herself off. “And whose turn is it at the tap?”

  Her youngest brother, Lallu, was now old enough to curse like his mother: “Give dinner to me fast or I will put your eyes out!” Her youngest sister was having a come-apart, having not received her rightful share of a packet of Parle-G biscuits.

  When the fakir completed his ministries and departed Annawadi, the scene through the door of the Husain hut was little different from those unfolding behind the other doors he passed. As night dropped its hood over the slum, dinners were being scrabbled together, abuses were being hurled, tears were getting kissed away. The next morning, Fatima came home in a white metal box.

  An infection had killed her. A doctor adjusted the record in the name of hospital deniability. Burns that covered 35 percent of Fatima’s body upon admission to Cooper became 95 percent at her death—a certain fatality, an unsalvageable case. “Greenish yellowish sloughs formation all over burn injuries with foul smell,” read the postmortem. “Brain congested, lungs congested. Heart pale.” Fatima’s file was tied up in red string and sent to the records room of the morgue, where feral dogs slept among the towering stacks of folders on the floor, and birdsong came through the window. A flock of spotted doves had colonized a palm tree outside, the croo-croo-croo of one bird overlapping the call of another.

  Fatima had gotten small again, dying—took up less than half of the box. All of Annawadi came outside, as it had when she burned, but this time the onlookers kept their distance. The slum grew quiet, and quieter still when Zehrunisa and Kehkashan emerged from their hut, heads covered, to wash the corpse.

  Only other Muslim women could perform this crucial ritual, the washing away of Fatima’s sins. No matter what, Zehrunisa always said, Muslims had to join up for festivals and sufferings. It was the tradition to tell Fatima she was dead now and going to be buried, so the Husain women murmured the words while dipping cotton rags into a vessel of water and camphor oil. Lifting a sheet of white muslin, they began to clean Fatima’s body. They moved up the length of her long leg, then the half leg, working slowly toward the shiny black face. “Close the mouth,” someone said. “Flies are getting in.”

  When Fatima was clean and sinless, Kehkashan closed the box and covered the bier with the Husains’ best cotton quilt, the one with tiny blue checks. Fatima would now be taken to a Muslim burial ground a mile away, and Kehkashan would go to jail. A charge would be filed, likely based on Fatima’s second statement that the Husains had beaten her and driven her to self-immolation, which named Abdul as the most violent actor. At the police station, an officer had told Zehrunisa she’d have to pay another five thousand rupees to see the chargesheet.

  Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing—the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.

  Only men could go to the Muslim burial ground. Mirchi stood beside Fatima’s husband, who held one of the bier’s four poles. It was rush hour as the camphor-scented metal box moved out onto Airport Road.

  The procession of dolorous slumdwellers seemed even smaller against the outsized enthusiasms of the airport city. Giant billboards announced the forthcoming launch of an Indian version of People magazine. Chauffeur-driven black sedans rolled out of the Hyatt—attendees of a pharmaceutical convention, taking a break to check out the town. At the Hotel Leela, Americans representing Universal theme parks were feeling optimistic about their plan for entering the Indian market. “The percentage of rich people is small in India, but look at the absolute numbers. Enough of them that we can make this work. Don’t talk to me about Disney—we’re the best brand. Spider-Man, Revenge of the Mummy, and now we’re seeing good results out of Harry Potter. I know, people say I should go to Disney World, check out the rival, but I can’t do it. I’m too competitive—not going to give the opposition a dime—”

  The white box proceeded across a hectic intersection, past Marol Municipal School, through the narrow lanes of one slum and then another, until it reached a water-stained green mosque, a papaya tree, and a burial ground filled with pigeons.

&
nbsp; Fatima went into the same earth that held her drowned two-year-old daughter. In a matter of days, her other two daughters were entrusted to Sister Paulette.

  Fatima’s husband loved his daughters, and grieved as he sent them off. But he worked fourteen hours a day sorting garbage, and local drunks sometimes despoiled little girls left home alone in Annawadi.

  Now it poured, a stinging rain. On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August. At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food through mounds of wet, devalued garbage, shitting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stamped the mud from their feet and said, “My stomach is on fire, my chest.” “All up and down this leg, all night.” The sewage lake’s frogs sang sympathetically, but you couldn’t hear the frogsong indoors. Rain banged on the metal rooftops as if slum zebras were stampeding overhead.

  Someone had once told Sunil that the rains washed the mean out of people. They certainly washed the stripes off the zebras. For weeks the animals stood revealed as poke-bone, yellow-hide nags, until the slumlord-in-decline, Robert, refreshed the black stripes with Garnier Nutrisse hair dye.

  The trail of garbage was sparser in the monsoon than in other seasons, since traffic at the airport declined and construction projects stalled. Sunil’s concrete ledge above the Mithi River was wiped clean by the wind and the rain. He found a little consolation behind one of the walls lining Airport Road. In this wet, jungly spot, six purple lotuses bloomed. He kept the discovery to himself, fearing other boys might pluck the blooms and try to sell them.

  As Sunil moved through the streets around his secret lotuses, chasing busted flip-flops, plastic bottles, and other floaters, he sometimes passed Zehrunisa Husain, who was uncharacteristically garbed in a burqa. She kept losing her footing, trying to move too fast through muddy ponds that had formed on the roads.