Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  Many of the children had been detained because they’d been caught working. Most child labor had been outlawed even when Abdul was young, but now, occasionally, the law was enforced.

  Two boys who looked to be seven years old had been picked up while sweeping floors in a cheap hotel. They reminded Abdul of his little brothers, and he felt emotional being around them. He couldn’t see why the state had taken them from their parents. Being so poor that you had to work so young seemed like punishment enough.

  Abdul had kept to himself in his first days at Dongri, aware of his inadequacy in the conversational arts, but the incarceration of the seven-year-olds inflamed him. “What’s the use, keeping them here?” he blurted out one day. “You see their faces? So much enthusiasm for life, they are going to break the walls of this jail. The government people should let them work, let them be free.”

  Only in detention had it occurred to him that drudge labor in an urban armpit like Annawadi might be considered freedom. He was gratified that boys from other urban armpits agreed.

  As Abdul was singing the national anthem one morning, a young Tamil woman left her two-year-old son outside the warden’s office because she couldn’t afford to keep him. Abdul could hardly bear to look at her—the way that grief bagged her face. It was unlike him to be sympathetic. He had seen worse at Annawadi but hadn’t felt it, overwhelmed as he had been by his own work and worry.

  When he was little, the family hut had collapsed, injuring everyone but Abdul. His mother always said that his selfishness had saved him. She’d fried a fleshy leaf for dinner, and when his father took a bite of his portion, Abdul became alarmed. He’d fled the hut with the rest of his leaf just before the walls caved in.

  In captivity, there was nothing to preserve—nothing to buy, sell, or sort. Later he realized it was the first long rest he’d ever had, and that during it, something had happened to his heart.

  One morning, he and some other inmates were delivered to a small hospital run by the police department, where a doctor had been assigned to check the ages of suspiciously old-looking juveniles. A forensic examination would settle the matter, and those over eighteen would go to Arthur Road Jail.

  In the examination ward, Abdul was weighed by a medical assistant: 108 pounds. He was measured: five foot one. He lay naked on a table as his pubic hair was declared normal, his facial hair categorized as “sub-adult,” and a bunchy old scar over his right eyebrow placed in the public record. Then a doctor entered the room with the results of the forensic investigation. Abdul was seventeen years old if he paid two thousand rupees, and twenty years old if he did not.

  Abdul sat up, angry. He didn’t have two thousand rupees, and what was it with this rich doctor, asking a boy in detention for cash? The doctor held up his hands, rueful. “Yes, it’s rubbish, asking poor boys like you, but the government doesn’t pay us enough money to raise our children. We’re forced to take bribes, to be kamina.” He smiled at Abdul. “Nowadays, we’d do almost anything for money.”

  Abdul couldn’t help but feel sorry for this friendly doctor, especially when the guy relented and declared him to be 17. A few days later, Abdul would even find himself feeling concern for a Mumbai policeman.

  An overweight officer, having delivered a batch of children to the home, started telling one of the guards about his heart problem. “You think you want to be a cop, but you don’t, because it kills you,” said the officer, mopping his brow. Then he told of another officer with a lung problem, and one who had cancer, and of others who were stress-sick, and of how none of them earned enough to afford decent doctors. Abdul hadn’t previously thought of policemen as people with hearts and lungs who worried about money or their health. The world seemed replete with people as bad off as himself, and this made him feel less alone.

  One afternoon, the Dongri boys were surprised to learn that they had something to do, possibly because human rights people kept showing up with notepads. Sixty new arrivals were corralled into a concrete-block room with a blackboard and a poster warning of the ills of smoking, and told to wait for a teacher—an individual stirringly referred to as The Master.

  When The Master appeared, Abdul felt a little disappointed. The guy wasn’t anything as commanding as his title. He was a pudgy, middle-aged Hindu with high-rise hair, watery pink eyes that reminded Abdul of his mother’s, and trousers that revealed a great expanse of tube sock. But then The Master started to talk.

  He began with a story of a boy who did not listen to his parents and ended up in Arthur Road Jail. As he listed the terrible things that happened to the boy in jail, tears rolled down The Master’s face. He could barely get the specifics out, it was so tragic. Then he spoke of other boys: boys who did not respect the law, boys who gave pain to others, boys like those he saw here in this room. “If you were my boys—I will not lie to you. I would have thrown you away long ago,” The Master said. Then he cried for their futures, which it seemed he was able to predict.

  A few boys in the room, select boys, would reform themselves and live admirably, The Master said. Rewards would come to them. But life would be dire for the other boys, who would continue in their criminal ways. Their disgusted families would cease to visit them in jail, and when they were released as old, broken men, they would die on the pavement, unloved.

  The Master cried for parents who beat their children instead of taking time to reason with them. Intriguingly, he also cried about his divorce, and how his wife had been a bitch to his mother, and how in the settlement he’d lost a big car. He cheered up when talking about his pretty new girlfriend.

  Whenever the man cried, whether for the loss of his car or for the fates of Dongri inmates, the boys started crying, too. Abdul had never in his life wept as he wept now. The tears weren’t the kind he’d shed after being beaten by the Sahar Police. These were tears of inspiration. He’d never encountered a man as refined and honest as this Master.

  Abdul was reluctant to name the feeling he had, listening to the man, because it could be taken wrong. But what he felt for The Master was intense. The man had allowed him to become a student.

  Not a great student. He didn’t quite get the Hindu myth about King Shibi offering up his own flesh to an eagle, which seemed not unlike a story that his father used to tell him when he’d misbehaved, about a different king and his scoundrel sons and a monkey. But his father’s king story had left him feeling guilty. The Master’s words lit up a virtuous path. Be generous and noble. Offer up your flesh, agree to be eaten by the eagles of the world, and justice will come to you in time. It was a painful way to go through life, but Abdul was drawn to the happy ending.

  He assessed himself to have been virtuous in some ways. He had resisted Eraz-ex, desi liquor, brothel visits, or other diversions he felt might impinge on his alertness and ability to work. He refused to encourage other boys to steal things, even if it meant losing out to the Tamil who owned the game shed and maximized his profits by lending out wire-cutting tools. Abdul never fought, lied only sometimes, rarely voiced resentment of his father. But he could have been better and more honorable. He still could be.

  He would categorically refuse to buy anything he thought had been stolen, even if it was only stolen garbage. He wouldn’t admit to something he hadn’t done to Fatima, even if it would get him out of Dongri, even if his family’s income suffered in his absence.

  To his family, Abdul’s physical capability had been the mattering thing. He was the workhorse, his moral judgments irrelevant. He wasn’t even sure that he had any moral judgments. But when The Master spoke of taufeez and izzat, respectability and honor, Abdul thought the man’s stare had blazed across the rows of heads and come to rest on him alone. It was not too late, at seventeen or whatever age he was, to resist the corrupting influences of his world and his nature. An awkward, uneducated boy might still be capable of righteousness: He intended to remember this and every other truth The Master spoke.

  In July, when Asha and her family stepped off the train
after a thirteen-hour journey north to the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, their village relatives inspected their faces, finding evidence of how good life was in the Mumbai slums. “You’re all fairer than you were when you were little,” noted a cousin of Manju, Rahul, and Ganesh. “Smooth-type. Chikna. You were very black before, and shy.”

  To examine Asha properly, the older women had to crane their necks, since their bodies were bent from decades of agricultural labor. Asha’s great-grandmother walked on all fours. Looking at the ancient woman, Asha stood mast-straight. She felt like a giantess, coming home.

  In Annawadi, she wept buckets when village movies played on the Marathi-language channels. Even the corniest of the flood-and-famine dramas swept her back to her own early years, working Vidarbha’s difficult earth. In her occasional recountings to her children, she kept the tone absurdist: a manic teenaged version of Mother India, dragging the plow after the oxen had died. The women of her village recalled the Asha of that era with respect. She’d been distinguished by her ability to work like a donkey even when she hadn’t eaten for days.

  “She was one-bone thin, half starving, when we were working the orange groves,” one of her relatives whispered to the others. “You wouldn’t know it now. She’s a double-bone, and the way she talks—you’d think she’d never trod on dirt.”

  Asha was glad to be the subject of admiring chatter, and to be away from the troubles of Annawadi. She had come home to market her beautiful daughter, and her own relative prosperity, among the people of her farming caste, the Kunbis. Her husband Mahadeo would play sober; she would play deferential wife; Manju would play herself; and marriage offers would by all rights roll in, despite the nominal occasion of the visit.

  This occasion was a stripped-down family wedding: no music, no dancing, no jalebis. The groom, one of Mahadeo’s nephews, was still in mourning for his elder brother, who had died of AIDS shortly after infecting his wife. The disease was rampant in Vidarbha, and vigorously denied. If word got out that it had claimed one of Manju’s relatives, it might diminish her value as a bride. But people in the village weren’t terribly interested in the young man’s death, or in the widow hidden away for the duration of the festivities, or even in Asha’s stories of the city. The farmers’ eyes kept turning to the sky.

  The break in the rains, as it was called in Annawadi, had a different name in the countryside: drought. Little rain had fallen in June, and millions of cotton seedlings planted the previous month had died. The villagers had paid a steep price for their seeds: genetically modified ones called “hybrids,” theoretically designed for Vidarbha’s erratic climate. Now more seeds would have to be sown, and new loans arranged to pay for them.

  Some Kunbis said that July was the month when the gods slept. Asha’s relatives hoped the gods had changed their schedules this year, and were also awake nights, worrying.

  In the two decades since Asha and her husband left their respective farming villages, twenty miles apart, much had changed for the better. Some houses had grown larger and sturdier, thanks to the money those who’d left for the city sent back home. Public money had also altered the landscape: Scattered among desiccated farms were new schools, colleges, and handsome government offices with lawns as well tended as those of the Airport Road Hyatt. The government had built more water projects, too, but these had failed to compensate for the decline of Vidarbha’s natural water systems. Poor rains and illegal siphoning depleted the water table; streams dried up; rivers reversed course. As fish died and crops failed, moneylenders became unofficial village chiefs.

  Ashamed and in debt, some farmers killed themselves—an old story, one of the Marathi-movie staples. But the movie reel was still playing. In the new century, the government counted an average of a thousand farmer suicides a year in Vidarbha; activists counted many more. Whatever the number, the suicides had turned the region into international shorthand for the desperation of rural Indian poverty.

  The files accumulating dust in the records rooms of the Vidarbha bureaucracy indicated that modern means of suicide—drinking pesticide, mainly—had supplanted self-immolation. Over thousands of mildewed pages, relatives described their loved ones’ distress.

  Last two years we had crop failure. He could not repay his loan. Then came a fire in the hut. All the seeds got burned—sunflower, wheat, destroyed. He couldn’t afford to marry his second son, and people would keep asking when the marriage would happen—

  His family was so big, and after looking at bank documents he was disturbed and drank insecticide. The loan was huge, and he didn’t see how he could pay.

  He was slow-minded, short on his lights, and worked the fields, then took loans for the daughter’s wedding, and felt trapped.

  He said, “Father, I will kill myself if you don’t buy me a cellphone,” then he went and drank the poison.

  The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had come down from Delhi to express his concern for the farmers’ hardship, and the central government’s determination to relieve it. The families of some indebted suicides would get government compensation, and a debt-restructuring and interest-waiver program had begun for the farmers who had borrowed from banks instead of moneylenders. A massive national scheme to increase rural incomes was also underway, guaranteeing unemployed villagers a hundred days a year of publicly subsidized work. One of the government’s hopes was to stop villagers from abandoning their farms and further inundating cities like Mumbai, but Asha’s relatives knew nothing of these celebrated relief programs.

  Among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade. Elsewhere that summer, public telecom licenses worth the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars were being sold to the highest under-the-table corporate bidder; public funds meant to build world-class sports facilities for the 2010 Commonwealth Games were being diverted to private interests; parliamentary opposition to the future of a landmark India–United States nuclear treaty was being softened by trunksful of cash; and the combined wealth of the hundred richest Indians was surging to equal nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP.

  In a forested stretch of Vidarbha east of where Asha and her husband had grown up, many citizens had stopped believing the government’s promises about improving their fortunes. Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they’d helped revive a forty-year-old movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail-bombs, and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India’s 627 districts, including an underdeveloped swath of central and eastern India known as the “Red Belt.” This summer, the Maoists had been especially productive in the state of Orissa. They’d sunk a boat full of military commandos, killing thirty-eight, and bombed a police van, killing twenty-one more.

  In most rural villages, however, people weren’t yet talking revolution. They were waiting to see if improvements in infrastructure and agricultural technology might change their prospects. This year, as Manju’s seventeen-year-old cousin Anil labored in the cotton and soybean fields, he carried one such advance on his back: a heavy metal canister of Dow pesticide.

  The fields on which he worked belonged to a rich politician who paid his laborers a thousand rupees, or twenty-one dollars, a month. While the politician’s crop yield and profit increased with the new chemicals, the freight of the canisters and the noxious inhalations made the laborers’ work, never easy, blisteringly hard. At the end of a recent workday, one of Anil’s co-workers had set down his canister, climbed a tree at the edge of the farm, and hanged himself. His family received no government compensation for the loss.

  At night, Anil had many imaginary conversations with the politician for whom he worked, in which he gently argued that more difficult labor be rewarded by slightly higher pay. A complaining worker was easily replaced, though. Anil kept his thoughts, including the suicidal ones, to himself.

  Try your lu
ck in Annawadi, Asha had suggested the previous year, and so Anil had become one of the roughly five hundred thousand rural Indians who annually arrived in Mumbai. Each dawn, he stood with other work-seekers at Marol Naka, an intersection near the airport where construction supervisors came in trucks to pick up day laborers. A thousand unemployed men and women came to this crossroads every morning; a few hundred got chosen for work. Anil didn’t know that life expectancy in Mumbai was seven years shorter than in the nation as a whole. He just knew that at the intersection, trying unsuccessfully to compete with all the other migrants, he felt as if his chest were stuffed with straw. After a month of rejection, he’d gone home.

  “People laughed to see me back,” he now told Manju. “I had told them I was going to earn money and see the city, and I didn’t do either. Only major thing I saw were airplanes.”

  The night before the wedding, Manju, in her position as the oldest female of her generation, carried a pot of grains through the village to the temple where prayers would be said for the bride and groom. In a peach-sequined chiffon tunic that her aunt in the city had tired of, she led a parade of family and neighbors along dirt roads full of scavenging donkeys. Past some mud-and-dung houses painted a shade of green no longer known in the fields, she clambered up a steep path to the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god.

  Earlier, she’d powdered the groom’s face and added glitter around his eyes with a toothbrush. But even in the dark, unelectrified temple she could feel people’s eyes following her, not the sparkle-caked groom. An urban, college-going girl was a firework in the village. But which of the Kunbi men would Asha choose to be her husband? Some of them would consider Manju too educated to be docile; others would be too poor to sustain her mother’s interest.

  Manju failed in her efforts to track Asha’s movements at the glum wedding the following day, but soon after, a young soldier appeared at the house where the family was staying. Asha went outside to speak to him privately. From time to time, Manju could hear her mother’s hoarse laugh.