Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  Recently in Annawadi, Manju had watched Asha negotiate a marriage between a shy neighbor girl and a boy from another slum. Manju had been excited at the chance to glimpse the sort of negotiations that would one day decide her own future. It had seemed to be going well, until the girl lifted her head. “Not beautiful!” the boy’s family had objected, blaming Asha for wasting their time.

  The harsh pragmatism of that afternoon had armed Manju, so when Asha called for her to bring out tea, she smoothed her hair, lowered her eyes, and tried to keep her heart ice-cold. Taking his cup, the soldier stared at her for a long moment and said, “Don’t stand in the sun—you’ll get too black.”

  He wasn’t bad looking, despite the mustache, and Manju’s eyes were not so lowered that she failed to note his own eyes sliding down her body. She felt as if she’d been touched. It sometimes disturbed her how strongly she wanted to be wanted; she felt very nearly ready for marriage, for sex. But if Asha arranged any marriage that sentenced her to a life in Vidarbha, Manju had decided that she would run away.

  One night before the family returned to Annawadi, Anil told his cousins of a dream he’d had. He was sprinting away from the farm, and Manju, Rahul, and Ganesh were running alongside him. “We were all escaping, and our mothers were angry. They were saying, ‘If you go, we won’t let you come back.’ And we were saying, ‘Don’t call us back! We don’t want to come back! We’re going somewhere better!’ We were laughing so hard as we ran.”

  Back at Annawadi, Asha shut the sordid Fatima drama out of her mind, and shut her door on the frantic Zehrunisa. She wanted to devote the rest of the monsoon season to self-improvement. For one, she needed to take a college course or two, or she would lose her temp job teaching kindergarten at Marol Municipal School. The government of Maharashtra had been trying to increase the quality of its schools, and some of the teachers were being pressured to show they were trying to get an education themselves. Fortunately, Asha’s professor at Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University had assured his class of teachers that he would provide answers to the end-of-year papers and exams.

  But Asha wanted to be a politician, not a low-paid kindergarten teacher. To achieve this goal, she thought she’d have to shed her slum ways as she’d shed her village ones. It was a second kind of migration—of class. The key, she told Manju, was “to study the first-class people. You see how they’re living, how they walk, what they do. And then you do the same.”

  Asha had raised her daughter to believe that she was different from the other children in Annawadi, superior even to her own brothers. At fourteen, Ganesh was gentle and hesitant, while Rahul, for all his confidence, lacked ambition. Having given up on hotel work, he was perfectly content with his new temp job, clearing tables at a canteen for airport employees. More and more, Asha could see her husband in the boys. Having taught them what she thought they could learn—they were now among the fastest male onion-dicers in Annawadi—she let them be. Only she and Manju seemed capable of the intelligent planning that might help carry them into India’s expanding middle class.

  Asha remembered how it was when her neighbors heard that she’d gotten a kindergarten post with only a seventh-grade education. They called her “Teacher” snidely. Over time, however, the title stuck and the mockery melted away. Similarly, you could pose as a member of the overcity, wait out the heckles, and become one. It was another form of the by-hearting that Manju did at school.

  “And don’t be afraid to talk to the first-class people directly. Some of them are quite nice, they’ll speak back,” Asha instructed her daughter. “Inquire of them how to look better, take their advice.”

  Recently, Asha had asked a Shiv Sena man to make a rigorous critique of her image. “He says, don’t wear shoes with heels when you have height, because it cheapens you,” she reported to Manju. “Don’t wear your housedress outside. Wear a sari instead. Put your mangalsutra on a long chain, not a short one. Don’t look as if you’re worried, even if you are—no one wants to look at such lines on your face. And don’t walk with people who look worse than you.”

  The Shiv Sena man had been a little blunt, conveying that last tip. She had been walking with him to the Corporator’s house one evening, and he’d said, “I am looking nice, and you are looking ugly, and your ugliness takes away from me, too.”

  Manju brought additional information home from college: dangling earrings, low-class; tiny hoops, high-class. High-class women also wear jeans, she told her mother, who subsequently sanctioned a pair of bell-bottoms. One day, looking in the mirror at how the jeans worked with the peach-sequined secondhand tunic, Manju said aloud to herself, “Marquee Effect.” She’d learned the term in computer class, practicing Photoshop.

  The Marquee Effect dimmed a bit when Asha’s sister gave both mother and daughter haircuts with feathery bangs. In the humidity, the feathers rose in a great cloud of frizz. But it was fun, spending the monsoon getting modern. Sensing her mother suddenly treating her as an equal, Manju broached a new subject: that many first-class people married outside their own caste, to people they, not their parents, had chosen.

  “Rich people all have this different mind-set,” Manju said.

  Asha didn’t want to get as first-class as that.

  Asha had liked the soldier from Vidarbha, who came from a relatively affluent family, but her husband had objected to the engagement on the unlikely grounds that army men were often drunks like himself. In Annawadi, Sister Paulette had visited Asha twice now to lobby on behalf of another potential groom, a middle-aged man who lived in Mauritius. “He’s my brother,” the nun said, eyes blinking fast. Asha suspected Sister Paulette was operating on commission. Asha was, too, in a way.

  Most Annawadians considered daughters a liability, given the crushing financial burden of the dowry. But it had long ago occurred to Asha that a girl as beautiful, capable, and self-sacrificing as Manju might make a marriage so advantageous it would lift up her whole family. The Mauritius man was rich, supposedly, but Asha was uneasy about sending her only daughter to Africa, where she’d heard that pretty girls got sold into slavery. She decided not to decide, for now. Instead, she encouraged Manju to widen her social circle, which would increase the odds of a superior offer.

  Asha believed a person seeking betterment should try as many schemes as possible, since it was hard to predict which one might work. Manju’s first idea had been to sell insurance, as one of her college classmates had done. The Life Insurance Corporation of India was offering free training to aspiring agents in an office building down the road from the Hotel Leela.

  Asha was intrigued by the television ads for this insurance, which allowed those who could afford it to insulate themselves from some of the volatility of Indian life. The young husband in one of the commercials had cared enough to buy medical insurance for his wife before the traffic accident. Now, miraculously, she was rising from her wheelchair! Life insurance was turning funerals into celebrations! Selling such policies would put Manju in touch with affluent people, while bringing more money to the household.

  The children in Manju’s hut school came early to support her as she learned the English names of the policies: Future Confidence II, Wealth Confident, Invest Confident, Aspire Life. The children’s vocabularies momentarily expanded to include the terms surrender value, rider premium, and partial withdrawal.

  In training, Manju learned that she wouldn’t sell anything if she referred directly to tragedy or death. You had to emphasize the profit angle—tell the story of a man who bought forty policies and left his family eye-high in rupee notes.

  Manju practiced her pitches and rebuttals until she was fluent, and passed the final exam with high marks. Then: nothing. Who did she know who could afford to buy insurance?

  “Everybody wants their profit,” she told the children one day, shaking her head. “They say, if I do this, how much will I make? In college, the girls talk like that, even when they’re talking about each other. ‘Why talk to that weird girl
, Pallavi? What’s the profit? What’s the use?’ ”

  The brothelkeeper’s eleven-year-old daughter, Zubbu, understood Manju’s concern with profit obsession better than the other children. Her parents were trying to sell her, and the girl felt as if she were going mad. Manju could only pray that Zubbu’s parents would be as unsuccessful in this entrepreneurial venture as they were in all their other ones.

  Teaching girls like Zubbu, Manju felt her own luck. Next spring, if she passed her state board exams, she’d have a B.A. degree. With another year of study, to be financed by selling one of the rented rooms in their hut, she’d be a qualified teacher, with a B.Ed. She had no hope of securing a permanent job at a government school, since such jobs typically required paying enormous bribes to education officials. Small private schools were a likelier bet, although most of them paid so little that her classmates in the B.A./B.Ed program had begun to worry that they’d invested in a chump profession. One girl intended to work at a call center upon graduation; another figured she’d make more money as a chef. Manju alone in the group still wanted to teach. But the Annawadi hut school where she honed her skills was irritating her mother more by the day. Asha didn’t see a long-term benefit in networking with low-class children.

  The central government funded Manju’s “bridge school” and hundreds like it in Mumbai through contracts with nonprofit organizations. Although public funds for education had increased with India’s new wealth, the funds mainly served to circulate money through the political elite. Politicians and city officials helped relatives and friends start nonprofits to secure the government money. It was of little concern to them whether the schools were actually running.

  Manju’s school came under the auspices of a Catholic charity, Reach Education Action Programme, or REAP, that took its obligation to poor students more seriously than some other nonprofits did. The priest who headed the organization resisted paying kickbacks, and his schools were gradually being shut across Mumbai. The Annawadi school was one of the survivors, and a supervisor for the charity came every month or so to sit in on the class and examine the records. He’d caught on that the school Asha was supposed to be running was really being taught by Manju, but he’d let it slide because her students were learning.

  One afternoon, the children were mastering the English words chariot, knee, mirror, fish, and hand. “And what do you do with these hands of yours?” Manju wanted to know.

  “Eat!”

  “Wash clothes!”

  “Fill water!”

  “Dance!”

  “Raise them to show somebody I’m going to beat him up—”

  Heads turned. Asha was in the doorway, enraged.

  “How urgent is this teaching?” she shouted at Manju. “What is more important? These children or keeping this house in order for me?”

  Dirty children were sprawled on the floor. Notebooks were scattered about. It was a scene unbefitting the home of an almost-slumlord and aspiring elected official. Supplicants would be arriving momentarily to present their problems to Asha. The morning’s laundry was damp. “Wonderful,” Asha said to Manju, feeling a towel. “You put the clothes on the string inside, when the sun is shining outside. Can’t you do one thing properly in my absence?” Manju turned away to keep her students from seeing her face.

  After that, Manju began teaching her class every other day, or every third day. The children understood that the choice was not her own. When a new school opened in the pink temple by the sewage lake, many of them gravitated to it, but it closed as soon as the leader of the nonprofit had taken enough photos of children studying to secure the government funds.

  In Manju’s newly free time, she pursued a second idea for widening her social networks. She joined the Indian Civil Defense Corps, a group of middle-class citizens trained to save others in the event of floods or terror attacks.

  Like many people in Mumbai, she was increasingly concerned about terrorism. In July, there had been bomb blasts in Bangalore, then blasts in Ahmedabad—nineteen explosions in the heart of the city. The bombers weren’t Maoists: Maoists were rural India’s problem. The urban hazard was religious militants, some of them acting in the name of Allah, as they wrote in their emails to newspapers.

  Mumbai, the financial capital, was an obvious target, so sniffer dogs joined the security phalanxes at the five-star hotels. At the airport, sandbag bunkers proliferated. On the Western Express Highway, electronic signboards urged the citizenry to be alert: STRANGER IN YOUR AREA? CALL POLICE. The Civil Defense Corps seemed to Manju a more substantial way to protect her city than calling the police about strangers.

  In the cavernous basement of a government building, she and forty other Maharashtrians—middle-aged women and two idealistic college boys—simulated crises and practiced techniques for saving lives. In a bomb blast, stay calm and make sure you are safe first. Then calm the others and lead them to safety. In a flash flood, pumpkins and empty plastic water bottles may be used as flotation devices. Tie your dupatta to someone too weak to swim, and pull them behind you.

  Of the cadre, Manju was the slenderest, and too weak for the all-important “farmer’s lift,” so her usual assignment in the training exercises was to be deadweight—the injured object of rescue. Splayed on the linoleum floor, hair fanned, she worked all the distress moves she could think of from Hindi movies, from the chest heave to the terrified eye-flit to the old sigh-and-tremble. Then she’d get thrown over someone’s shoulder and carried to safety. Being touched was permissible here, and loveliest when she let her body relax in the arms of Vijay, an earnest, square-jawed college boy who led the battalion. He appreciated the sincere effort Manju put into being a victim.

  One night, as Manju left the training in her new jeans and the peach tunic, Vijay called her name. As they crossed the road to the bus stop together, he gripped her hand. Her first time. Manju’s hopes pressed against her well-honed tendency toward realism, which insisted that the city’s Vijays had better options than a not-yet-first-class girl.

  It was hard to keep secrets in a slum. As Asha understood, secrets successfully kept were a kind of currency. People could say what they liked about where she went at night, and what she did with whom, but until they caught her, she was going to deny it.

  Now it was the night of her fortieth birthday—a scant moon in a low sky, no rain. Manju passed out slices of cake, a heap of potato chips on the side, and Asha put her arms around her sons. Even her husband Mahadeo was in a celebratory mood as he plundered one of her gifts, a plastic treasure chest filled with gold-wrapped chocolate coins. “They should have been real coins, since it’s my fortieth,” Asha said, smiling, as she set into her cake.

  Her cellphone rang again. It had been ringing for most of the last fifteen minutes, and she’d been enfolding it ever deeper into the lap of her dark blue sari. A police officer named Wagh was impatient to see her.

  “An emergency?” Manju asked after a while. “Calling so many times.”

  “It’s that woman Reena, shakha work,” Asha lied. Shiv Sena women’s-wing business. Then a minute later, she said, uncertainly, “Maybe I will need to go.”

  “What? Tell her you can’t come—it’s your birthday party,” Manju commanded cheerfully, just before Asha answered the phone.

  “Can’t,” she said into the receiver. Long pause. “No, not possible. Tomorrow? You see—” Long pause. “Listen, I …”

  Suddenly she was standing at the mirror, powdering her cheeks with talcum, adjusting her sari, combing her thick hair off her face. She could see her husband and Manju staring at her through the mirror.

  “My necklace must look real,” she chattered, nervous. “A guy at the train station today told me to put it away or it would get stolen. Did you know coriander is only five rupees at the Ghatkopar market? I went to my friend’s house for tea there earlier, then missed the bus. Good, fresh coriander, better than we get here—”

  “Mother,” said Manju quietly. “Don’t go.”

&nbs
p; The cellphone rang again.

  Asha said, “Yes, I said I’m coming. I am hurrying. But where?”

  The talcum powder was all over the cellphone, streaking down her neck. She was sweating. Her husband’s eyes had filled with tears.

  “Mother,” Manju said again, reaching for her hand. “Please. Mother.”

  But Asha spun out of her daughter’s grasp, walked fast across the maidan, past the road boys in the video parlor, past the Hyatt, not pausing until she reached the bus stop outside the imperious Grand Maratha hotel.

  This pink hotel was the most expensive of the lot. Golden-pink now, as hundreds of lights illuminated the curves of its Jaipur-stone front. Asha glowed, too, standing on the other side of the fence, a slash of white talc across one cheek.

  She suspected, rightly, that at home, Manju’s tears were falling on a slice of chocolate cake. For years, Asha had hoped that her daughter wouldn’t guess about the men. Now she wished she had raised Manju to be worldly enough to understand. This wasn’t about lust or being modern, though she knew that many first-class people slept around. Nor was it just about feeling loved and beautiful. This was about money and power.

  Her mind moved more quickly than other people’s. The politicians and policemen had eventually recognized this dexterity, come to depend on it. Even so, it had not been enough. At twenty, she was a poor, uneducated refugee from the droughtlands whose husband had no appetite for work. Tonight, at forty, she was a kindergarten teacher and the most influential woman in her slum. A woman who had given her daughter a college education and soon, she hoped, a brilliant marriage. The flourishing of Manju, alone, had justified the trade-offs. Even the nightmares about dying of AIDS.

  She should get the blood test done. She knew that. She should be watching Airport Road for the arrival of the officer. But a society wedding was spilling out onto the Grand Maratha’s lawn. This day was an auspicious one in the Hindu calendar, astrologist-certified for weddings. She had forgotten. A brass band was playing music she didn’t recognize. Paparazzi were jostling for photos, blocking her view of the bride. Bits of red and pink confetti blew over the fence and landed at her feet, before the gusts winged them off. A white police van pulled up. For her. Asha slowly turned from the lights and the band and the celebration, as the back door of the van slid open.