Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  “Pick up the truth,” he repeated skeptically. As if truth were a coin on a footpath. He changed the subject.

  “How is my father?”

  “They don’t give medicine in Arthur Road Jail, and there’s no room to sleep. Oh, it is terrible to see him there—his face has become so small. But Kehkashan says it is not so bad in her jail. She prays a lot, for all of us. She says it’s what Allah wants, troubles coming at us from all four sides at once.”

  “Why didn’t you get Father out first?” he asked. “It’s not right that I get out before him.”

  Sighing, Zehrunisa told him of all the relatives and friends who had declined to help with the bail, and of her humiliation before the family of his supposed fiancée.

  “For these others, what has happened to us is just entertainment—something to talk about when they’re bored,” Abdul said grimly. “Now we know for certain that no one cares about us.”

  A rich silence followed. Then he asked his mother about his garbage business.

  Under Mirchi’s supervision, it had collapsed. The scavengers all sold to the Tamil who ran the game parlor.

  Abdul emitted a sound like an amplified hiccup. He might have guessed it. His parents had raised Mirchi for something better than garbage work. Even Abdul had wanted something better for Mirchi.

  “Okay,” he said after a while, pressing a finger deep into his twitching lower lip. It was only mostly hopeless. He would start over, work harder than before, and try not to resent losing three days a week going back and forth to Dongri. Additional income would be forfeited to his decision to walk down the virtuous path recommended by The Master at Dongri, and to stay out of police interrogation cells for the rest of his life. He would no longer buy stolen goods.

  His mother seemed fine with his decision. He hoped she’d actually been listening. She seemed half absent in her exhaustion, and definitely hadn’t been listening later, when he asked if his suffering might be rewarded with an iPod.

  The scavengers found Abdul to be more talkative on his return from Dongri. At the scales, he kept asking whether they had procured their goods honestly. Between rounds of this newly interrogatory purchasing, he made weird little announcements: “Can I tell you something?” “This is the thing I have to say.” Upon which, he talked endlessly about a teacher at Dongri who had seen the taufeez, the refinement, in his nature.

  Abdul claimed that he spoke to The Master all the time—that the guy had been so taken with Abdul that he’d given him his cellphone number. Everyone knew the garbage sorter was lying. Road boys didn’t mind deception; extravagant fabrications passed the time. They were just amused that he would lie about a friendship with a teacher. The only other boy who told that kind of loser-lie was Sunil, who liked to pretend to new boys that he was a fifth-grade student, top of his class.

  Abdul had a fresh audience for his stories about The Master when his semi-friend Kalu returned from the Karjat construction site in mid-September. Kalu had gained weight, on account of the shortage of Eraz-ex outside the city.

  Zehrunisa, surprised to see Kalu back so soon, called him into the house for a plate of leftovers, of which there were more than usual, since the Husains were fasting for the month of Ramadan. Zehrunisa was fond of Kalu, thought he was in need of mothering. Kalu did not dispute this. He’d been calling Zehrunisa Amma, or Mother, for a year—an endearment that made Abdul a little tense.

  “Your father is still there in the mountains?” she asked.

  “Yes, but Amma, I had to leave it. I didn’t want to be out in the country now.” Mumbai was in the midst of the giddy festival in honor of his beloved Ganpati. Two days from now, to the sound of drumbeats and cheering, millions of citizens from across Mumbai would bring lovingly crafted idols of the elephant god to the sea to immerse them. It was a celebratory practice of which environmentalists took a dim view, but which marked the high point of Kalu’s year.

  “You should have stayed,” Zehrunisa admonished him. “I can barely recognize you, you’re so healthy. Why forget your father like that? You’ll just slip back into your old bad ways, being here.”

  “I’m not getting back into stealing,” he promised her. “I’m good and improved now, can’t you see?”

  “Yes, good and improved now,” Zehrunisa agreed. “But can thieves really change? If they can, I haven’t seen it.”

  The next day, Kalu scavenged for trash at the airport with Sunil. In the evening, after selling the trash to Abdul, they lingered with him outside the game shed. The three boys were ranging across the usual subjects—food, movies, girls, the price of waste—when a disabled man named Mahmoud, stoned and glassy-eyed, slugged Abdul in the chest for reasons known only to himself. Another raging One Leg. Of course Abdul wasn’t going to fight him. He headed home to sleep. Sunil did, too.

  Kalu had no home to retreat to. He decided to go to the airport, taking off across the thoroughfare toward the bright blue signs that lead the way to the international terminal. ARRIVALS down. DEPARTURES up. HAPPY JOURNEY.

  The following morning, Kalu lay outside Air India’s red-and-white gates: a shirtless corpse with a grown-out Salman Khan haircut, crumpled behind a flowering hedge.

  A hulking, mustachioed constable named Nagare rode his motorcycle into Annawadi, the disabled junkie who’d punched Abdul the previous night balanced on the seat behind him. The motorcycle braked hard in front of Zehrunisa, who was haggling with a scavenger. She began to shake when she saw the constable’s face. This Nagare did not wear the face a policeman usually wore when coming to ask for money. His was a tense, bad face she didn’t know how to read. So he would be bringing some fresh trouble to compound the trouble her family was already in.

  No, she was being paranoid like Abdul. The constable simply wanted to know the whereabouts of Kalu’s relatives, and Mahmoud, the disabled junkie, had told him she was likely to know. Zehrunisa felt lightheaded with relief, until Nagare told her why he was asking.

  “Boy’s dead,” he said with a frown, and she barely had time to grieve when he sped away, because the next thing she heard was the sound of Abdul breaking down.

  For weeks her eldest son had tried to forget what had happened to him in the police cell. Now, in an instant, something sealed inside him had split open. He couldn’t remember the mechanics of breathing, and began to speak in a clipped, frantic tone. Kalu, his only sort-of friend: dead. So now he would be arrested for the murder. The police would trap him, just as Fatima had done. “I know it,” he kept saying. The addict, Mahmoud, would already have told the police that Abdul had been standing on the road with Kalu the night before. This would be the evidence on which Abdul would be convicted. There would be more police beatings and, after that, decades in Arthur Road Jail. He crouched and gulped, then rose and ran inside his hut, where even Kehkashan, now out on bail, could not console him. He felt he needed to go into hiding again, but not, this time, in his trash pile—

  “Kalu got murdered! Eyes poked out! Sickle up his ass!”

  Other boys, less traumatized by life, had run to see the body, and their reports now flew through the slumlanes. Sunil refused to believe them, needed to see for himself. He took off, dodging the cars on Airport Road.

  The other boys had said that Kalu’s body was in the garden, but which garden? Two years into the aesthetic makeover of the airport, led by the conglomerate GVK, the place was choking with flowers. There were also gardens by the Hotel Leela, weren’t there? In his distress, Sunil’s mental map of his airport terrain got turned around.

  When he finally arrived at the correct garden, Air India and GVK executives had gathered, and the police were keeping everyone else far away. Another boy told Sunil that crows had taken Kalu’s eyeballs and dropped them in the coconut trees.

  Sunil watched from a distance as Kalu’s half-naked corpse was loaded into a police van. He watched the van drive away. All that remained to stare at was yellow police tape—dumb plastic ribbon twisting through a stand of orange heliconia, thei
r flowers like the open beaks of baby birds.

  Sunil turned and walked home, past the immense pilings of the elevated expressway being constructed in the middle of Airport Road, past a line of signs GVK had planted that said WE CARE WE CARE WE CARE, past the long wall advertising floor tiles that stay beautiful forever. He felt small and sad and useless. Who had done such a thing to his friend? But the fog of shock and grief didn’t fully obscure his understanding of the social hierarchy in which he lived. To Annawadi boys, Kalu had been a star. To the authorities of the overcity, he was a nuisance case to be dispensed with.

  Officially, the Sahar police precinct was among the safest places in Greater Mumbai. In two years, only two murders had been recorded in the whole precinct, which included the airport, hotels, office buildings, and dozens of construction-site camps and slums. Both murders had been promptly solved. “All murders we detect, 100 percent success,” was how Senior Inspector Patil, who ran the Sahar station, liked to put it. But perhaps there was a trick to this success rate: not detecting the murders of inconsequential people.

  Succumbed to an “irrecoverable illness” was the swift conclusion of Maruti Jadhav, the inspector in charge of Kalu’s case. At the morgue of Cooper Hospital, the nature of the “irrecoverable illness” was decided. Fifteen-year-old Deepak Rai, known as Kalu, had died of his tuberculosis—the same cause of death tagged to the bleeding scavenger who had slowly expired on the road.

  Active, fence-climbing boys don’t suddenly drop dead of tuberculosis; one thing Annawadians know as well as pathologists is that TB deaths are torturously slow. But the evidence of Kalu’s body was swiftly turned to ash in a pyre at the Parsiwada Crematorium on Airport Road, the false cause of death duly noted in an official register that had been burned through the middle by a resting cigarette. Then photos of the boy’s corpse, taken in accordance with police regulations, vanished from the files at the Sahar station.

  As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise. The death did, however, provide the police with an opportunity to clear the airport grounds of other Annawadi road boys.

  After Kalu’s death, five of the road boys were picked up and taken to the Sahar Police Station’s “unofficial” cell. They were beaten in the name of an investigation and released with the understanding that, if they didn’t stay away from the increasingly elegant airport, they might find themselves charged with Kalu’s murder. The boys didn’t know that the police had already filed away the case as a natural death.

  One of the released boys, named Karan, fled Annawadi, fled the city, and never returned. Another, Sanjay Shetty, frantically collected garbage and took it to the Husains in order to finance his own getaway.

  Zehrunisa gasped when she saw him. “What happened to your face?” she asked. “Why are you crying?”

  Sixteen-year-old Sanjay stood out from the other road boys for his uncommon height, his beauty, and his pronounced South Indian drawl. “Every word you say has a loving sound,” Zehrunisa had once teased him. “You will melt a person, the way you talk.” Now Sanjay could barely make words.

  “Calm yourself,” Zehrunisa told him. “Say what happened.”

  Between sobs he told her he had seen Kalu attacked by a gang of men in the darkness by the Air India gate. Then he told her of his own beating, in the police station. Sanjay didn’t know what to fear more: that Kalu’s attackers would discover he’d been a witness and come after him, or that the cops would pick him up for another round of violent interrogation.

  He couldn’t sleep on the Annawadi rut-road any longer and was heading to his mother’s house, because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. After his family’s hut at the airport had burned down, she’d moved five miles south to Dharavi, the largest slum in the city.

  Zehrunisa agreed that Dharavi was a better place than Annawadi for a boy to get lost in. She put the money in Sanjay’s hand and watched him run.

  When Sanjay reached Dharavi, his fourteen-year-old sister, Anandi, was making tomato chutney for dinner. She nearly dropped the bowl when she saw the fear in his face. The two were close, and recently, in rare possession of disposable income, he’d had her first initial tattooed next to his own on his forearm. Anandi often chided him that any brother who loved his sister as much as he professed to would come home more often. But their sixty-square-foot hut was too small for three people, and Sanjay liked to be near the airport—said it made him feel he had a chance to get away.

  Sanjay took his sister’s hand, and as they sat knee-to-knee on the floor, told her of seeing a group of men swarm Kalu all at once. “They killed my friend,” he kept repeating. “Just threw him off.” Like he was garbage.

  Recovering himself, Sanjay began to lecture Anandi: that she shouldn’t cause heartache for their mother, who was still at work, tending to an elderly woman in a middle-class neighborhood; that she should take her studies more seriously.

  His sister looked at him, confused. “What are you saying, Sanjay? Study? Like you, I have to work and earn. And you’re the one who gives Mother tension, not me.”

  “You also should sleep properly,” he said, not hearing her. “I don’t think you sleep so good.”

  Anandi didn’t know what to make of her brother’s paternal tone. Was it Eraz-ex? She stood up, impatient. She was sorry that this Kalu had been murdered. She’d met him once; he’d praised her cooking, made her laugh. But she couldn’t just sit here holding Sanjay’s hand when she had the vegetables and rice to do. As she turned back to the stove, Sanjay stretched on the floor and closed his eyes, perhaps to model his idea of proper sleep.

  When his mother walked in an hour later, Sanjay was up and restless, listening to a duet from an album called Phir Bewafaai: Deceived in Love. “Sanjay’s broken-heart music,” his mother liked to call it, rolling her eyes.

  “Just a single misunderstanding,” the guilty husband was singing, as his betrayed wife sang back her plan of revenge. Sanjay’s mother’s voice rose above them both: “Going to be sick! Oh, I ate something rotten at lunch!”

  Bolting for the toilet, she called, “Wait, Sanjay. Don’t run off.”

  “I won’t,” he promised. When his mother returned, his sister was hysterical and he was convulsing on the floor. Pulling Sanjay up, thinking that he was having a seizure, his mother caught a chemical reek on his breath. His sister retrieved a white plastic bottle from the corner of the room. She’d seen him toying with it earlier, assumed it contained soap for blowing bubbles—Sanjay was crazy for soap bubbles. But the empty plastic bottle was rat poison.

  Sanjay rolled over to face the wall, refusing the salt water his mother prepared to force him to vomit. He lived for two hours after reaching the public hospital. After midnight, returning home to Dharavi ancient with grief, his mother tossed into the gutter the prescriptions the doctor had written for Sanjay. There had been no time to go out to the road and fill them.

  The police inquiry into her son’s death was closed as swiftly as the inquiry into Kalu’s death had been. In the public record, Sanjay Shetty would be neither a vulnerable witness to a murder nor the victim of police threats and beatings. He would be a heroin addict who had decided to kill himself because he couldn’t afford his next fix.

  In Delhi, politicians and intellectuals privately bemoaned the “irrationality” of the uneducated Indian masses, but when the government itself provided false answers to its citizens’ urgent concerns, rumor and conspiracy took wing. Sometimes, the conspiracies became a consolation for loss.

  Trying to make sense of the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay, Sunil and Abdul grew closer. Not quite friends—rather, an unnameable, not-entirely-willing category of relationship in which two boys felt themselves bound to two boys who were dead. Sunil and Abdul sat together more often than before, but when they spoke
, it was with the curious formality of people who shared the understanding that much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

  Sunil felt certain that Air India security guards had murdered Kalu upon catching him in their recycling piles. Abdul suspected Kalu had been killed by drug dealers on whom he’d informed. “It was a dog’s death, either way,” Abdul said, often, which made Sunil think of the strangled dog in the Will Smith movie that he and Kalu had seen at Pinky Talkie Town.

  Mirchi felt both boys should drop the subject. “Yeah, he stole garbage, but it was their garbage. So of course he was going to die like that.”

  Road boys blamed other road boys. “Mahmoud—my full doubt is on him.” “Karan probably did it then ran away.” A corrosive, free-floating distrust worked its way down the slumlanes. Fatima’s ghost may or may not have been involved.

  Kalu’s father turned against the woman whose Airport Road stall Kalu had frequented for chicken-chili rice. She heard things, and Kalu’s father had counted on her to tell him what had really happened. “Kalu what? Kalu who?” she had said, staring into her cook-pot. In the end, for the refusal of the police and the morgue to tell the truth about the death of his son, he would blame the chicken-chili rice woman most of all.

  Sanjay’s mother didn’t know whom to blame. For weeks after her son’s suicide, she walked unsteadily through Annawadi, asking everyone she passed if they could tell her why her son had taken his life. “How do I sleep without knowing?” she asked her daughter. “The whole world is in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.”

  Sunil and the road boys were torn when they saw Sanjay’s mother coming. They’d known her before she’d moved to Dharavi. That she now looked three hundred years old suggested just how much she’d loved her son. But how to explain Sanjay’s death without talking about Kalu’s, without talking about the Sahar police? Even the Tamil who ran the game shed, and whose police contacts were intimate, was afraid to say Kalu’s name. So Sanjay’s mother learned only what another mother, who slept on pavement, dared to whisper: “Your boy died with fear in his heart.”