Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  The soil outside the red-and-white Air India gates was good and loamy. Gradually, with the ministrations of the airport gardening crew, a boy-sized break in the flowers filled in. One afternoon, Sunil crouched there, studying the skin of the earth. He could find no trace of damage.

  By late September 2008, Asha was in control of Annawadi. There had been no clinching event, no slum-boss coronation. Rather, it had been a campaign of small advances toward the moment when the line of supplicants extended outside her hut, policemen promptly returned her calls, and Corporator Subhash Sawant, on hand to address the residents, offered her the plastic chair beside his own. Her patron had regained his confidence, now that the faked-caste-certificate case against him seemed tied up in court. Seated beside him on the stage by the sewage lake, Asha looked nearly his equal, sporting a gold chain much like his own. Hers had been financed by her self-help group and the high-interest loans it made to poorer women.

  Relaxing into her authority, Asha stopped making elaborate excuses to her family about the men she met late at night. When her husband threatened suicide, she consoled him but made no promise to change. She let herself gain ten pounds, which softened the lines beneath her eyes—a last trace of her years in the fields.

  Her main regret was the lack of a confidante with whom to relish this fledgling triumph. Her secrets had isolated her from other women; she’d had to close certain doors to herself. “What friend do I really have,” she would say to Manju. But now even her daughter seemed remote. On the rare occasion that Manju met her eye, she would bring up Asha’s least favorite subject, the One Leg.

  While the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay shook the boys who lived on the road, Fatima’s death was the one that strobed in and out of the minds of Annawadi women. Two months after the public spectacle of her burning, it had insinuated itself into countless private narratives. Fatima’s regret at what she’d done had been forgotten, her act reconstrued as a flamboyant protest.

  What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.

  One night the brothelkeeper’s wife doused herself with kerosene in the maidan, called out Fatima’s name, and threatened to light a match. Another night, a woman beaten by her husband did light the match. She survived in such a state that Manju and her friend Meena, in their secret nightly meetings at the public toilet, began discussing more foolproof means of suicide.

  Only fifteen-year-old Meena knew that Manju had considered taking her life the night that Asha had run out on her fortieth birthday party, and on other nights after that. As Manju became consumed with shame and worry over her mother’s affairs, Meena could only offer perspective. Her own parents and brothers beat her regularly, with force, and the big expeditions punctuating her housekeeping-days were visits to the public tap and the toilet. In Meena’s opinion, any mother who financed her daughter’s college education, rarely slapped her, and hadn’t arranged her marriage at age fifteen could be forgiven for other failings.

  Meena encouraged Manju to express the worst of her thoughts. It was said to be the modern, healthy way of coping. “You always say that the flowers I put in my hair never turn sticky and brown,” she told Manju one night at the toilet. “My flowers live because I don’t keep anything dark in my heart. I let the bad things come out into the air.”

  Manju winced. She didn’t want her mother’s behavior to be more in-the-air than it already was. “My heart must be black, then,” she replied, deflecting. “The flowers in my hair die in two hours.”

  Manju thought it wiser to practice the denial about which she’d been learning in psychology class—just stop thinking about her mother altogether. “If I don’t block it out, I won’t be able to study,” she said. The exams that would determine whether she would become Annawadi’s first female college graduate were only a few months away.

  Based on his theory of the unconscious, Freud tells us how a fantasy is an unsatisfied wish which is fulfilled to the imagination. He divides fantasies into two main groups:

  a) ambitious wishes

  b) erotic

  Young men have mostly ambitious wishes. Young women have mostly erotic ones. The ordinary person feels ashamed of his fantasies and hides them.

  By-hearting the psychology notes her teacher provided, Manju realized she needed to block out a second painful subject: Vijay, the middle-class hero of the Civil Defense Corps, who had once gripped her hand. “In my next birth, you can be my wife,” he had recently told her. “Not this time.”

  Late September was the season of romantic contemplation for many young women in Annawadi. The annual flirtfest, the Navratri festival, was about to begin.

  The holidays the boys anticipated most were Holi and Haandi. On Holi, they attacked each other with balloons full of colored water; on Haandi, they made human ladders and belly-flopped into the mud. Slum girls weren’t allowed to roll in mud. Navratri—nine nights of dance—was the festival in which they could be equals, even betters, of the boys. Over these nights at the end of the monsoon season, the goddess Durga was said to battle the evil of the universe and triumph. Feminine divinity was celebrated, and even Meena received parental permission to dance and shine.

  On the first night of the previous Navratri, Meena and Manju had spent hours getting ready. A dark blue sari for Manju, who could pull it off now that she had breasts and hips, like her mother. Stylish red salwar kameez for Meena, who stayed reedy no matter how many Good Day biscuits she put away.

  Meena found it hard work not to be dazzled by Manju: her figure, her fairness, her ability to stand back straight, butt in, perfectly still. Meena’s own deportment was fidget-and-twist. But when she threw back her head and laughed, teeth gleaming, hers was the edgier beauty. She looked like one of those girls who made exciting things happen. Exciting things didn’t happen, though—and certainly not on the Navratri of 2007. The two girls had swanned onto the maidan for the first night of dancing only to be drenched by the season’s final downpour. The stage by the sewage lake was the only mud-less place. The feral pigs that camped beside it reeked of a too-long monsoon.

  The Navratri of 2008 could only be better, since Asha would be choreographing it. She knew what these nine nights meant to girls. Among her plans were a band, a deejay with powerful speakers, a large pandal to house an idol of the goddess Durga, and fairy lights strung up over the maidan, under which the dancing would wheel. The leaders of Shiv Sena and the rival Congress Party had contributed money for this extravaganza. Elections were approaching and, with millions of slum voters to be won over, the city’s political class was in a generous mood.

  Annawadians were in need of exuberant distraction, as a recession that had begun in the West arrived in India. Suddenly, once-profitable links to the global markets were pushing the slumdwellers backward. The price of recyclable goods declined. Temp work in construction dried up as projects that had stopped in the monsoon stalled again for lack of foreign financing. Meanwhile, the price of food was soaring, largely on account of poor rains and harvests in Vidarbha and other agricultural strongholds.

  The political response to this hardship—deejays and colored lights—was a time-honored tradition in Mumbai. On festival days before elections, the city slums became as bright as the wealthy neighborhoods with their pucca buildings, and ten times louder. Meena was all for bands, amps, and twinkling lights. This would be her last Navratri before starting a life she dreaded, as a teenaged bride in a Tamil Nadu village.

  Meena had once taken pride in having been the first girl born in Annawadi. But as she prepared to leave Mumbai, it troubled her that domestic labor in the slum was all she had learned of her city. Nothing a girl cleaned in Annawadi stayed clean. Why di
d people see it as a failure of the girl? Why did her mother scream at her when, like everyone else, she lost two hours of her morning standing in line for water at a dribbling tap?

  Everything on television announced a new and better India for women. Her favorite Tamil soap opera was about an educated single girl who worked in an office. In her favorite commercials, a South Indian movie siren named Asin was recommending, along with Mirinda orange soda, more fun, a little wildness.

  This new India of feisty, convention-defying women wasn’t a place Meena knew how to get to. Maybe Manju would get there, with her college degree. Meena couldn’t say, not knowing any woman who had finished college. But watching the soap operas and Mirinda commercials, she sometimes felt her own life to be a husk of an existence. Things were inflicted upon her—regular beatings, the new engagement to marry. But what did she ever get to decide?

  A boy, not her fiancé, had recently fallen in love with her. In the soap operas, such a thing would be explosive. In her constricted life, it was a small but welcome distraction. The boy was a friend of her older brother: a factory worker from a nearby slum who was about to take a housecleaning job in the Persian Gulf—the only way he thought he could make enough money to someday support a wife and family. One night, while visiting her brother, he slipped Meena his phone number. Another night, at a public phone, she dialed it. During the sixth or eighth illicit phone call, he said she was the future wife for whom he was striving.

  The flirtation had gone too far. Meena gave him what she thought was a respectable response: “It’s okay if you love me. I’m glad that you do. But I am going to be married to someone else, so you must think of me only as a friend.”

  Manju was relieved to hear it, since Meena was a see-through kind of girl, poorly suited to sneaking around. Her brothers had twice caught her on the phone and slapped her for it.

  “Anyway,” Manju pointed out, “you said last month that you liked the village boy.”

  Meena did like the village boy, who called on Sundays. He washed his own dinner plate—an astonishment to Meena and Manju, since he could have ordered his sister to do it for him. The boy was not the problem; the problem was an arranged marriage at age fifteen.

  Meena’s father spoke rapturously of the feeling she was supposed to have, being engaged: “The first time your hearts meet, nothing else is left.”

  Manju’s father took a more cynical view: “No marriage is happy after it happens. It’s only before, thinking of it, that it’s happy.”

  But Meena didn’t feel euphoric anticipation. She couldn’t see how love would alter the daily practicalities. What if over the verge of marriage stretched an adult life even more confined than her childhood had been?

  To both Meena and Manju, marrying into a village family was like time-traveling backward. In Asha’s village, people of the Kunbi caste still considered Dalits like Meena contaminated: unhygienic people relegated to the outskirts of town and tolerated in Kunbi homes only when picking up garbage or dredging drains. If a Dalit touched a cup in such a house, it had to be destroyed. Those villagers would be appalled if they saw how Manju leaned against her friend, or learned that the two girls shared a sky-blue sari.

  Manju had worn the sari on the Maharashtrian New Year, the previous spring. Meena had worn it, draped with narrower pleats, for the Tamil New Year. “I feel too fluffy and puffy, wearing it your way,” she told Manju. Meena would rightfully get to wear it for her final Navratri in Mumbai.

  “I’m afraid my mother will decide to marry me to that soldier from the village,” Manju said one night in the toilet, where they always made a point of turning their backs to the slum. Ever since Asha had taken Manju home to Vidarbha, Rahul had been teasing her about her rural future: “You’ll have to cover your head and clean and cook for your mother-in-law, and your husband will be away in the army and you’ll be so lonely.”

  “So what will you do if your mother sets up such a marriage?” Meena asked.

  “I’ll run to my aunt, I think. She would protect me. How could I spend my life like that?”

  “Maybe it’s better just to do what Fatima did,” Meena said. “Escape the situation if you know you’re going to be miserable. But I would kill myself by eating poison, not by burning. If you burned yourself, the last memory people would have of you is with your skin all spoiled and scary.”

  “Why are you still thinking like that?” Manju admonished. “You were sick for a week after you saw Fatima’s body lying there. You’ll get sick again if you don’t push such thoughts out of your mind the way I do.”

  As they whispered, they couldn’t help looking around every once in a while, to make sure there was no sign of the One Leg. Although her curses floated through Annawadi, wreaking havoc in any number of huts, her actual ghost was known to be lodged in these very toilets. Slumdwellers remembered her walking there, tink-tink-tink, dolled up in lipstick. Many of them had decided it was safer to shit outside.

  “Don’t worry,” Rahul told the girls. “The One Leg didn’t take her crutches with her when she died, so her ghost won’t be able to run and catch you.” Manju more or less believed this, and also knew that first-class people did not subscribe to ghost talk.

  Meena was unapologetically superstitious, though. Recently, her mother reported seeing a snake slither across a menstrual cloth that Meena had too casually discarded. Her mother had been hysterical—said it foretold that Meena’s womb would shrivel up.

  Manju suspected that Meena’s mother hadn’t really seen a snake, and was simply getting more creative in her attempts to keep Meena docile before marriage. But Meena was shaken. “I’m going to dry up and die,” she cried one night. Married women without children were suspect in Mumbai. And to be barren in a village?

  Meena started to feel skittish at the toilet; the serpent curse and Fatima’s ghost struck her as a risky convergence. Still, she lingered, couldn’t not linger. The minutes in the night stench with Manju were the closest she had ever come to freedom.

  The day before Asha’s Navratri began, the maidan underwent a fury of beautification. Abdul and his garbage piles were banished, and women swept and swept. A teenaged boy shimmied up the flagpole to anchor the strings of lights, while other boys climbed onto hut roofs to affix the ends of the strings to corrugated eaves. Tonight, Manju and Asha would fetch the idol of Durga from a nearby neighborhood, the arrival of which would complete the holiday preparations. Now, returning from college in the early afternoon, Manju rushed across the maidan wondering how she could teach school, memorize a plot summary for English literature, and do the housework on a day when the goddess-getting would consume at least an hour.

  “Will come before dinner!” she called out to Meena, who was waving from the doorway of her hut. Manju didn’t intend to be caught with unfinished laundry on a week when dancing privileges could be taken away.

  Four hours later, clothes on the line and the final round of Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes completed, Manju walked over to Meena’s. Her friend was sitting in her doorway, looking out at the tidy maidan. This was odd. Meena’s parents didn’t let her sit on the stoop—said it gave a girl a loose reputation.

  Manju settled in beside her. Late afternoon was the time many girls and women of Annawadi took a break from housework, before beginning their dinner preparations. When they were younger, Meena and Manju had spent their free minutes playing hopscotch in front of the hut, but marriageable teenaged girls couldn’t jump around. Meena looked wan, and wasn’t as fidgety as usual, but she was fasting as she did every Navratri, to please the goddess Durga.

  From time to time, Meena bent over and spit in the dust. “Are you getting sick?” Manju asked after a while.

  Meena shook her head and spit again.

  “So what are you doing?” Manju said in a low voice, suddenly suspicious. “Chewing tobacco?” With her mother right there inside the hut?

  “Just spitting,” Meena said with a shrug.

  Feeling a little aggrieved at Meen
a’s failure to entertain her, Manju rose to return to her work. “Wait,” said Meena, holding out her hand. In her palm was an empty tube of rat poison.

  Meena met her eyes, and Manju went flying into the hut, where Meena’s mother was grinding rice to make idlis. Manju’s words came forth in a torrent—rat poison, Meena, foolish, going to die.

  Meena’s mother kept grinding the rice. “Calm down. She’s playing a trick,” she told Manju. “She said a few weeks back that she’d eaten poison, and nothing happened.”

  Meena’s mother was fed up with her daughter. The prospect of dancing had apparently caused the girl to lose her senses. Meena had been discovered talking on the phone to the city boy at 2 A.M., and taken a beating for it. At lunchtime, she refused to make her younger brother an omelet because she was fasting and didn’t want to be tempted by food. Took a beating for that, too. Her brother was about to give her the third beating of the day, for sitting outside the house, when she concocted this story about having eaten poison.

  Manju was momentarily reassured by Meena’s mother. But if Meena was manufacturing a drama, wouldn’t she let Manju in on it? Manju went back outside, leaned into her friend’s face, and sniffed.

  Manju thought of cartoon dragons, exhaling fire and smoke. Later, she kept thinking she saw smoke coming out of Meena’s mouth and nose—as if the girl had set herself on fire from the inside. No, that was impossible. Rat poison only. Her mind was looping. If she screamed for help, the whole slum would know that Meena had attempted suicide, which would ruin her reputation. Quiet seemed essential. She ran to a pay phone to call Asha.

  “Mummy,” she whispered, “Meena ate rat poison, her mother doesn’t believe, and I don’t know what to do!”