Behind the Beautiful Forevers

by Katherine Boo

  Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. “We try so many things,” as one Annawadi girl put it, “but the world doesn’t move in our favor.”

  Three days a week, going through the child-size security gate at Dongri, Abdul scanned the courtyard for The Master. He wanted to tell him about the government official who had tried to trick his parents, and about how well the trial had been going until the female judge was sent away, and how his Annawadi business had been undone by the police. Abdul had told so many lies about The Master, back at Annawadi, that he had started to believe the man actually cared how he was faring.

  Abdul didn’t find The Master, though. After signing his name in a register, he returned to the street wondering how he could delay going back to a shed in Saki Naka where he was failing to make his family’s living. One day, trying to recover his energy, he walked an hour from the juvenile jail to Haji Ali, the city’s storied Muslim gathering place.

  “I won’t go long,” he had promised his mother. “Just long enough to fill my heart.”

  The mosque and tomb of Haji Ali sat on an islet in the Arabian Sea, connected to the mainland by a rocky promontory. Salty gusts turned the burqas in front of Abdul into hundreds of black balloons, floating slowly down the promontory toward the glittering dome of the mosque. On either side of him, merchants with fold-up tables were selling paste jewelry and plastic water guns. Above him, the sky was batting gullwings. It was beautiful—like he was walking into an Urdu calendar. Then he registered what no calendar ever showed.

  The narrow road to Haji Ali was lined with One-Legs. No Legs, too. Stretching before him for hundreds of yards were disabled beggars, prostrate, keening and tearing their clothes. It was like a mad multiplication of Fatimas.

  He departed Haji Ali in haste. The confusion he felt wasn’t going to be addressed by feasting his eyes on something lofty. It could be eased only by a court deciding that he hadn’t attacked a disabled woman, throttled her, and driven her to a violent suicide.

  Abdul could control many of his desires, but not this one. He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.

  Asha had conceived of a hundred escape routes from Annawadi, but in the first months of 2009 those paths kept dead-ending, and she began to feel scooped out and sad. Possibly an electrical shock was to blame for disrupting her normal, optimistic mental circuits. Possibly Mr. Kamble had left a curse when he finally died for want of a heart valve. For shortly after his cremation, his pretty widow, in debt to a loan shark, stole one of Asha’s most useful male companions.

  It was hardly the first time Asha had been dismissed by a man without warning. In earlier times, though, she’d managed to seal the disappointment in some tidy interior compartment and bustle forth in pursuit of something new. The questions had even entertained her: What to try, whom to try, next? But now, such questions merely illuminated the fact that her previous answers had been wrong. Gold pots flaked away, revealing mud pots.

  Asha’s slavish attention to Corporator Subhash Sawant was the biggest mud pot. Shortly after her spectacular Navratri, a judge had expelled her political patron from office for pretending to be low-caste. But her list of disappointments was long. The grocery store for which she’d received a government loan, and which she’d hoped her husband could run from the hut. The tedious, still unremunerative slumlording. The idea of Manju as insurance agent to the Mumbai elite. The idea of Manju as a profit-center bride. The windfall that was supposed to have come from securing flats for Sahar police officers to conduct their side businesses. Other schemes that had sucked up months before sputtering out.

  The parliamentary elections were closing in, and she was supposed to be leafleting the slums. Shiv Sena people called five times a day to remind her. The newly installed Corporator, from the Congress Party, also called. To win the slumdwellers’ affection, he had installed elegant paving stones on the maidan, plus a black-marble monument to the Congress Party. Now he needed an Asha. Her power at Annawadi had transcended party affiliation.

  But Asha was as reluctant to pledge allegiance to another politician as she was to leaflet. She wanted to stay inside and cry. Coming home from kindergarten, she wrapped herself in a blanket and murmured a Marathi poem she had copied from a bulletin board in Mankhurd.

  What you don’t want is always going to be with you

  What you want is never going to be with you

  Where you don’t want to go, you have to go

  And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die.

  Manju was distressed to see her mother curled up, making a cave of herself, though she knew better than to ask why. Instead she said, “Not like you, Mummy, sitting still.”

  Said the next day, handing over a steaming teacup, “I’m tired, too, from my exams.”

  Said the next day, “I’ll copy this poem over, and do it nicely.” Asha had smeared the ink with her tears.

  That evening, when Asha pulled her head out of the blanket, she found her ode to low expectations neatly printed, laminated, and hanging from a tack on the wall.

  Although Manju attributed her mother’s grief entirely to a secret heartache, Asha’s heart at forty was stubborn and knowing. Her brain was the troublesome thing. When not reflecting on the cause of past failures, she brooded on the smallest of slights: a police officer who no longer returned her phone calls; Reena, a Shiv Sena colleague who had a special puja and failed to invite her. The normal Asha would have been happy not to visit Reena, who was grumpy and had the face of a cow. But in her current mood, small affronts were bundled with larger disappointments and became a body of evidence. Something bright in her had been eclipsed.

  Asha had always prized her competitiveness, a quality that she’d failed to pass on to her children. Perhaps because they lacked it, she had valued it more in herself. But over time, the compulsion to win could become self-deceiving. Instead of admitting that she was making little progress, she had invented new definitions of success. She had felt herself moving ahead, just a little, every time other people failed. She had outflanked the Husains, for one, and Mr. Kamble, in a way. But the facts of her days had barely changed. She was still living with a drunken husband in a cramped hut by a sewage lake. Her vanity—a quality she had passed on to all three children—was being undermined. She had failed to crack the code of the wider city, while at home, many of her neighbors had started to loathe her.

  Annawadians agreed upon the moment when their respectful wariness of Asha had turned to vibrant dislike. It was during her attempt to capitalize on what they feared: that in 2010 or 2011, the airport slums would start being razed.

  Since it was election season, and airport slumdwellers were known to vote, some politicians were still talking about fighting the demolition. But plans were well underway. A small part of the cleared acreage would be used to serve the expanding airport, and the rest would be leased on the open market. In place of thirty-odd slums, there would be more hotels, shopping malls, office complexes, perhaps a theme park.

  The airport clearance would roughly follow the state’s slum-redevelopment scheme. Under it, private developers were granted rights to build on slum land only if they agreed to construct apartments for those slumdwellers who could prove they’d lived in their huts since 1995 or 2000, depending on the slum. Corruption in the scheme was endemic; organized-crime syndicates had become major players. But the program had overt limitations as well. Although in the previous two years 122,000 huts had been demolished, two-thirds of the affected families hadn’t lived in their huts long enough to qualify for rehousing. So they had crowded into other slums, or built new slums on the outskirts of the city.

  The general failure of Mumbai slum clearance efforts made removing the airport slums even more important. The job was manageable in scale and outsized in resonance. It would signify to the
world that Indian leaders were making headway on their goal of a “slum-free Mumbai.”

  It irked Asha that officials saw the slums simply as monuments to backwardness. “And if they need space at the airport so badly,” she said one day, “why don’t they bulldoze the hotels?” But luxury hotels were not perceived as the problem; swimming pools and lawns would be preserved. So what was she supposed to do, as a leader of one of the eyesores said to be holding back the fortunes of a nation? Unite her neighbors in some fruitless opposition? It had seemed to her more realistic to pursue her private ambitions and make some money.

  She had identified an opening in land speculation, of which there was much at Annawadi lately. The apartments promised to displaced airport slumdwellers would be tiny—269 square feet—but would have running water, which made them a valuable asset in a city starved of affordable formal housing. Hence overcity people had been buying up shacks in the slums and concocting legal papers to show that they were longtime Annawadi residents.

  Most of the speculators intended to use the rehabilitation flats as rental or investment properties. “The flat I’ll get will be worth ten times what I paid for this place,” said the businessman who bought Abdul’s storage hut. A small-time politician named Papa Panchal had secured a large block of huts by the sewage lake on behalf of a major developer, hiring thugs on commission to persuade the occupants to sell.

  Asha had anticipated her own commission when she arranged for a middle-aged hotel supplier to buy the hut of an illiterate young mother of three named Geeta. The fake papers, showing that the businessman was a veteran slumdweller, had come out nicely. Then Geeta began to have second thoughts at high volume.

  Such shouting, up and down the slumlanes! Asha had tricked her! Her children would be out on the pavement! Geeta refused to leave her hut, and tried to register a complaint with the police. Asha handled the police end of things, of course. The problem arose when the businessman sent a gang of drunken men to expedite Geeta’s exit—on a Sunday afternoon, when all of Annawadi was on hand to watch.

  Asha dispatched her son Rahul to supervise as the men dragged the tiny, flailing Geeta out into the slumlanes by her hair, dumped her belongings into the sewage lake, called her a whore, and poured kerosene over her last bag of rice. Sobbing, Geeta’s young children had crouched to pick up the spoiled rice grains, one by one.

  Bad visuals. Damaging to the stature of a slumlord, especially one who had been seen sitting at home, face hard as a knuckle, while the violence in the slumlanes had transpired. Ever since that Sunday, the whispers of her neighbors had trailed Asha like jet streams.

  “She’s become like an animal in her greed,” said a Nepali woman, putting her hand to her mouth.

  “Always she was sly, but now we know there is no one she won’t hurt for money,” said a Tamil woman.

  “She probably made ten thousand rupees in the end,” said Zehrunisa. This hurt the most, when it got back to Asha. Ten thousand would have been tremendous—would have made up for the lost reputation. Instead, the businessman had stiffed her on the commission.

  It was an experience so disheartening that when another corrupt and powerful person approached her, promising that, this time, her efforts would be rewarded with a share of the proceeds, she was skeptical.

  And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die. She firmly held this position of pessimism until the day she saw she would be living more, which was the day the government check cleared the bank.

  The idea that secured her family’s future was not her own. It belonged to an administrator named Bhimrao Gaikwad at the Maharashtra Department of Education. His charge was to implement in Mumbai an ambitious central government program, supported by foreign aid, called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Its aim was to make elementary education universal, bringing tens of millions of child laborers, girls, and disabled children to school for the first time.

  In newspaper interviews, Gaikwad spoke of his search for unschooled children and his hope of giving them the sort of education that would lift them out of poverty. His less public ambition was to divert federal money to himself. Working with community development officials across the city, he found frontmen to receive government funds in the name of educating children. Then he and his colluders would divvy up the spoils.

  Later, Asha wished that she had come to the attention of Gaikwad because of her intelligence, or even her looks. But his interest was based on something more mundane: the fact that she had a nonprofit organization. In 2003, another man with another scheme had set up the nonprofit for her, promising a city sanitation contract that had failed to materialize.

  “Properly registered?” Gaikwad wanted to know.

  “Yes, properly.” And on that basis she was chosen to help him defraud the central government’s most important effort to improve the lives of children.

  Government officials prepared documents attesting that for several years her nonprofit had been running twenty-four kindergartens for poor children. The government would pay her 4.7 lakhs, or more than ten thousand dollars, for this fictitious work. More money would come later in the year for her supposed management of nine bridge schools for former child laborers. From this windfall, Asha would write checks to a long list of names that Gaikwad provided—theoretically teachers and assistants at the schools. What business was it of hers to ask who they were? Her business was to hand-deliver twenty thousand rupees in cash to Bhimrao Gaikwad, plus five thousand rupees to the community development official who had helped to fix the contract.

  In the first year, Asha wouldn’t make big money after all the payoffs. But Gaikwad had assured her that there would be more money in the years ahead.

  A minor hitch occurred when the first installment of government money—429,000 rupees—showed up in the bank account of the moribund nonprofit. The checks to be dispersed required a co-signer, but the neighbor whom Asha had named long ago as the nonprofit’s secretary was in a state. “Will we be rich?” the woman asked, and then, tearfully, “What if we get caught?” She resisted signing the checks, so Asha fired her and appointed a more compliant secretary. The checks went out, and the government officials got their cash.

  Triumphant, Asha felt confirmed in a suspicion she’d developed in her years of multi-directional, marginally profitable enterprise. Becoming a success in the great, rigged market of the overcity required less effort and intelligence than getting by, day to day, in the slums. The crucial things were luck and the ability to sustain two convictions: that what you were doing wasn’t all that wrong, in the scheme of things, and that you weren’t all that likely to get caught.

  “Of course it’s corrupt,” Asha told the deferential new secretary of the nonprofit. “But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people did all the papers—when the big people say that it’s right?”

  The new secretary nodded at Asha’s analysis, but ever since she had co-signed the checks, her mouth had been slightly tight. How could she argue? Asha was her mother.

  “Now you don’t have to do a real job once your studies are finished,” Asha told Manju of the empire of schools they were pretending to be running. “You’ll take it over from me. I’ll have to put your name down as the person in charge anyway, since all these schools are supposed to be run by someone with an education.”

  Although Manju was troubled by this legacy, she wasn’t about to refuse the secondhand computer that soon came through the door. Meena had been the hot resister of daughterly responsibilities, not she. Asha also provided a dial-up Internet connection, which Rahul used to join Facebook, though his interest in social networking receded when his red Honda motorcycle arrived.

  Manju loved her computer, as did the children she had taught in her slum school. They popped in regularly to contemplate its splendor. The children still called her “Teacher” and looked at her expectantly, unwilling to believe that their education was over. But the schools Asha and Manju were pretending to
run made the income derived from a real school unnecessary.

  Manju had recently memorized a plot summary of Dr. Faustus, which told of an ultimate reckoning—the moment when a “person who wanted to be the supreme person” discovered that the payment for a good life, badly acquired, had come due. Though this Christian hell was something she couldn’t quite picture, she felt that punishment might be in the offing.

  One quiet evening, shortly before the day on which she graduated from college, she looked up from her keyboard, alarmed. There were two, no, five eunuchs at the door! The eunuchs were nothing like the lithe and beautiful one who had once mesmerized her in the temple by the sewage lake. These she-males had hairy hands, mustache traces, and a practice of coming to the doors of families who’d had good luck and throwing down a curse to reverse it.

  She was terrified, and the eunuchs felt bad, making her tremble like that. They had come on different business. Asha being the most powerful person they knew, they hoped she would help them register to vote in the election, a week away. Like most Annawadians, they wanted to be part of the exhilarating moment when politics was forced from its cryptic quarters and brought into the open air.

  The parliamentary elections would be the largest exercise of democracy in the history of the world: nearly half a billion people standing in line to vote for their representatives in Delhi, who would in turn select the prime minister. The parliamentarian who would represent Annawadians was hardly in doubt. It would be the incumbent from the Congress Party, Priya Dutt, a kind, unassuming woman who personified two historical weaknesses of the Indian electorate: for filmi people and for legacies. Her parents had been Bollywood superstars, and her father had held the parliamentary seat before her.