Behind the Beautiful Forevers (16 page)

Running through the airport, he had hoped he might be able to explain what had happened the previous evening with Fatima, or at least offer up his own body to protect his father from violence. Maybe, bent over a wooden table, he was taking blows that would otherwise have landed on his father. He wasn’t sure. The only clear thing was that the officers were not listening. They didn’t want a story of hot tempers and a crappy brick wall. They seemed to want Abdul to confess to pouring kerosene on a disabled woman and lighting a match.

“She’s going to die, and it will be a 302,” an officer told Abdul, with what sounded to the boy like delight. Abdul knew that a 302, in the Indian penal code, was murder.

Later in the beating—how much later, he couldn’t say—he was pulled back into sentience by the sound of his mother’s voice. She seemed to be just outside what the officers called the reception room
of the station. “Don’t hurt him,” she was begging at considerable volume. “Do this peacefully! Show kindness!”

Abdul didn’t want his mother to hear him scream. He tried to gather his self-discipline. No point looking at his handcuffs. No point looking at the fat-lipped officer or those sharp creases in his regulation khaki pants. He closed his eyes and tried to recall some key words from the last time he had prayed.

His efforts did not help him maintain his silence. His screaming, then his sobbing, rang out onto the road. But afterward, watching the shiny brown shoes move away, he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t uttered a sound. Although his mother’s wails had become deafening as he was being beaten, that in itself was not conclusive. Given his mother’s tendencies, she’d probably been wailing all day.

The good thing was that her distress was now coming from farther away. Maybe the officers had dragged her off for being so loud. The airport management had improved the grounds of the old bungalow that housed the police station—fronted it with pink flowers and tropical plants, their leaves as shiny as the new police jeeps parked nearby. Abdul hoped his mother was retreating fast past this strip of garden. He wanted to think of her at home.

The large cell in which he was being kept housed seven other prisoners, including his father, who had taken his own beating in front of Abdul. The place was nothing like the sparse jail cells in movies Abdul had seen in the Saki Naka video shed. Rather, it contained metal chairs, a large, handsome wooden table with a laminated top, and four new steel cabinets—the nicest cabinets Abdul had ever seen. Godrej brand. Painted bronze and sky blue and smoke blue. Two cabinets had shiny mirrors embedded in their doors. It was like being in a cabinet showroom, except for the tension and the screaming.

The Sahar Police had a more typical holding pen elsewhere in
the station. The room where Abdul and his father were kept was what repeat inhabitants called the “unofficial cell”—a large office where police paperwork was supposed to get done. As a matter of official record, the Husains had not been arrested, were not in custody. What happened in this office was off the books. The room’s best feature, those being held agreed, was a small window through which friends or relatives could relay cigarettes and consolations.

Abdul kept waiting for Sunil or Kalu the garbage thief or some other boy to look in, ask if he was okay. He imagined his answer. Not okay. He imagined reassuring replies. No one but his mother came to see him, though. By the third day, he had stopped expecting that anyone else would.

“Why did you do such a thing to a cripple?” The officers asked him the same question again and again.

Abdul had his pathetic answer. “Sir, I am such a weakling I would have told you, after so many slaps, but I haven’t done it. We only all threw insults at each other.”

He had his other pathetic answer: “Please, go to Annawadi and ask. So many people were there. I didn’t touch her. Why would I fight with a woman? A one-legged woman? Ask anyone, have I teased a girl? I don’t fight. I don’t talk to anyone. My brother Mirchi is the only guy I tease. Even earlier I never hit him—my own little brother, who I knew I could hit.”

He feared the police weren’t going to Annawadi to ask, though. This inspired his resigned answer: “She has set herself on fire in a fit of rage. She has taken a small quarrel with my mother and stretched the thing like rubber. But what is the use? Now that she has done that, said that, you will listen to her because she is burned. You aren’t going to listen to me.”

The officers asked his father more interesting questions, like, “Why did you give birth to so many children, Mussulman? You are
not going to be able to feed and educate them now. You’ll be in jail for so many years that your wife won’t remember your face.”

“I’d rather be beaten than see them beat you,” Abdul said to his father, who said the same back to him when they were handcuffed together on the floor one sleepless night. The salutary effect of the oxygen Karam had received two weeks earlier at the private hospital had been negated.

As they lay on the tiles, Karam attempted to convince his son that the police didn’t really believe they’d tried to murder Fatima. By now, he whispered, the officers would have at least some sense of what had actually happened, given the hundreds of witnesses. But the specifics of what had or had not been done to a disabled woman were not the officers’ animating concern. The concern, he told his son, was the money that might be made off of the tragedy. “So you’ve made big bucks there at Annawadi,” one officer kept saying to Karam.

The idea was to get terrified prisoners to pay everything they had, and everything they could secure from a moneylender, to stop a false criminal charge from being recorded. Beatings, though outlawed in the human rights code, were practical, as they increased the price that detainees would pay for their release.

The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.

Abdul wasn’t sure how much money his family had left after fixing the house and paying his father’s hospital bill. But he thought that whatever remained should be paid, in order to be innocent. He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

“But what if Fatima dies tomorrow,” Karam said. Abdul knew his father was talking to himself, not asking for advice. If they paid now, and Fatima died, their savings would be gone, and the police might still register a criminal case against them. Then how would they afford
a lawyer? His father’s voice changed every time he said this bankrupting word,
lawyer
. Another man being held unofficially had been on trial before, and warned that if they used one of the city’s public defenders, they’d get sent away forever.

As the days in detention went on, Abdul and his father stopped talking, which Abdul felt was just as well. What did he have to say, anyway? That if his parents had been as paranoid and alert as he was, they would have kept their mouths shut with the crazy One Leg? It was better to pretend that he and his father were too tired for talk, having answered all the questions of the lead investigator, Subinspector Shankar Yeram, whose lips Abdul had by now decided looked more like a monkey’s than a fish’s.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a haggard Zehrunisa appeared at the cell window to explain the compounding price of their freedom. Asha was saying it would cost fifty thousand rupees to make the police case go away. Not that she’d pocket the money herself, of course. She would pay the police and placate Fatima’s husband with a more modest sum.

Zehrunisa had felt grateful to Asha in the first days after the burning. Despite her political antipathy toward Muslims and migrants, Asha had worked hard on behalf of the Husains, and for free. In addition to asking Fatima to retract her false statement, she’d accompanied Zehrunisa to the police station in order to impress upon the officers that Fatima had set herself on fire. This attempted intervention had gone badly. An officer had shouted, “What? Do you women think you are the police? Go away! We will do our own investigation!” For all Asha’s power in Annawadi, it was inconsistent beyond the slum’s boundaries.

At the cell window, Zehrunisa told her husband, “The point is, for a few days Asha helped for free, but now she says I’m sitting on
money and I have to open the purse strings. I would, to get you both out of here, but I’m not sure that paying her will do it.”

Zehrunisa had already paid Officer Thokale, the man who’d asked her to settle her “account” with him while she was in the station after her own fight with Fatima. After the burning, he’d told her he could help ensure that the investigation was “fair” and that her husband and son wouldn’t be badly hurt during interrogations. “I told him I’d pay anything for that, and I think he feels terrible for us, really,” she told her husband. “He knows it is a frame-up. He could have taken so much more money than he did.”

The special executive officer who took Fatima’s statement in the hospital also wanted money. She’d visited Zehrunisa to report that that statement, and the statements of other Annawadi witnesses, were under her control. She was as gentle with Zehrunisa as she’d been with Fatima, saying, palms open, “What do you want me to do? Good statements or bad statements? I am working for the government, so what I say will decide the matter. It is in your hands, and you will have to decide very soon.”

Zehrunisa told her husband, “She’s like Asha. She says that whatever we pay won’t be for herself—that she would give the money to Fatima’s husband. But I’ve already told him directly that I’ll help his girls and get Fatima into a private hospital—pay for everything, bed, medicine, food. I’m scared to pay this witness-statement woman. What if she steals the money from the husband, and Fatima stays there at Cooper?”

“What does the husband say when you ask about the private hospital?”

“Not a word. He’s upset and can’t take a decision. It’s crazy. Does he want her to die, so he can get a new wife? Cooper is going to kill her, and then everything we have—”

There was a rhyme that Zehrunisa had heard Mirchi sing: “People who go to Cooper, they go
upar
.” They go above, to heaven. If Fatima went upar, Zehrunisa’s husband, son, and daughter would face a decade or more in prison.

Karam agreed that his wife should ignore the special executive officer and keep pressing Fatima’s husband about a private hospital.

“I will,” she said, starting to cry. “But now you see what will happen. This government woman will be angry and get the investigators to take the statements of the people who want us to be fucked. If it were our own village, with our own people, we might hope the witnesses would care for us and tell the truth. But we are so alone in this city.”

A light rain began to fall, and hearing it on the station roof one night, Abdul remembered an action movie he and Kalu had seen.
Zinda
. Alive. The hero had been imprisoned for years, not knowing why and going mad in his not-knowing.

Kalu had liked the part at the end when the guy escaped, discovered why he’d been imprisoned, and hammered to death all responsible parties, despite the knife sticking out of his back. In the part Abdul remembered now, the man was still trapped in his cell, but after years of chipping away at a brick wall that was apparently sturdier than the one between the Husains and Fatima, he had managed to make a small hole. The prisoner stuck his hand through, cherishing the rain on his skin.

At home, Abdul had never given his future much thought, beyond vague fantasies about living in Vasai and more concrete, health-related worries. Were his lungs going bad like his father’s? Did his right shoulder hunch forward? That tended to happen after a decade of squatting over scrap.

Having accepted a life of sorting early on, he considered himself a separate species from Mirchi or the most-everything girl, Manju, or the other young people at Annawadi who believed they might become
something different. Abdul had been aiming for a future like the past, but with more money. The rage of a neighbor with less money had played no part in his calculations.

He didn’t know if his mother was right about an earlier, peaceful age in which poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly. He just knew that she didn’t really long for companionable misery. She’d known abjectness, loathed its recollection, and raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she’d made him understand that he had to rise. They’d lost a lot in the 2005 floods, but many other Annawadians had, too. He felt his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.

Which day was this? How long had he been here? He was being beaten and phones were ringing in a room next door, which Abdul had concluded was some kind of control room, because of the radio squawks. The officers all spoke in Marathi, which he made the effort to follow. Trying to figure out what the officers were saying gave him something to do besides worrying the obvious problem of being innocent and beaten in a jail cell.

The officers had been going after his hands, the body part on which his livelihood depended. Small hands, with the prominent veins, orange rust stains, and healed cuts that were standard in his profession, they had been seriously injured only once—a bicycle spoke that went deep.

His mind broke a little. The phone conversations in the other room faded out. Only later, when the voices reestablished themselves, did he realize that one officer was speaking about him.

“The ones who attacked the cripple … Not the father, the boy … But no one’s beating anyone, Asha.… No, nothing like that.”

Annawadi’s Asha was on the phone. Abdul was terrified then. She was probably calling to make the beatings worse, so that his mother would change her mind about paying her off.

Suddenly, Officer Thokale was standing in the unofficial cell. “Asha says this boy didn’t set anyone on fire, doesn’t cause any trouble in Annawadi, so there’s no point in hitting him,” he told his colleagues with the straps. Abdul was let up, and neither he nor his father was beaten again. Abdul’s shackles came off, too.