Behind the Beautiful Forevers (4 page)

Mirchi was impatiently awaiting his best friend, Rahul, a Hindu boy who lived a few huts away, and who had become an Annawadi celebrity. This month, Rahul had done what Mirchi dreamed of: broken the barrier between the slum world and the rich world.

Rahul’s mother, Asha, a kindergarten teacher with mysterious
connections to local politicians and the police, had managed to secure him several nights of temp work at the Intercontinental hotel, across the sewage lake. Rahul—a pie-faced, snaggle-toothed ninth grader—had seen the overcity opulence firsthand.

And here he came, wearing an ensemble purchased from the profits of this stroke of fortune: cargo shorts that rode low on his hips, a shiny oval belt buckle of promising recyclable weight, a black knit cap pulled down to his eyes. “Hip-hop style,” Rahul termed it. The previous day had been the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, a national holiday on which elite Indians once considered it poor taste to throw a lavish party. But Rahul had worked a manic event at the Intercontinental, and knew Mirchi would appreciate the details.

“Mirchi, I cannot lie to you,” Rahul said, grinning. “On my side of the hall there were five hundred women in only half-clothes—like they forgot to put on the bottom half before they left the house!”

“Aaagh, where was I?” said Mirchi. “Tell me. Anyone famous?”

“Everyone famous! A Bollywood party. Some of the stars were in the VIP area, behind a rope, but John Abraham came out to near where I was. He had this thick black coat, and he was smoking cigarettes right in front of me. And Bipasha was supposedly there, but I couldn’t be sure it was really her or just some other item girl, because if the manager sees you looking at the guests, he’ll fire you, take your whole pay—they told us that twenty times before the party started, like we were weak in the head. You have to focus on the tables and the rug. Then when you see a dirty plate or a napkin you have to snatch it and take it to the trash bin in the back. Oh, that room was looking nice. First we laid this thick white carpet—you stepped on it and sank right down. Then they lit white candles and made it dark like a disco, and on this one table the chef put two huge
dolphins made out of flavored ice. One dolphin had cherries for eyes—”

“Bastard, forget the fish, tell me about the girls,” Mirchi protested. “They want you to look when they dress like that.”

“Seriously, you can’t look. Not even at the rich people’s toilets. Security will chuck you out. The toilets for the workers were nice, though. You have a choice between Indian- or American-style.” Rahul, who had a patriotic streak, had peed in the Indian one, an open drain in the floor.

Other boys joined Rahul outside the Husains’ hut. Annawadians liked to talk about the hotels and the depraved things that likely went on inside. One drug-addled scavenger talked
to
the hotels: “I know you’re trying to kill me, you sisterfucking Hyatt!” But Rahul’s accounts had special value, since he didn’t lie, or at least not more than one sentence out of twenty. This, along with a cheerful disposition, made him a boy whose privileges other boys did not resent.

Rahul gamely conceded he was a nothing compared with the Intercontinental’s regular workers. Many of the waiters were college-educated, tall, and light-skinned, with cellphones so shiny their owners could fix their hair in the reflections. Some of the waiters had mocked Rahul’s long, blue-painted thumbnail, which was high masculine style at Annawadi. When he cut the nail off, they’d teased him about how he talked. The Annawadians’ deferential term for a rich man,
sa’ab
, was not the proper term in the city’s moneyed quarters, he reported to his friends. “The waiters say it makes you sound D-class—like a thug, a
tapori
,” he said. “The right word is
sir
.”

“
Sirrrrrrr
,” someone said, rolling the r’s, then everyone started saying it, laughing.

The boys stood close together, though there was plenty of space in the maidan. For people who slept in close quarters, his foot in my
mouth, my foot in hers, the feel of skin against skin got to be a habit. Abdul stepped around them, upending an armful of torn paper luggage tags on the maidan and scrambling after the tags that blew away. The other boys paid him no notice. Abdul didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was as if he’d spent weeks privately working over some little idea. He might have had a friend or two if he’d known how to tell a good story.

Once, working on this shortcoming, he’d floated a tale about having been inside the Intercontinental himself—how a Bollywood movie called
Welcome
had been filming there, and how he’d seen Katrina Kaif dressed all in white. It had been a feeble fiction. Rahul had seen through it immediately. But Rahul’s latest report would allow Abdul’s future lies to be better informed.

A Nepali boy asked Rahul about the women in the hotels. Through slats in the hotel fences, he had seen some of them smoking—“not one cigarette, but many”—while they waited for their drivers to pull up to the entrance. “Which village do they come from, these women?”

“Listen, idiot,” Rahul said affectionately. “The white people come from all different countries. You’re a real hick if you don’t know this basic thing.”

“Which countries? America?”

Rahul couldn’t say. “But there are so many Indian guests in the hotels, too, I guarantee you.” Indians who were “healthy-sized”—big and fat, as opposed to stunted, like the Nepali boy and many other children here.

Rahul’s first job had been the Intercontinental’s New Year’s Eve party. The New Year’s bashes at Mumbai’s luxury hotels were renowned, and scavengers had often returned to Annawadi bearing discarded brochures.
Celebrate 2008 in high style at Le Royal Meridien
Hotel! Take a stroll down the streets of Paris splurging with art, music & food. Get scintillated with live performances. Book your boarding passes and Bon Voyage! 12,000 rupees per couple, with champagne
. The advertisements were printed on glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees, or four U.S. cents, per kilo.

Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year’s rituals of the rich. “Moronic,” he had concluded. “Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night.”

“The hotel people get strange when they drink,” he told his friends. “Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero—good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier—that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I’m not going to act like such a loser.”

Mirchi laughed, and asked the question that many were asking of themselves in Mumbai in 2008: “And what are you going to do,
sirrrrrrrr
, so that you get served at such a hotel?”

But Rahul was shoving off, his attention diverted to a green plastic kite snagged high in a peepal tree at Annawadi’s entrance. It appeared to be broken, but once the bones were pressed straight, he figured he could resell it for two rupees. He just needed to claim the kite before the idea occurred to some other money-minded boy.

Rahul had learned his serial entrepreneurship from his mother, Asha, a woman who scared Abdul’s parents a little. She was a stalwart in a political party, Shiv Sena, which was dominated by Hindus born in Maharashtra, Mumbai’s home state. As the population of Greater
Mumbai pressed toward twenty million, competition for jobs and housing was ferocious, and Shiv Sena blamed migrants from other states for taking opportunities that rightfully belonged to the natives. (The party’s octogenarian founder, Bal Thackeray, retained a fondness for Hitler’s program of ethnic cleansing.) Shiv Sena’s current galvanizing cause was purging Mumbai of migrants from India’s poor northern states. The party’s animus toward the city’s Muslim minority was of longer, more violent standing. That made Abdul’s family, Muslims with roots in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, twice suspect.

The friendship of Rahul and Mirchi transcended ethnic and religious politics, though. Mirchi sometimes raised his fist and yelled the Shiv Sena greeting, “Jai Maharashtra!” just to make Rahul laugh. The two ninth graders had even started to look alike, having decided to let their bangs grow into long floppy forelocks, which they brushed out of their eyes like the film hero Ajay Devgan.

Abdul envied their closeness. His only sort-of friend was a homeless fifteen-year-old boy named Kalu, who robbed recycling bins in airport compounds. But Kalu worked nights, when Abdul slept, and they didn’t talk much anymore.

Abdul’s deepest affection was for his two-year-old brother, Lallu, a fact that had begun to concern him. Listening to Bollywood love songs, he could only conclude that his own heart had been made too small. He’d never longed with extravagance for a girl, and while he felt certain he loved his mother, the feeling didn’t come in any big gush. But he could get tearful just looking at Lallu, who was as fearless as Abdul was flinchy. All those swollen rat bites on his cheeks, on the back of his head.

What to do? When the storeroom grew too crowded, as it did in flush months like this one, garbage piled up in their hut, and rats came, too. But when Abdul left garbage outside, it got stolen by the scavengers, and he hated to buy the same garbage twice.

By 3
P.M.
, Abdul was facing down the bottle caps, a major sorting nuisance. Some had plastic interior linings, which had to be stripped out before the caps could be assigned to the aluminum pile. Rich people’s garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic. How was he to classify a loofah? The owners of the recycling plants demanded waste that was all one thing, pure.

His mother was squatting beside him, applying a stone to a heap of wet, dirty clothes. She glared at Mirchi, drowsing in the doorway. “What? School holiday?” she said.

Zehrunisa expected Mirchi to pass ninth grade at the third-rate Urdu-language private school for which they paid three hundred rupees a year. They’d had to pay, since spreading educational opportunity was not among the Indian government’s strong suits. The free municipal school near the airport stopped at eighth grade, and its teachers often didn’t show up.

“Either study or help your brother,” Zehrunisa said to Mirchi. He glanced at Abdul’s recyclables and opened his math book.

Recently, even looking at garbage made Mirchi depressed, a development that Abdul had willed himself not to resent. Instead he tried to share his parents’ hope: that when his brother finished high school, his considerable wit and charm would trump the job-market liability of being a Muslim. Although Mumbai was said to be more cosmopolitan and meritocratic than any other Indian city, Muslims were still excluded from many good jobs, including some in the luxury hotels where Mirchi longed to work.

It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as he sorted his garbage, like with like. There were too many people in Mumbai for everyone to have a job, so why wouldn’t
Kunbi-caste Hindus from Maharashtra hire other Kunbis from Maharashtra, instead of hiring a Muslim of garbage-related provenance? But Mirchi said that everyone was mixing up nowadays, that old prejudices were losing strength, and that Abdul just couldn’t see it, spending his days with his head in his trash pile.

Abdul was now working as fast as he could in order to finish by dusk, when strapping Hindu boys began playing cricket on the maidan, aiming their drives at his sorted piles, and sometimes his head. While the cricketers sorely tested Abdul’s policy of non-confrontation, the only physical fight he’d ever had was with two ten-year-olds who had turf-stomped one of his little brothers. And these cricketers had just sent another Muslim kid to the hospital, after smashing his head in with their bats.

High above Abdul, Rahul was bobbling on another tree branch, trying to liberate a second resalable kite. The leaves of the tree were gray, like many things in Annawadi, on account of sand and gravel blowing in from a concrete plant nearby. You won’t die to breathe it, old-timers assured red-eyed new arrivals who fretted about the spoon-it-up air. But people seemed to die of it all the time—untreated asthma, lung obstructions, tuberculosis. Abdul’s father, hacking away in their hut, spoke of the truer consolation. The concrete plant and all the other construction brought more work to this airport boom-town. Bad lungs were a toll you paid to live near progress.

At 6
P.M.
, Abdul stood up, triumphant. He’d beaten the cricketers, and before him were fourteen lumpy sacks of sorted waste. As smoke clouds rose from the surrounding hotels—their evening fumigation against mosquitoes—Abdul and two of his little brothers hauled the sacks to the truckbed of a lime-green, three-wheeled jalopy. This small vehicle, one of the Husains’ most important possessions, allowed Abdul to deliver the waste to the recyclers. And now out onto Airport Road and into the city’s horn-honk opera.