Behind the Beautiful Forevers (9 page)

“Are you afraid of water?” Kalu asked.

“I can swim. I swim at Naupada.”

“Do you have a bedsheet?”

A bedsheet was one thing Sunil had. He ran to fetch it, then followed Kalu out onto Airport Road. As the boys crossed the street, Sunil wrapped the sheet around himself. He felt shivery, though this was not a cool night. Kalu turned and laughed. “You’ll scare people like that! They’ll think you’re a walking ghost!” Reluctantly, Sunil gobbed his sheet under his arm as they gained the road leading up to the international terminal.

Cars were still coming out of the airport. Arrivals from Europe
and America, Kalu said; he’d learned the flight schedules and the names of many world cities while loading luggage. He said the best tippers were Saudis, Americans, and Germans, in that order.

Past a glittery
DEPARTURES
sign and some security barricades that read
HAPPY JOURNEY
, the boys sprinted down a half-paved road used by construction vehicles, then veered onto a narrower, pitch-dark lane. Sunil could navigate it blind. After some high fences behind which airplane meals got made was an open-air toilet where he’d often found empty water bottles. The boys skipped quickly over this wasteland. Now they were standing at the edge of a wide gully that took runoff from the Mithi River. Sunil came here from time to time to catch mangoor fish to sell back at the slum. When he was young, the water had been blue—“like swimming-pool water,” he said. It had since turned black and reeking, but the fish still tasted sweet.

Across the gully to his right were towering security fences, protecting floodlit hangars. Jets were rolling in for the night. The far left side of the gully, where Kalu said they were going, was dim and still. Sunil could make out one spindly Ashoka tree, and behind it, indistinct, several large, shedlike buildings. Kalu jumped into the fetid water and paddled toward them. Sunil swam too, then waded when he saw Kalu wading. The current in the trench was gentle, the monsoon being nine months past. Still, Sunil’s stomach felt liquid as he scrambled up the opposite bank.

What Kalu called “the workshops” was a large new industrial estate. Smelting. Plasticizers. Lubricants. A concern called Gold-I-Am Jewels Unlimited. Bluish lights in front of a few of the warehouses illuminated the figures of uniformed guards, whose shadows seemed thirty feet long.

Sunil wanted to dive back into the water. But Kalu had planned a circuitous route to the weeds where he’d hidden the iron. “The guards won’t see,” he said. “It will be easy.” Which was how it turned
out. The iron in the weeds looked like barbells to Sunil, and felt like barbells when lifted. This posed the sole dilemma of the night: How much weight could the two boys manage, swimming? Making their bedsheets into slings, they decided to carry three irons apiece.

They staggered away with their loads, and fifteen minutes later they were back in Annawadi, sopping. When Abdul woke at dawn, he bought the iron for 380 rupees, and Sunil got a cut of one-third. What the police officers got, Sunil couldn’t say. Kalu seemed quietly satisfied with his profit. For Sunil, it was the first disposable income of his life.

To Pinky Talkie Town, then. Kalu led the way to the movie theater, where Sunil was mesmerized by the carpet and the clean. The noon film was an American one, its lead actor a man named Will Smith who, on the screen, seemed to be the lone human survivor of a plague in New York City. A she-dog had also survived this plague, and became the hero’s friend. The dog was yellow with a large spot like a saddle on her back, and the man spoke to her as if she could understand everything. Then, near the end, the man strangled her.

Sunil figured the hero had a motive for murdering his only friend. In addition to the plague, there had been a ghost and an explosion, and while these events no doubt contributed to the hero’s decision, Sunil couldn’t work out the chain of logic. When he emerged from the dark theater into the sunblast of a spring afternoon, he felt sickened by the betrayal of the she-dog. He partially recovered after eating until his belly was full.

A few weeks later, Kalu asked for his help again, and as Sunil considered other thieves devouring plates of chicken-chili rice, he began to weigh this potential career path against the waste-picking that led to maggots, boils, and orange eyes. But for now, he thought, he’d stick with his dumpsters and his ledge.

Abdul seemed relieved at this choice, though Sunil could never
read all of what that old man of a boy was thinking. Kalu didn’t press him either, which was good, because Sunil wasn’t sure that his reasoning would make sense to anyone else. It had something to do with the fact that, on the most profitable day of his life, he’d failed to reach the state of exhilaration that other boys called “the full enjoy.” The strangled she-dog had been only part of it. He sometimes said of being a scavenger, “I don’t like myself, doing this work. It’s like being an insult.” He thought he might like himself even less, being a thief. Moreover, Kalu’s dealings with the Sahar Police made him uneasy.

Later, Sunil would come to understand the extent of the power that Mumbai police officers had over Annawadi road boys. But now, as good as he was at divining motives, he could only conclude that the workings behind Kalu’s night jobs were beyond a twelve-year-old’s ability to grasp.

The plot of this novel,
Mrs. Dalloway
, made no sense whatsoever to Manju. Doing her college reading, Asha’s daughter felt so sluggish that she feared she’d caught dengue fever or malaria again—hazards of living thirty feet from a buzzing sewage lake. No, she decided. It was simply the weather: Only spring and already the sun was scorching, a knifing white force that made the eyes ache and sent Annawadi water buffalo prematurely into heat. Manju thought her mother looked wan, too, but this was possibly because Corporator Subhash Sawant—the man Asha hoped would make her slum boss—had been accused in court of electoral fraud.

When Manju first asked about the rumor, Asha had shrugged it off. Her patron had previously made two murder charges disappear. “Court cases can be managed in Mumbai,” as the Corporator put it. So why did his bulk seem to be slipping from his chest to his belly? The clamminess around his collar seemed imperfectly correlated to the weather.

Just as the Indian government allowed only women to stand for certain elections, it reserved other elections strictly for low-caste candidates, to increase the presence of historically excluded populations in the country’s political leadership. In the previous year’s elections, restricted in Ward 76 to low-caste candidates, the Corporator had won handily. Subhash Sawant wasn’t low-caste, though. He’d simply manufactured a new caste certificate, a new birthplace, and a new set of ancestors to qualify for the ballot. At least ten candidates in other city wards, mostly Shiv Sena, had done the same.

But the Congress Party candidate for Ward 76, a genuine low-caste who had finished second, was now papering the High Court with evidence of Subhash Sawant’s falsifications, asking the judge to overturn the election. Suddenly, the Corporator felt the need for citizen homage. He’d been running this ward for more than a decade, could barely recall the autorickshaw-driving and petty thuggery that came before. So he’d begun visiting the ward’s slums to receive the love of his constituents, in hopes that it might somehow trump a paperwork discrepancy.

Annawadi’s turn next. Asha and Manju would assemble the slumdwellers in a pink temple by the sewage lake in order to pray with him for a victory in court.

Asha winced when he gave the order. It was the season of school exams, and parents were reluctant to leave their huts and risk having their children abandon their textbooks. She had to bring all her influence to bear to ensure a respectable attendance.

At sunset on the designated night, Subhash Sawant strode into Annawadi in an impeccable white safari suit, accompanied by an entourage. Sunil and the other scavengers gaped from a distance. The Corporator had one of those spread-leg policeman strides—as if his thighs were too muscled for normal walking. And there was enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.

The Corporator approved of the poori bhaji that Manju and her friend Meena were cooking for the ceremony. He was pleased, too, with the decorations in the tiny temple, which was furnished with an old metal school desk. The Tamil construction workers who’d settled Annawadi, Meena’s parents among them, had erected this hut and consecrated it to Mariamma, the goddess who protects against plagues. With Subhash Sawant’s approval, Asha had helped wrest control of it for the Maharashtrians, after which the pink temple sat locked most days. But this afternoon, Meena and Manju had given it a proper scrubbing. The dead flies and rat turds were gone, the new idols shining.

“Call people, and I’ll come after dinner to speak,” the Corporator told Asha before he and his entourage departed in their SUVs. Asha rang the temple bell at 8
P.M.
, and soon the place was packed. As a tabla player drummed quietly, Asha arranged herself by the school desk, the gold border of her best sari catching the light of a dozen votive candles.

Almost every person in the temple, Asha included, was genuinely low-caste. Most were the migrants Shiv Sena wanted to banish from Mumbai. But the residents had come not just out of fear of angering Asha, but out of belief in the Corporator himself.

They understood Subhash Sawant to be corrupt. They assumed he’d faked his caste certificate. “But he alone comes here, shows his face,” Annawadians said. Before each election, he’d used city money or tapped the largesse of a prominent American Christian charity, World Vision, to give Annawadi an amenity: a public toilet; a flagpole; gutters; a concrete platform by the sewage lake, where he usually stood when he came. And each time he visited, he told residents how hard he’d been fighting to hold off the bulldozers of the airport authority, which had razed huts here in 2001 and 2004. In the scheme of the airport modernization project, and of the governance of Mumbai,
the Corporator was a bit player, a pothole-filler of a politician. But he loomed larger than the Indian prime minister in the political imaginations of Annawadians. He needed their votes; they needed to believe in his power to protect them.

“When does he come?” people asked.

“Soon,” Asha promised. The packed temple grew ripe with sweat. Slum dwellings, temples included, sucked in the heat of the city and held it, but in the first hour the misery went unexpressed. The next hour, the temple was teeming with sighs.

Time was precious to Annawadians, even those not tense about their children’s exams. They had work at dawn, homes to clean, children to bathe, and above all water to get from the slum’s trickle-taps before they went dry, which involved standing in line for hours. The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.

At 10
P.M.
, Asha’s sari blouse was soaked at the throat and armpits, but she’d finally reached Subhash Sawant’s chauffeur on the phone. “He’s on his way,” she told the crowd, then struck up a group prayer, so that when the Corporator arrived he would find the residents hard at their devotions.

At 11
P.M.
, he still hadn’t come. Asha gestured to her daughter. “Get the food.” The dishes Manju had prepared were to be consumed after the ceremony, but people were starting to leave, and neither the Corporator nor the chauffeur was answering his phone.

The would-be celebrants ate and went home, leaving only a dozen people, mostly sad-sack drunks, in the temple. Asha could not compose her face.

The departees would say that Asha had promised to deliver the Corporator and failed. Worse, Subhash Sawant, a late-night type, would arrive to find an empty temple. It was a catastrophe for which she alone would be blamed. He would give her that smile that could not be read but as an insult. He would say that she didn’t have the respect of the residents, that Annawadi wasn’t ready for a female slumlord. No doubt he would mention how many people had gathered for how successful an evening at how many other slums.

As Asha bitterly laid out these probabilities to her daughter, a beautiful young eunuch wandered into Annawadi. Seeing a drummer sitting idle in an empty temple glowing with light, he went inside and started to dance.

The eunuch had long thick curls, lashes that touched his eyebrows, cheap metal bangles on his wrists, and hips that swiveled slowly, at first. He held his arms out, statue-still, while his legs became slithery things. The drummer came to life. Manju’s mouth fell open. It was as if the eunuch’s upper and lower body were being operated by separate controls. He paused to take a votive candle in his teeth, then launched into a spin that extinguished the flame.

The eunuchs, or
hijras
, of Mumbai were feared and fetishized both. They had so much bad luck, being sexually ambiguous, that the bad luck was understood to be contagious. When eunuchs came to your doorstep, you had to pay them to go away. You paid a little more if you wanted them to throw a coconut in front of your enemy. But once the coconut was thrown, the evil eye would stick, even if your enemy hired a
baba
to burn three incense sticks in a glass of rice with a sprinkle of vermilion powder on top.