Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Prologue

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father.

The father, a sick man, would wait inside the trash- strewn, tin-roofed shack where the family of eleven resided.

Abdul’s opinion of this plan had not been solicited, typically.

He knew nothing about eluding policemen.

Doing waste work that many Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large family above subsistence.

Doing waste work that many Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large family above subsistence.

A kind of beachfront for a vast pool of sewage that marked the slum's eastern border, the place was bedlam most nights: people fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending goats, playing cricket, waiting for water at a public tap...

Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo, and the usual belly-down splay of alcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small, unspookable boy from Nepal.

He had deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry—the type that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through people-choked slumlanes.

He simply recognized Annawadi as a place booby-trapped with contentions, new and ancient, over which he was determined not to trip.

Only a coconut-tree-lined thoroughfare separated the slum from the entrance to the international terminal.

Serving the airport clientele, and encircling Annawadi, were five extravagant hotels: four ornate, marbly megaliths and one sleek blue-glass Hyatt, from the top-floor windows of which Annawadi and several adjacent squatter settlements looked like villages that had been airdropped into gaps between elegant modernities.

They dredged sewers and raided dumpsters for empty bottles of water and beer.

Abdul would be waiting at his rusty scale. In the hierarchy of the undercity’s waste business, the teenager was a notch above the scavengers: a trader who appraised and bought what they found.

Abdul’s mother was the haggler in the family, raining vibrant abuse upon scavengers who asked too much for their trash.

To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day.

To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day.

Although profane bargaining was the norm in the waste business, he felt his mother acceded to that norm with too much relish.

Abdul considered himself “old-fashioned, 90 percent,” and censured his mother freely. “And what would your father say, to hear you cursing in the street?”

As India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one's caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention.

She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class.

But the One Leg also wanted to transcend the affliction by which others had named her.

Abdul's family knew many of the officers at the local station, just enough to fear them all. When they learned that a family in the slum was making money, they visited every other day to extort some.

The worst of the lot had been Constable Pawar, who had brutalized little Deepa, a homeless girl who sold flowers by the Hyatt.

But the two officers were perfectly calm, even friendly, as they relayed the salient facts.

That gave him three or four more hours of darkness in which to plan an escape more sensible than a skulk to the hut next door.

One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee.

“So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction.

The clangor around him was Annawadians in adjacent huts, making breakfast.

Abdul had occasionally tried to monetize the terminal's security perimeter. Two aluminum panels, swiped and sold, and a garbage boy could rest for a year.