Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Part One

A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats' eyes were heavy with sleep.

But other poor citizens had seen the Tamils sweat to summon solid land from a bog, and that labor had earned a certain deference.

This morning, culling screws and hobnails from his pile, he tried to keep an eye on Annawadi's goats, who liked the smell of the dregs in his bottles and the taste of the paste beneath the labels.

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.

Annawadians liked to talk about the hotels and the depraved things that likely went on inside.

She was a stalwart in a political party, Shiv Sena, which was dominated by Hindus born in Maharashtra, Mumbai's home state.

Shiv Sena's current galvanizing cause was purging Mumbai of migrants from India's poor northern states.

Rich people’s garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors.

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?

Her husband was an alcoholic, an itinerant construction worker, a man thoroughgoing only in his lack of ambition.

The Corporator, Subhash Sawant, was a man of pancake makeup, hair dye, aviator sunglasses, and perspicacity.

Her temp work, teaching kindergartners at a large municipal school for modest pay, was a sinecure the Corporator had helped her obtain, overlooking the fact that her formal schooling had stopped at seventh grade.

Discretion and subtlety, qualities useful in controlling a slum, were things she had learned since coming to the city.

She had by now seen past the obvious truth—that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition—to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy.

As group identities based on caste, ethnicity, and religion gradually attenuated, anger and hope were being privatized, like so much else in Mumbai.

This development increased the demand for canny mediators—human shock absorbers for the colliding, narrowly construed interests of one of the world’s largest cities.

As Asha arrived home from her teaching job one afternoon, her step didn’t quicken when she saw supplicants lined up against the wall of her hut.

Her job was to gather random female neighbors to smile demurely while the officials went on about how their collective had lifted them from poverty.

Asha believed in New Indian miracles but thought they happened only gradually, as incremental advantages over one’s neighbors were parlayed into larger ones.

The upstart nephew wanted to show voters that a new political party he had started disliked bhaiyas like Abdul even more than Shiv Sena did.

In the years since, Sunil had come back to Annawadi frequently—whenever he’d had chicken pox or jaundice or some other goddess-in-the-body situation that threatened the health of Sister Paulette’s other wards.

Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.

But people of other castes were encroaching on the Matangs’ historical livelihood, because steady work was hard to come by, and trash was always there.

Now they didn’t have money to buy gas for it, nor the rent they owed the Husains. The Bihari woman asked Zehrunisa’s forbearance. “What can I do? Please don’t chuck us out!”

Abdul and Rahul lived in Tamil Sai Nagar, the oldest and most salubrious section, which was anchored by the public toilets.

Kalu jumped into the fetid water and paddled toward them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the other hours, she provided cooking, cleaning, water-collection, and laundry services to her household of five. These obligations were fulfilled by sleeping only four hours a night, and rarely impinged on her temperament.

She had spent her teenaged years turning herself into a model of proper and gentle deportment—deportment she thought her own mother lacked.

A Christina Aguilera belter—I am beautiful, no matter what they say—segued into “Rise Up,” a dance song that was Rahul's current favorite.

Except in the best colleges, dominated by high-caste, affluent students, Indian liberal arts education was taught by rote.

Neither Rahul nor her mother knew English, and both took umbrage that the language of India’s former colonizers was considered requisite for decent jobs in offices and hotels, when Marathi was just as venerable a language.

In his spare time, he sold mutual funds for ICICI Bank, making cold calls for a paltry commission.

Manju wanted to be a teacher when she finished college, and her great fear was that, in a fit of pique, her mother would wed her to a village boy who didn’t think that a woman should work.

But Manju's desire to be good was also rebellion—a way of chastising a mother who was said to have acquired the television set and other advantages by behaving badly.

She was checking to see if she’d stanched the bleeding when Devo’s one-eyed, widowed mother came through the door, brandishing a foot-long piece of metal.

Rahul, awake now, rolled his eyes; he considered the hut school a magnet for family histrionics.