Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Part Four

Two months after the public spectacle of her burning, it had insinuated itself into countless private narratives.

To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty.

In Asha’s village, people of the Kunbi caste still considered Dalits like Meena contaminated: unhygienic people relegated to the outskirts of town and tolerated in Kunbi homes only when picking up garbage or dredging drains.

A teenaged boy shimmied up the flagpole to anchor the strings of lights, while other boys climbed onto hut roofs to affix the ends of the strings to corrugated eaves.

Meena’s future in-laws might not come to hear that they’d chosen an impetuous bride.

His climbing ability had been honed on Airport Road coconut trees, his small size helped deflect suspicion, and he didn’t balk at calculated risks, like the ones he took when jumping down to the garbage-filled ledge above the river.

On the road outside the shed, his father was careening past, and Abdul was talking animatedly to another boy, who wasn’t listening.

But by fiat of the central government, the massive case backlogs were now being addressed by fourteen hundred high-speed courts across the country.

He simply counted on Kehkashan, a more reliable narrator than his father, to keep him apprised of how worried he should be.

First to the wooden witness stand was one of Fatima’s two close confidantes, a destitute girl named Priya.

She felt sicker than ever when she saw him take the stand with a clenched jaw, a livid face. Because he was speaking in Marathi, some minutes passed before Kehkashan figured out that his anger was not directed at her family but at the Sahar Police.

What he cared about was having to forgo a day’s income because of an inaccurate police statement.

Should he look at the judge, who was considering him placidly from her perch high above the stand, or at the prosecutor, who stood opposite him, on his level?

The misconstrued witnesses and the mystified accused all got on the same train to return to their regular, contentious lives in Annawadi, where they would stew about what they thought had happened but couldn't know for sure.

One afternoon, Abdul, Mirchi, and their parents stood, hands behind backs, contemplating a motley cache of garbage in the storeroom.

Unable to accuse the family of possessing hot goods, the officers threatened to arrest Abdul for sorting his garbage on the maidan. A usurpation of public space! A crime against Annawadians’ quality of life!

Arriving at work, Mirchi stood under a blower that blasted the city dirt from his body, then loaded food onto pallets inside a cavernous freezer.

He secured a six-month stint cleaning air-conditioning ducts.

The popular rage about Kasab didn’t seem to transfer to other Muslims in Mumbai, Abdul was relieved to find on the three days a week he traveled by train to Dongri. In the clammy, crowded train cars, he was no one's proxy.

The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.

The mosque and tomb of Haji Ali sat on an islet in the Arabian Sea, connected to the mainland by a rocky promontory.

But her list of disappointments was long. The grocery store for which she’d received a government loan, and which she’d hoped her husband could run from the hut. The tedious, still unremunerative slumlording.

The idea of Manju as a profit-center bride. The windfall that was supposed to have come from securing flats for Sahar police officers to conduct their side businesses. Other schemes that had sucked up months before sputtering out.

But in her current mood, small affronts were bundled with larger disappointments and became a body of evidence.

Corruption in the scheme was endemic; organized-crime syndicates had become major players.

The general failure of Mumbai slum clearance efforts made removing the airport slums even more important. The job was manageable in scale and outsized in resonance. It would signify to the world that Indian leaders were making headway on their goal of a “slum-free Mumbai.”

She had identified an opening in land speculation, of which there was much at Annawadi lately.

The problem arose when the businessman sent a gang of drunken men to expedite Geeta's exit—on a Sunday afternoon, when all of Annawadi was on hand to watch.

Bad visuals. Damaging to the stature of a slumlord, especially one who had been seen sitting at home, face hard as a knuckle, while the violence in the slumlanes had transpired.

Later, Asha wished that she had come to the attention of Gaikwad because of her intelligence, or even her looks. But his interest was based on something more mundane: the fact that she had a nonprofit organization.

A minor hitch occurred when the first installment of government money—429,000 rupees—showed up in the bank account of the moribund nonprofit.

The eunuchs were nothing like the lithe and beautiful one who had once mesmerized her in the temple by the sewage lake.

The parliamentarian who would represent Annawadians was hardly in doubt. It would be the incumbent from the Congress Party, Priya Dutt, a kind, unassuming woman who personified two historical weaknesses of the Indian electorate: for filmi people and for legacies.

Their problem was that district elections officials sometimes failed to process registration forms submitted by migrants and other reviled minorities.

They stood where the sewage lake used to be, rapt, as the bright yellow bulldozers churned the ground.

The deposed slumlord, Robert the Zebra Man, was running two of his horses harnessed to an undermaintained carriage, freshly painted red and blue.

At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now; the quashing of voter applications at the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborers' pay.

The judge's conclusion was succinct.

As 2009 drew to a close, Zehrunisa was taking special measures to hasten Abdul’s trial and vindication.

Abdul's father had developed an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: "It's moving past and you think you're going to miss it but then you say, wait, maybe I won't miss it—I just have to run faster than I've ever run before. Only now we're all tired and damaged, so how fast can we really run? You have to try to catch it, even when you know you're not going to catch it, when maybe it's better just to let it go—"
Abdul wanted no part of this malaise.