Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Part Two

June, the beginning of the four-month monsoon season, made every sensible Annawadian pensive.

In a 2005 deluge that brought the whole city to a standstill, Fatima's family had lost most of what they owned, as had the Husains and many other Annawadians.

Mirchi seemed to have forgotten the pall he’d brought over the household by failing ninth grade.

The Hindu cricketers took note of Kehkashan's return, deciding that the Muslim girl's resplendent looks trumped the taint of her goat-eating and dwelling amid garbage...

His family took loan after loan at usurious interest, spending fifteen thousand rupees trying to cure him.

Mirchi put it bluntly: “She treats that old man like a shoe.” The shoe often came over to complain about his wayward wife, and one night Zehrunisa had teased him.

He’d learned of the Vasai community from a Muslim developer so given to religious disquisition that Mirchi and Abdul called him the imam, rolling their eyes.

It would exacerbate her husband’s condescension, a quality sufficiently annoying that she had to snap at him from time to time.

Annawadi’s lack of censorious, conservative Muslims allowed her to call out her husband when necessary, just as it had allowed her to work to feed her children.

But Zehrunisa had had an idea, and sensed an auspicious moment when her husband came out of the hospital. It had nothing to do with the position of the moon and the stars. It had to do with the shortness of life and a break in the rains.

On the floor she wanted ceramic tiles like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever wall—tiles that could be scrubbed clean, instead of broken concrete that harbored filth in each striation.

Before she'd even finished making her petition, her husband had assented, setting into motion the chain of contingency that would damage two families forever.

Manju would soon be calling them to class, but in the meantime they perused the Husain possessions, piled up on the maidan.

To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family's tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities.

When she recovered from her bout of sobbing, Asha was in the seat beside her.

Hearing his daughter's virtue disparaged, Karam came outside.

Now, proffering sweet lime juice and coconut water, Asha whispered into Fatima’s blackened ear.

The British had written the criminal code, and their strict anti-suicide provisions were designed to end a historical practice of families encouraging widows onto the funeral pyres of their dead husbands—a practice that relieved the families of the expense of feeding the widows.

In the new account, Fatima admitted to burning herself, then carefully apportioned the blame for this self- immolation.

Later in the beating—how much later, he couldn’t say—he was pulled back into sentience by the sound of his mother’s voice.

The salutary effect of the oxygen Karam had received two weeks earlier at the private hospital had been negated.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a haggard Zehrunisa appeared at the cell window to explain the compounding price of their freedom.

She would pay the police and placate Fatima’s husband with a more modest sum.

Despite her political antipathy toward Muslims and migrants, Asha had worked hard on behalf of the Husains, and for free.

He just knew that she didn't really long for companionable misery. She'd known abjectness, loathed its recollection, and raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition.

At sundown, four days after the burning, a Muslim fakir came to Annawadi with a peacock-feather broom to offer blessings and drive away evil spirits.

When Fatima was clean and sinless, Kehkashan closed the box and covered the bier with the Husains' best cotton quilt, the one with tiny blue checks.

She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all.

The procession of dolorous slumdwellers seemed even smaller against the outsized enthusiasms of the airport city.

The trail of garbage was sparser in the monsoon than in other seasons, since traffic at the airport declined and construction projects stalled.

Those children, too, became Mirchi’s responsibility, since the relatives before whom Zehrunisa needed to prostrate herself were scattered in slums across a rain-wrecked city.

At sunset, clouds distended, the monsoon sky corded red, she would be on her knees outside the station, begging the officer’s forgiveness.

She thought he would know about efficacious bribery.

However, age-related records weren’t part of his repertoire.

He must have slept, for the next sounds he registered were sonorous calls to prayer—the amplified dawn azan of the neighborhood mosques.

There was more water here than at Annawadi, and Abdul felt a little better after washing off the sweating he’d done in the police cell. But on his second morning at Dongri, when ordered to take a bath, he bridled.

On the third morning, the guard said that if he didn't bathe, he'd miss breakfast and get put in the airless cell that had made him want to eat small children. He decided to accept the Dongri bathing rules. By the fourth morning, his knees and ears and neck were as clean as they'd ever been. The breakfasts received in exchange for this heroic capitulation were dismal.

He didn’t have two thousand rupees, and what was it with this rich doctor, asking a boy in detention for cash? The doctor held up his hands, rueful.

The world seemed replete with people as bad off as himself, and this made him feel less alone.

He would categorically refuse to buy anything he thought had been stolen, even if it was only stolen garbage.