Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Part Three

Her husband Mahadeo would play sober; she would play deferential wife; Manju would play herself; and marriage offers would by all rights roll in, despite the nominal occasion of the visit. This occasion was a stripped-down family wedding: no music, no dancing, no jalebis.

The disease was rampant in Vidarbha, and vigorously denied.

The villagers had paid a steep price for their seeds: genetically modified ones called “hybrids," theoretically designed for Vidarbha's erratic climate.

Public money had also altered the landscape: Scattered among desiccated farms were new schools, colleges, and handsome government offices with lawns as well tended as those of the Airport Road Hyatt.

The files accumulating dust in the records rooms of the Vidarbha bureaucracy indicated that modern means...had supplanted self-immolation.

The families of some indebted suicides would get government compensation, and a debt-restructuring and interest- waiver program had begun for the farmers who had borrowed from banks instead of moneylenders.

One of the government’s hopes was to stop villagers from abandoning their farms and further inundating cities like Mumbai, but Asha’s relatives knew nothing of these celebrated relief programs.

...the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India's 627 districts, including an underdeveloped swath of central and eastern India known as the “Red Belt.''

...the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India's 627 districts, including an underdeveloped swath of central and eastern India known as the “Red Belt.''

Past some mud-and-dung houses painted a shade of green no longer known in the fields, she clambered up a steep path to the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god.

Some of them would consider Manju too educated to be docile; others would be too poor to sustain her mother’s interest.

The harsh pragmatism of that afternoon had armed Manju, so when Asha called for her to bring out tea, she smoothed her hair, lowered her eyes, and tried to keep her heart ice-cold.

Back at Annawadi, Asha shut the sordid Fatima drama out of her mind, and shut her door on the frantic Zehrunisa.

Asha remembered how it was when her neighbors heard that she’d gotten a kindergarten post with only a seventh-grade education. They called her “Teacher” snidely. Over time, however, the title stuck and the mockery melted away.

Sensing her mother suddenly treating her as an equal, Manju broached a new subject: that many first-class people married outside their own caste, to people they, not their parents, had chosen.

Asha was intrigued by the television ads for this insurance, which allowed those who could afford it to insulate themselves from some of the volatility of Indian life.

But the Annawadi hut school where she honed her skills was irritating her mother more by the day. Asha didn’t see a long-term benefit in networking with low-class children.

Manju's school came under the auspices of a Catholic charity, Reach Education Action Programme, or REAP, that took its obligation to poor students more seriously than some other nonprofits did.

The priest who headed the organization resisted paying kickbacks, and his schools were gradually being shut across Mumbai.

Mumbai, the financial capital, was an obvious target, so sniffer dogs joined the security phalanxes at the five-star hotels.

At the airport, sandbag bunkers proliferated.

Of the cadre, Manju was the slenderest, and too weak for the all-important “farmer’s lift,” so her usual assignment in the training exercises was to be deadweight—the injured object of rescue.

Then she’d get thrown over someone’s shoulder and carried to safety. Being touched was permissible here, and loveliest when she let her body relax in the arms of Vijay, an earnest, square-jawed college boy who led the battalion. He appreciated the sincere effort Manju put into being a victim.

But Asha spun out of her daughter's grasp, walked fast across the maidan, past the road boys in the video parlor, past the Hyatt, not pausing until she reached the bus stop outside the imperious Grand Maratha hotel.

Its anatomy department required twenty-five unclaimed cadavers for dissection, and this one rounded out the order.

The face itself was off-putting: wizened, with one of the blinky eyes rolling up.

It was a display so abject that Sunil felt prepared to disdain it, until the guard emptied two large trash cans at Sonu’s feet.

They started to talk more as they worked. First, little stuff: that toes were almost as useful as fingers for judging the recyclability of goods; that Sonu’s family owned a radio that shocked your hand when you turned up the volume. Then bigger stuff, for Sonu liked to give concise lectures as he scavenged.

Imbibing water from the sewage lake gives you jaundice, he argued, against Sunil’s contention that teasing people with jaundice gives you jaundice.

Sunil thought of Kalu as the parrot of road boys, although the older boy had recently seemed subdued.

Though Ganesh Anna paid the police to stay off his back, the constables weren't satisfied with their cut. In return for good information about the time and place of drug buys, they would leave Kalu's trash pilferings alone.

His father and brother were decamping for a construction project in the hill country near Karjat, two hours away from Annawadi.

He thought Ganpati, the elephant god, the remover of obstacles, should be Sunil’s main god, too. To convince him, Kalu took him on a barefoot nine-mile penitents’ pilgrimage to the Siddhivinayak temple in central Mumbai.

A judge had decided he wasn’t the type to run away before his trial in juvenile court, releasing him with strict instructions: Until the trial, report to Dongri every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to prove you haven't absconded.

At the scales, he kept asking whether they had procured their goods honestly.

"You should have stayed,” Zehrunisa admonished him.

“All murders we detect, 100 percent success,” was how Senior Inspector Patil, who ran the Sahar station, liked to put it. But perhaps there was a trick to this success rate: not detecting the murders of inconsequential people.

Succumbed to an “irrecoverable illness” was the swift conclusion of Maruti Jadhav, the inspector in charge of Kalu’s case.

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear.

Anandi often chided him that any brother who loved his sister as much as he professed to would come home more often.