Behind the Beautiful Forevers (12 page)

She was damaged, and acknowledged it freely. She was illiterate—acknowledged that, too. But when others spoke of her fury as an ignorant, animal thing, that was
bukwaas
, utter nonsense. Much of her outrage derived from a belated recognition that she was as human as anyone else.

Sometimes, the afternoon men left her money; most were too poor to do so. But even the poorest of them helped her grasp what her parents had taken from her—those ashamed and shaming parents who’d hidden an imperfect daughter in their hut.

It had been daily punishment, watching her siblings run off to school and return to suck up their parents’ affection. “I had such hate for myself, back then,” Fatima told Zehrunisa, whom she alternately relied on and resented. “All I heard was that I had been born wrong.” Nowadays, when her mother took the train across the city to visit, she couldn’t help but pass around a glamour photo of Fatima’s younger sister—that two-legged marvel with a sparkling jewel in her nose. “
This
one is a good girl,” the mother liked to say. “See how nice she looks, and fair?”

“The One Leg could say worse, be worse, the way she grew up,” Zehrunisa told Abdul, though she privately considered it self-indulgent for a grown woman to complain about her childhood. Zehrunisa could barely stand to speak of her own early years of water-and-wheat-husk soup in Pakistan, before an arranged marriage sent her across the border. Few women in Annawadi could look back on a honeyed youth. But Fatima thought wretched early years should be rounded out by a few good ones, which she had yet to have.

She had no interest in playing the shuffling, grateful role that the charitable types expected of the disabled. It was hard enough maintaining her pride in a slum where even hardy women grew exhausted
running a household. In the monsoon, Fatima’s mornings sometimes started like this: one leg, two crutches, twelve-pound vessel of pump-water, mudslick, splat. Add to this young daughters whom she couldn’t chase after—needy, rambunctious creatures who laid her deficiencies bare. Only in the hours when the men came—husband at work, daughters at school—did the part of her body she had to offer feel more important than the part of it she lacked.

June, the beginning of the four-month monsoon season, made every sensible Annawadian pensive. The slum was a floodbowl, surrounded as it was by high walls and mounds of illegally dumped construction rubble. 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. Two residents had drowned, and more would have, had not a construction crew building an addition to the Intercontinental hotel supplied ropes and pulled slumdwellers through the floodwaters to safety.

This year, the clouds broke early, and for a week the rain came down like nails. Outside Annawadi, construction projects stopped, and daily-wage workers braced for hunger. Hut walls grew green and black with mold, the contents of the public toilet spewed out onto the maidan, and fungi protruded from feet like tiny sculptures—a special torment to those whose native customs involved toe rings.

“I’m going to die of these feet,” said a woman whose fungus fanned out like butterfly wings as she lined up in the rain for water. “The way my children eat, the rice I’ve stored won’t last two weeks,” said the woman behind her, as the seasonal complaints gathered momentum. “I don’t want to be stuck inside with my husband for all these months.” “At least you’re not married to Mr. Kamble—heart valve day and night.” But just as the women settled into the rhythm
of monsoon grievance, the rains ceased, replaced by a syrupy yellow sun. Then the women wished the rains would start again; it seemed unnatural for them to quit for so many days.

The children saw the break in the rains differently. While the school year would soon resume, a clear sky permitted a final orgy of play. Abdul’s brother Mirchi started a giant game of ring toss in the maidan, using the flagpole and busted bicycle tubes from Abdul’s storeroom.

“It’s a fluke,” Mirchi said to Rahul, whose inner tube had juddered down the flagpole.

“What fluke?” protested Rahul, as other boys cheered and thumped his back. “Watch me—I can do it again!”

Zehrunisa came out to watch the game, wiping away tears as she considered her exuberant son. Mirchi seemed to have forgotten the pall he’d brought over the household by failing ninth grade. She considered him her brightest child, had even imagined him becoming a doctor. Now his unexpected failure brought the tally of Husain household crises to three. Her husband was in the hospital, struggling to breathe, and her eldest daughter, Kehkashan, had run away from her husband of a year.

Mirchi’s cheerfulness had much to do with the return of his sister. All of the Husain children had been elated to see her. It wasn’t just that she could cook and clean in place of their mother, who spent most of her days at the hospital. To her younger brothers and sisters, Kehkashan had been a second mother—a more organized, less exhausted version of the original. But she’d returned home with heartbreak in her eyes.

Kehkashan’s husband was also her cousin; Zehrunisa and one of her sisters had arranged the marriage when their children were two. But Kehkashan felt that the intimate photos in her husband’s cellphone—of a woman not more beautiful than she—resolved a
question that had troubled her since the wedding. Why didn’t her new husband want to make love? “He told me once, ‘It’s because you go off to sleep too early,’ so I would stay up late,” she told her mother. “Then he stopped coming home at night. He says, ‘Don’t correct me, you don’t have any rights over me.’ What kind of life is this?” The women in her husband’s family kept strict purdah—stayed inside the house unless accompanied by a man. “So I sit at home, entirely dependent on this man,” she said, “and then it turns out his heart was never with me.”

Zehrunisa hoped that her sister would be able to bring the husband back in line. But to her daughter’s urgent question—“How is it possible to force someone to love me?”—she had no answer, because the faults of her own husband did not include a lack of love.

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, especially now that she was presumed not to be a virgin. Boys stared into her hut. Kehkashan averted her eyes. She sometimes wished, for peace’s sake, that she was plainer.

Zehrunisa blamed Fatima for drawing such dogs in heat to the family doorstep. She’d managed to beat away one of Fatima’s lovers, who kept drifting over to leer at her daughter, but he was frail from a heroin habit. Other men might fight back. Fatima would sit on her neck, too. With Kehkashan crushed, Mirchi a failure, toddlers to chase after, her husband in the hospital, and a fever she couldn’t get rid of, Zehrunisa lacked the energy for a fight with the One Leg.

Zehrunisa tried not to judge the private morality that Fatima had developed; she knew the woman craved affection and respect. But especially when Zehrunisa considered Fatima’s children, her own respect drained away. Recently, Fatima had gone at her eight-year-old, Noori, so hard with the crutches that Zehrunisa and another woman
had had to tackle her. And then there was Fatima’s two-year-old, Medina. After the little girl got TB, Fatima had become obsessed about catching the disease herself. Then Medina had drowned in a pail.

“I was in the toilet when it happened,” Fatima had claimed to Zehrunisa. But shared walls leak secrets, one of which was that when Medina drowned in a very small hut, Fatima and her mother were there. Fatima’s six-year-old daughter, Heena, had also been on hand, and said afterward, “Medina was a very nice sister until that day.”

Zehrunisa had paid for the funeral shroud and the burial plot, and tried to convince herself that Medina’s death had in fact been an accident. She thought about her own children, and how she didn’t know what they were up to half the time.

The police came to Annawadi one day to ask about Medina’s death, an inquiry quickly closed. Young girls in the slums died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth. Sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.

One-year-old Danush, who lived two lanes over from the Husains, had gotten an infection in the filthy public hospital where he was born. His skin peeled off, and the touch of a sheet made him scream. His family took loan after loan at usurious interest, spending fifteen thousand rupees trying to cure him. Then one night in March, his father had beaten back his wife and emptied a pot of boiling lentils on the baby in his sari-sling cradle. Asha’s son Rahul had jumped smack into the middle of that horror show—had run to get the police. Zehrunisa admired the hell out of Rahul for that. Danush reached a hospital and survived. Now Zehrunisa ached every time she saw him: that grave, unblinking eye in a burn-mapped face.

After Medina drowned, Fatima seemed oddly liberated. Other
women said the worst of her, and she found that she didn’t much care. She drew on dramatic black eyebrows, shellacked her cheeks with powder—“spent fifty rupees to turn into a white lady,” the Husain boys whispered—and picked up a fresh set of lovers. “Did you see how that guy and his friend are looking at me?” she would say to Zehrunisa. “Are you jealous? No man looks at you.” The men she invited inside found her beautiful, she told her neighbor. Said there was no woman like her in all of India. Said she deserved a nicer life than she had.

The Husains felt for Fatima’s husband, who sorted garbage in another slum, earning a hundred rupees for a fourteen-hour day. 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. “Idiot, you should have asked me before you married. I could have picked you a nice Muslim woman with two legs who would raise your children and run your household properly.”

Mistake. Thin walls. Fatima was in her face, crutches waving. “Who are you to call me a bad wife!”

Still, when Fatima and her husband fought, she would call out Zehrunisa’s name. And Zehrunisa would go, sighing, to separate the miserable couple, just as she sighed on Eid and other Muslim holidays before inviting them to share her mutton korma. The family of the child-abusing Fatima, the family of the skeezy brothel owner: This was the Muslim fellowship she had in Annawadi.

“It’s easy to break a single bamboo stick, but when you bundle the sticks, you can’t even bend them,” she told her children. “It’s the same with family and with the people of our faith. Despite the petty differences, Muslims have to join up in big sufferings, and for Eid.”

Black clouds hunched over the hills west of the city, but didn’t break. Annawadi children kept flinging their inner tubes toward the
flagpole, and one July morning, Abdul’s father watched the game from his doorway, beaming. His shirt hung as loosely as ever off his shoulders, but Fatima and the other neighbors marveled when they saw his face. Garbage proceeds had financed a two-week stay in a small private hospital, where he’d breathed oxygen instead of foul slum air. Karam was shining. He looked
naya tak-a-tak
, brand new.

“I can’t believe it,” the Tamil woman who ran the liquor still told Zehrunisa. “Ten years gone from his face, like that. He looks like some Bollywood hero—Salman Khan.”

“He ought to look good,” said Zehrunisa. “We paid twenty thousand rupees to that hospital. But it’s true, he got so young—like a boy! I see him from the corner of my eye and I think, oh shit, I forgot that I had another child. Now I will have to arrange another marriage! Allah knows I have enough marriages to do already.”

The next marriage would be Abdul’s. Though the financials remained to be worked out, she and her husband had settled on a likely girl, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a scrap dealer in Saki Naka, the industrial slum where Abdul sold his goods. The girl was pretty, no moles evident. Crucially, she was habituated to filthy men. She had come to the house three times, demure in a burqa, her younger sister in tow. From what Mirchi could make out, this younger sister was extremely hot, and in her honor, he painted a large red heart on the front of the family hut.

Mirchi claimed to be eager for marriage. One day, well out of his father’s earshot, he said, “Mother, I want a wife just like you—she’ll do all the work, and I’ll do nothing.” But Abdul was as cautious about marrying as he was about everything else.

“I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don’t feel it, and I myself don’t know why,” he fretted. “These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away—they cut their arms with a blade,
they put a cigarette butt out in their hand, they won’t sleep, they won’t eat, they’ll sing—they must have different hearts than mine.”

He told his parents, “You don’t hold a hot iron in your palm, do you? You let it cool. You think on it slowly.”

“No, I think we should marry him quickly,” Zehrunisa told her husband as she cooked lunch a few days after his homecoming. He’d asked for meat to build his strength, and she was crouched on the floor breast-feeding Lallu while stirring a cartilaginous stew. “A marriage would make him happy, I think. So much turmoil inside him—I don’t think he’s been happy for a single day in Annawadi.”

“Who is happy, living here?” her husband replied, fishing a silver-foil packet of prednisolone from a plastic bag of medicines he’d tacked on the wall. “Am I happy? All around us, third-class people and no one with whom I can relate. Does anyone here even know of the American war in Iraq? All they know of is each other’s business. But I don’t complain to you. Why is Abdul complaining?”

“Do you know your own son? He says nothing—just does his work, does what we ask him. But why is it only his mother who sees that he is sad?”

“He will be happier when we go to Vasai,” he replied.

“Happier in Vasai,” she quietly repeated, with a sarcasm he chose to ignore.