Behind the Beautiful Forevers (13 page)

The small plot of land on which they’d made a deposit in January was an hour and a half farther outside the city, in a community of construction suppliers and industrial recyclers. Many of its residents were Muslims from the Uttar Pradesh district in which Karam had been raised, on the Nepal border. 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.

The first time Karam visited the place, he’d been struck by a
group of men clutching newspapers and speaking animatedly at a tea stall. He imagined they were discussing the black man in the United States who was trying to become the country’s president. Karam had heard that this Obama was secretly a Muslim, and was rooting for him.

The dirt roads twisting upward from the tea stall had been giddy with chickens, which reminded him of his native village. He wasn’t sentimental about that village, in a district where there was little work except in sugarcane fields and children died at one of the highest rates in India. But he felt that urban slums surrounded by affluence turned children contemptuous of their parents—“because we can’t give the brand-name clothes, the car.” He considered it fortunate that Mirchi was merely lazy, not a defiant consumer of Eraz-ex, but there were six other children after Mirchi. To Karam, Vasai was the ideal village-city hybrid: a place where opportunity and parental respect weren’t mutually exclusive.

“And at least there they would not be insulted for their religion,” he told his wife.

Zehrunisa felt it premature to invest their dreams for their children in a part-owned bit of dirt that lacked even four bamboo poles and a tarp under which to sleep. “Our ghost house,” she’d taken to calling the property. She’d given him permission to make the deposit. He always consulted her on financial decisions, since the results had been dire the two times he ignored her advice. But it irritated her that he hadn’t yet taken her to see the land.

“How can I take you, with all these children to care for?” he’d been saying all year. But Kehkashan was now here to help, and she still hadn’t seen the place. She wondered if the community was so like his native village that it had gotten him to thinking like the conservative Muslim men who lived there.

Before her husband’s hospitalization, the developer had visited to
discuss the property payments. She’d worn her burqa, served tea, then crouched in a corner, as her mother had done in Pakistan. Covered and unseen by men outside her family was the way Zehrunisa had expected to live out her adult life. But shortly after marriage brought her to Uttar Pradesh, she was working the sugarcane fields—at night, among men. She had prayed constantly for her husband’s TB to relent so that she could go back into purdah. “I couldn’t even speak in those days,” she told her children. “I was scared of the whole world.” Having a man to deal with that world on her behalf had seemed to her a fine thing.

She had stopped praying for a return to purdah after Kehkashan was born. She believed in focusing her requests to Allah, troubling Him with only one matter at a time. So she prayed for the health of Kehkashan and then for the health of Abdul, who entered the world in a pile of dirt by the Intercontinental hotel. Her husband had brought the family to Mumbai in hopes of finding work less strenuous than farming. Renting a pushcart to transport waste to recyclers was the work he could find.

Abdul had been a sulky infant—refused his mother’s breast as often as he took it. But he had survived, unlike the next boy. Then Mirchi came, fat and pretty, followed by six more, also healthy. Nothing in Zehrunisa’s life had brought her more satisfaction than the fact that her children took after her, not her husband, in their haleness. Not an undersized one in the lot, after Abdul.

Soon, one of the younger boys would prove clever enough to take over her role in Abdul’s business—negotiating with scavengers, thieves, and police. Then she would gladly stay in the house. But to go back to purdah? It had belatedly dawned on her that this might be expected in Vasai. It would exacerbate her husband’s condescension, a quality sufficiently annoying that she had to snap at him from time to time.

“Just because I can’t read, you pretend to everyone that you’re the hero in this family and I am the nothing,” she’d said to him recently. “Like I would have been stuck in my mother’s womb without you to get me out! Go, act like this big-time shareef, but it is I who have been managing everything!”

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. Such freedoms would be painful to give up.

“In your mind, you’ve already moved to Vasai,” she told her husband, ladling out the stew and handing it over with the economy of motion people develop when living in small, overpopulated huts. “Maybe you should pack up and go. And then go to Saudi—oh, there you can really relax! But this house is where your wife and children live. Look at it. You also felt ashamed when that imam came over.”

Walls bloated and watermarked from flooding. Uneven stone floor with a hoard of recyclables in every corner, and more recyclables beneath an iron bed they’d recently purchased because Karam’s breathing improved when he slept a foot higher than the trash. But had he slept like a bat on the ceiling, there would be no escaping the smell: trash, stale cooking smoke, and the olfactory traces of eleven human beings who lacked sufficient water to get clean.

“I’d like to leave this place, too,” Zehrunisa said. “But where do your children grow up? In the ghost house?”

He looked at her, confused. All last night, all morning, she had been affection itself.

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.

“Do you remember how anxious you were in the hospital?” she
said. “Thinking, what if you were to leave this family?” He had told her, then, “I fear God is inviting me in.”

Karam nodded, frowning. “So?”

“He let you out this time.” She paused. “Do I work hard for this family? Do I ask for jewelry?”

“No,” he admitted. “You don’t ask.”

She was less and less sure she wanted to go to Vasai, less and less sure her husband would live to get there. She wanted a more hygienic home here, in the name of her children’s vitality. She wanted a shelf on which to cook without rat intrusions—a stone shelf, not some cast-off piece of plywood. She wanted a small window to vent the cooking smoke that caused the little ones to cough like their father. 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. With these small improvements, she thought her children might stay as healthy as children in Annawadi could be.

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. The Husains would spend some of their savings to make a decent home. The next day, typically, Karam was acting as if the renovation had been his own idea. In this instance, a happy wife let her husband’s nonsense go.

The little Husains grasped the seriousness of the house renovation when their parents kept them home from school, now back in session. For the next three days, even six-year-old hands would have assignments, the first of which was to drag everything in their hut onto the maidan. The rusty bed came out first, and Karam and Zehrunisa settled in, guarding their possessions from passersby while watching Abdul direct his sibling labor crew.

“Finally, my kitchen!” Zehrunisa said, leaning into her husband, her head scarf slipping down to her shoulders.

“Look at Atahar,” said Karam after a while. Their third son was furiously stirring cement to keep it from hardening in the day’s oppressive heat. “I despair because he has no brains—eighth grade and can’t write the number 8. But he works hard. Like Abdul, not afraid of labor.”

“He’ll be okay,” Zehrunisa agreed. Her fifth son, Safdar, was the
child she worried about. He was dreamy and impractical, like her husband. He loved frogs, and in pursuit of them sometimes swam the sewage lake. No one liked to sleep next to him after he did that.

Asha’s husband, Mahadeo, materialized at the bedside. Slight and weathered, he was monosyllabic when sober, as he’d been since Asha found a cleverer hiding place for her purse. In hopes of relieving this painful condition, he offered his construction skills to the Husains for a hundred rupees.

Abdul, who didn’t quite know what he was doing, was glad for Mahadeo’s help. Asha was the only one in that family who unnerved him. “I think she’s mad in her ambitions,” Abdul’s father had said a few nights earlier. “She wants a shining public life, wants to be some big politician, when her private life is so shameful. Does she think other people can’t hear her fight with her husband at night?” Their fights were indeed as loud as the ones between Fatima the One Leg and her husband. Asha, it was rumored, always won.

As Mahadeo and the Husain children worked, some of Manju’s students wandered over, curious. Manju would soon be calling them to class, but in the meantime they perused the Husain possessions, piled up on the maidan. Adults also came to look. Only a handful of neighbors had been inside the Husains’ hut, but to judge by the piles, the Muslim garbage people were less poor than had been assumed.

Many Annawadians recalled how much the Husains had lost in the 2005 deluge. Their youngest daughter had nearly drowned, and their clothing, rice stores, and savings of five thousand rupees had washed away. Now they had a roughly carpentered wooden cupboard for their clothing—a cupboard twice as large as Asha’s. A small television, bought on an installment plan. Two thick cotton quilts, one blue-and-white checked, one chocolate brown. Eleven stainless steel plates, five cooking pots. Fresh cardamom and cinnamon, superior to
the spices most Annawadians used. A cracked mirror, a tube of Brylcreem, a big bag of medicines. The rusty bed. Most people in the slum, Asha included, slept on the floor.

“Everyone is jealous of us, fixing our house,” Kehkashan explained to an older cousin who’d just arrived from the countryside.

“So let them be jealous,” Zehrunisa exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t we live in a better room now that we are doing a little better?” Still, she decided to entrust the television to the brothelkeeper for the duration of the repair work.

No onlooker asked,
Why fix a house when the airport authority might demolish it?
Almost everyone here improved his hut when he was able, in pursuit not just of better hygiene and protection from the monsoon but of protection from the airport authority. If the bulldozers came to flatten the slum, a decent hut was seen as a kind of insurance. The state of Maharashtra had promised to relocate those families who had squatted at the airport since 2000 to tiny apartments in high-rises. 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. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.

To Abdul, fixing the family hut seemed unwise for reasons that had nothing to do with the airport authority. To him, it was like standing on the roof bragging that a Muslim family was out-earning the Hindus. Why throw ghee on an open flame? His mother’s new tile floor would in any case get carpeted in garbage.

Had the family funds been at his disposal, he would have bought an iPod. Mirchi had told him about this iPod, and while Abdul knew little of music, he had been enchanted by the concept: a small machine that let you hear only what you wanted to hear. A machine to drown out your neighbors.

The window that would let out the cooking smoke was finished the first day, and on the second day the children turned to breaking the cracked stone floor and leveling it in preparation for tiles. “
Ceramic
tiles,” Zehrunisa instructed her husband, who felt well enough to go and shop for them. Two-year-old Lallu, unhappy at being excluded from the construction work, applied a rag to his father’s shoes for the momentous outing. Shortly after noon, Karam put two thousand rupees in his pocket and left for a small tile shop in Saki Naka. Abdul was glad to see him go. Delay was a specialty of his father, and Abdul hoped to finish the work by nightfall.

“You’re all hammering too loud! I can’t hear my radio!” Fatima yelled through the wall after a while. The younger Husain boys looked at one another, amused. Each of the last three times they’d made small repairs to their house, she’d thrown one of her famous fits.

“We’re breaking the floor, putting in a kitchen,” Zehrunisa called back. “I wish the tiles and shelf would magically jump into place, but they won’t, so there will be some noise today.”

Abdul ignored the exchange, intent on his own problem. His mother’s cooking shelf was driving him mad. The four-foot gray slab was uneven, as was the floor, so the shelf wobbled perilously on two supports he’d built to hold it up. Nothing in this idiot house was straight. The only way to stabilize the shelf, and make it level, would be to cut into the brick wall, itself uneven, and cement the slab in place.