Behind the Beautiful Forevers (14 page)

Asha’s husband being too hungover to work today, another neighbor had offered to help, for money up front. This man seemed wobbly, too, but Abdul put it out of his head as the two of them began chipping away at the brick. Zehrunisa said, “We’ll really hear from the One Leg now.” Thirty seconds later, Fatima began to shout.

“What’s happening to my wall?”

“Don’t take tension, Fatima,” Zehrunisa called back. “We’re doing the shelf now. Just give us this day—we also want it done fast, before the rains come.”

Abdul kept working. He was a categorizer of people as well as garbage, and as distinctive as Fatima looked, he considered her a common type. At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope—that the good fortune of others might one day be hers. His mother claimed that back when every life at Annawadi was roughly equal in its misery, neighborly resentments didn’t get out of hand, though Zehrunisa was known to be sentimental about history.

“You bastards! You’re going to break down my wall!”

Fatima, again.

“
Your
wall?” said Zehrunisa, irritated. “We built this wall and never took a paisa from you. Shouldn’t we be allowed to put a nail in it from time to time? Be patient. If anything happens, we’ll repair it once the shelf is in.”

Fatima went quiet, until bricks began crumbling on her side. “There is rubble in my rice!” she shouted. “My dinner is ruined! Sand is spraying everywhere!”

Abdul was dismayed. The readiness of the bricks to disintegrate, long suspected, was now confirmed. They’d been made with too much sand, and the mortar between them had deteriorated. Crap bricks that weren’t even glued to one another—less a wall than a tremulous stack. As he considered how to install the kitchen ledge without toppling the whole house, Zehrunisa went outside. So did Fatima, and the two women started shoving each other. Neighbors came out to watch, the children debating which of the two women was more like the Great Khali, an Indian fighter in the World Wrestling Entertainment franchise.

“If you don’t stop breaking my house, motherfucker, I will put you in a trap,” shouted Fatima.

“It’s my wall to break, prostitute,” Zehrunisa shouted back. “If we’d waited for you to build a wall, we’d all still be seeing each other naked!”

Abdul ran outside and pushed the two women apart. Taking his mother by the neck, he dragged her back home.

“Don’t you have children?” he said, disgusted. “You’re no better than the One Leg, fighting outside in front of everyone!” Such scenes violated his first principle of Annawadi: Don’t call attention to yourself.

“But she used bad language first,” his mother protested.

“This woman talks badly to her own man,” Abdul said. “Would she hesitate to throw bad words at you? But you didn’t have to throw them back at her. She has a crack in her—she’s cracked, you know this.”

Fatima was still swearing when she crossed the maidan and departed Annawadi. Abdul heard female neighbors laughing at her as she went, but the things that females laughed at did not interest him. He registered only that Fatima’s absence gave him a chance to finish installing the ledge in peace. Except that the neighbor he’d hired to help him had now collapsed, taking the slab down with him.

“You
are
drunk!” Abdul accused his neighbor, who was pinned to the floor by the stone. The man could not deny it. He had advanced TB and explained, “Lately, if I don’t drink, I don’t have the strength to lift anything.”

Abdul felt like crying when he saw the wall’s fresh degradation. Fortunately, the stone hadn’t broken when it fell, and the neighbor seemed sobered by the accident. He assured Abdul that they could finish the job in an hour. Abdul calmed himself by imagining that if
his mother had a nicer house, she might start practicing a nicer way of speaking.

But now a neighbor arrived to report an extraordinary sight. Fatima, a woman with few rupees to spare, had been seen riding off in an autorickshaw.

Another report, fifteen minutes later: Fatima was in the Sahar Police Station, accusing Zehrunisa of violent assault.

“Allah,” said Zehrunisa. “When did she become such a liar?”

“Go quickly,” Kehkashan told her mother. “If you don’t get to the station fast, they will have only her story to judge by.”

Karam returned home as his wife was departing. Tiles were more expensive than he’d realized, and he’d been two hundred rupees short. She told him, “Stop delaying. Get the money, buy the tiles. If the police come and see all that we have outside, they’ll clean us out.” The younger boys were already picking up the family possessions and tossing them into the storeroom.

“Don’t worry about me,” Zehrunisa told Abdul. “Just don’t stop working, get it done.”

When Zehrunisa reached the station, winded from the half-mile run, Fatima was sitting at a desk telling her story to a tall female officer named Kulkarni.

“This is the one who beat me, and you see I am a cripple, with only one leg,” Fatima said.

“I did not beat her!” Zehrunisa protested. “So many people were outside watching, and not one would say I did. She came and started a fight.”

“They broke my wall! Got sand in my rice!”

“She said she wanted to put us in a trap! When all we do is work and mind our own business—”

Fatima was crying, so Zehrunisa turned on her own waterworks.

The officer put up her palms. “Are you women mad, bothering us like this? You think the police have nothing better to do than listen to you fighting about some small thing? We are protecting the airport. You go home and cook your dinner and mind your children,” she told Fatima. To Zehrunisa, she said, “You sit over there.”

Zehrunisa took a seat on a row of bucket chairs and doubled over. Now her tears were real. Fatima had put her in a trap, as threatened. She would soon be back at Annawadi telling everyone that the police were holding Zehrunisa like a common criminal.

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

Asha had been helping some police officers find a government-subsidized apartment in which to conduct a side business—brokering work for which she hoped to earn real money. The potential profit to be made by patching up a dispute between two Muslims would be small. However, if she didn’t handle the petty conflicts at Annawadi, people would start turning to a woman from the Congress Party whom everyone called “white sari,” and Corporator Subhash Sawant would hear about it.

Asha met Zehrunisa’s eye. For a thousand rupees, Asha said, she’d convince Fatima to make no further trouble. The money wouldn’t be for Asha herself. She would put it—some of it—in Fatima’s hand.

Asha wasn’t always this explicit about money, but she felt she had to be with Zehrunisa. Mirchi had once been picked up by the police for buying stolen goods, and Zehrunisa had begged for Asha’s help. Asha had impressed on the officers that Mirchi was a child and unwell—which happened to be true, for he had six badly infected rat bites on his butt. When Asha brought Mirchi home, Zehrunisa had
thanked
her, as if she didn’t know that Asha’s help had become a business.

But Zehrunisa distrusted Asha as much as Asha distrusted her. Asha was Shiv Sena, anti-Muslim, like many of the officers in the station.

“We’ll work it out with Fatima’s husband,” Zehrunisa told Asha, concluding the conversation. “Thank you, but it will be fine.”

An hour later, she started to believe it
would
be fine when Officer Kulkarni offered her a cup of tea and advice: “You need to really beat the crap out of this One Leg, finish the matter once and for all.”

“Oh, but how can I beat her when she is a cripple?”

“But if you don’t beat people like that, you will have to deal with them over and over again. Just whack her, and I will handle it if she complains. Don’t worry.”

Zehrunisa thought the officer’s friendliness might also be a request for payment. A male officer named Thokale was less subtle. He regularly demanded bribes from the family, since people squatting on airport land were not allowed to run businesses. “You owe me for so many months,” he said when he saw her. “Have you been hiding from me? Now that you’re here, we can settle your account.”

Zehrunisa had more money than Fatima. Extracting some of that money was probably why she, not Fatima, had been kept in the station. She would have to pay Thokale; he would shut down their business otherwise. But she decided to give Officer Kulkarni a wet-eyed look that conveyed enormous gratitude for the advice about beating her neighbor. Then she turned her attention to a cup of milky tea.

It was dusk, and, in Annawadi, Kehkashan was fuming. Sitting in the clearing guarding the family’s things, she could see her panicked brothers spading cement, trying to finish before the police showed up and asked for money. Kehkashan could also see through Fatima’s open door, where she was swaying on crutches to a cassette tape of
Hindi film songs, turned up loud. Upon returning from the police station, Fatima had painted her face more extravagantly than usual: a shining bindi on her forehead, black kajal around her eyes, red lipstick. She looked as if she were about to step onto a stage.

Kehkashan couldn’t hold her tongue. “The police are keeping my mother because of the lies that you told, and you’re dressing up and dancing like some film heroine?”

A fresh fight began on the maidan.

“Bitch, I can put you in the police station, too,” Fatima shouted. “I won’t leave it—I will put your family in a trap!”

“Isn’t what you’ve done enough? Getting my mother arrested! I should twist off your other leg for that!”

The audience of neighbors re-formed for this lively
tamasha
. No one had ever seen Kehkashan angry; she was usually a mediator among Annawadi women. Now, with her flashing, tear-spangled eyes, she looked like Parvati in that soap opera,
Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki
.

“You may twist my leg, but I’ll do worse to you,” Fatima said. “You say you are married, but where’s your husband? Did he find out you prostitute yourself to other men?”

Hearing his daughter’s virtue disparaged, Karam came outside. Being called a whore was not Kehkashan’s central worry. She said to her father, “Have you lost track of the hour? It’s almost night, and Mother is still in the station.”

“Run and see if your mother is okay,” Karam instructed Mirchi. To Fatima he said, “Listen, beggar. We’ll finish this work, then we stay out of each other’s business forever.”

Inside the hut, Abdul was bagging up shards of brick; the cooking shelf was now installed. For some days, Abdul had imagined his mother’s pleasure at seeing it done. Instead, she was being held by the police. The floor was half rubble, half wet cement, awaiting tiles his father had not yet bought. The installment-plan television, stored in
the brothelkeeper’s house, had been broken by the man’s son. Abdul’s little brothers and sisters had been frightened by all the shouting, and his father, surveying the wreck of his home, appeared to be losing his mind.

Suddenly Karam stormed back to Fatima’s doorway. “Half-wit,” he shouted, “you lied and said my wife beat you, so now I’m going to make you recall what a real beating feels like!”

On second thought, he wouldn’t do the hitting himself.

“Abdul,” he called to his son. “Come and beat her!”

Abdul froze. Though he had obeyed his father all his life, he wasn’t about to hit a disabled woman. Fortunately, his older sister intervened. “Father, calm down,” she ordered. “Mother will handle this when she gets home!” Kehkashan understood where the family authority resided in a crisis.

As she led Karam home, he called over his shoulder, “One Leg, tell your husband that if this is how you treat our years of kindness, I want half of what we spent to make this wall.”

“Yes, you will need your small change for your own funeral,” Fatima replied. “I am going to hurt you all.”

Mirchi soon returned from his police-station reconnaissance: His mother, apparently unharmed, was sitting quietly with a female officer. Relieved, Kehkashan started dinner.

At this hour, cooking fires were being lit all over Annawadi, the spumes converging to form a great smoke column over the slum. In the Hyatt, people staying on the top floors would soon start calling the lobby. “A big fire is coming toward the hotel!” Or, “I think there’s been an explosion!” The complaints about the cow-dung ash settling in the hotel swimming pool would start half an hour later.

And now came one more fire, in Fatima’s hut.

Fatima’s eight-year-old daughter, Noori, had come home for dinner,
but the wooden door wouldn’t open when she pushed. Inside, a love song was blasting, and she thought her mother was so busy dancing she’d forgotten the hour. Noori ran to get her mother’s friend Cynthia. Cynthia couldn’t open the door, either, so she lifted Noori up to a hole near the roof of the hut—a hole that Noori proudly called their window.

“What do you see, Noori?”

“She’s pouring kerosene on her head.”

“Don’t, Fatima,” Cynthia yelled, trying to make her voice heard over the music. Seconds later, the film song was overwhelmed by a
whoosh
, a small boom, and an eight-year-old screaming, “My mother! On fire!”

Kehkashan shrieked. The brothelkeeper was the first across the maidan, three boys fast behind, throwing their weight against the door until it broke. They found Fatima thrashing on the floor, smoke pouring off her skin. At her side was a yellow plastic jug of kerosene, overturned, along with a vessel of water. She had poured cooking fuel over her head, lit a match, then doused the flames with water.

“Save me!” she shouted.

The brothelkeeper tensed. Something low on Fatima’s back was still burning. He grabbed a blanket and smothered the flame, as a vast crowd formed outside the hut.

“All day these Muslim garbage people have been fighting so loudly.”

“Didn’t she think of her daughters before she did this?”

“She’s okay now,” the brothelkeeper announced, rolling away some cooking pots he’d knocked on top of her in his haste to extinguish the fire. “Alive, no problem!”