Behind the Beautiful Forevers (21 page)

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. The young husband in one of the commercials had cared enough to buy medical insurance for his wife before the traffic accident. Now, miraculously, she was rising from her wheelchair! Life insurance was turning funerals into celebrations! Selling such policies would put Manju in touch with affluent people, while bringing more money to the household.

The children in Manju’s hut school came early to support her as she learned the English names of the policies: Future Confidence II, Wealth Confident, Invest Confident, Aspire Life. The children’s vocabularies momentarily expanded to include the terms
surrender value, rider premium
, and
partial withdrawal
.

In training, Manju learned that she wouldn’t sell anything if she referred directly to tragedy or death. You had to emphasize the profit angle—tell the story of a man who bought forty policies and left his family eye-high in rupee notes.

Manju practiced her pitches and rebuttals until she was fluent, and passed the final exam with high marks. Then: nothing. Who did she know who could afford to buy insurance?

“Everybody wants their profit,” she told the children one day, shaking her head. “They say, if I do this, how much will I make? In college, the girls talk like that, even when they’re talking about each other. ‘Why talk to that weird girl, Pallavi? What’s the profit? What’s the use?’ ”

The brothelkeeper’s eleven-year-old daughter, Zubbu, understood Manju’s concern with profit obsession better than the other children. Her parents were trying to sell her, and the girl felt as if she were going mad. Manju could only pray that Zubbu’s parents would be as unsuccessful in this entrepreneurial venture as they were in all their other ones.

Teaching girls like Zubbu, Manju felt her own luck. Next spring, if she passed her state board exams, she’d have a B.A. degree. With another year of study, to be financed by selling one of the rented rooms in their hut, she’d be a qualified teacher, with a B.Ed. She had no hope of securing a permanent job at a government school, since such jobs typically required paying enormous bribes to education officials. Small private schools were a likelier bet, although most of them paid so little that her classmates in the B.A./B.Ed program had begun to worry that they’d invested in a chump profession. One girl intended to work at a call center upon graduation; another figured she’d make more money as a chef. Manju alone in the group still wanted to teach. 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.

The central government funded Manju’s “bridge school” and hundreds like it in Mumbai through contracts with nonprofit organizations. Although public funds for education had increased with India’s new wealth, the funds mainly served to circulate money through the political elite. Politicians and city officials helped relatives and friends start nonprofits to secure the government money. It was of little concern to them whether the schools were actually running.

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. The Annawadi school was one of the survivors, and a supervisor for the charity came every month or so to sit in on the class and examine the records. He’d caught on that the school Asha was supposed to be running was really being taught by Manju, but he’d let it slide because her students were learning.

One afternoon, the children were mastering the English words
chariot, knee, mirror, fish
, and
hand
. “And what do you do with these hands of yours?” Manju wanted to know.

“Eat!”

“Wash clothes!”

“Fill water!”

“Dance!”

“Raise them to show somebody I’m going to beat him up—”

Heads turned. Asha was in the doorway, enraged.

“How urgent is this teaching?” she shouted at Manju. “What is more important? These children or keeping this house in order for me?”

Dirty children were sprawled on the floor. Notebooks were scattered about. It was a scene unbefitting the home of an almost-slumlord and aspiring elected official. Supplicants would be arriving momentarily to present their problems to Asha. The morning’s laundry was damp. “Wonderful,” Asha said to Manju, feeling a towel. “You put the clothes on the string inside, when the sun is shining outside. Can’t you do one thing properly in my absence?” Manju turned away to keep her students from seeing her face.

After that, Manju began teaching her class every other day, or every third day. The children understood that the choice was not her own. When a new school opened in the pink temple by the sewage lake, many of them gravitated to it, but it closed as soon as the leader of the nonprofit had taken enough photos of children studying to secure the government funds.

In Manju’s newly free time, she pursued a second idea for widening her social networks. She joined the Indian Civil Defense Corps, a group of middle-class citizens trained to save others in the event of floods or terror attacks.

Like many people in Mumbai, she was increasingly concerned
about terrorism. In July, there had been bomb blasts in Bangalore, then blasts in Ahmedabad—nineteen explosions in the heart of the city. The bombers weren’t Maoists: Maoists were rural India’s problem. The urban hazard was religious militants, some of them acting in the name of Allah, as they wrote in their emails to newspapers.

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. On the Western Express Highway, electronic signboards urged the citizenry to be alert:
STRANGER IN YOUR AREA? CALL POLICE
. The Civil Defense Corps seemed to Manju a more substantial way to protect her city than calling the police about strangers.

In the cavernous basement of a government building, she and forty other Maharashtrians—middle-aged women and two idealistic college boys—simulated crises and practiced techniques for saving lives.
In a bomb blast, stay calm and make sure you are safe first. Then calm the others and lead them to safety. In a flash flood, pumpkins and empty plastic water bottles may be used as flotation devices. Tie your dupatta to someone too weak to swim, and pull them behind you
.

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. Splayed on the linoleum floor, hair fanned, she worked all the distress moves she could think of from Hindi movies, from the chest heave to the terrified eye-flit to the old sigh-and-tremble. 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.

One night, as Manju left the training in her new jeans and the
peach tunic, Vijay called her name. As they crossed the road to the bus stop together, he gripped her hand. Her first time. Manju’s hopes pressed against her well-honed tendency toward realism, which insisted that the city’s Vijays had better options than a not-yet-first-class girl.

It was hard to keep secrets in a slum. As Asha understood, secrets successfully kept were a kind of currency. People could say what they liked about where she went at night, and what she did with whom, but until they caught her, she was going to deny it.

Now it was the night of her fortieth birthday—a scant moon in a low sky, no rain. Manju passed out slices of cake, a heap of potato chips on the side, and Asha put her arms around her sons. Even her husband Mahadeo was in a celebratory mood as he plundered one of her gifts, a plastic treasure chest filled with gold-wrapped chocolate coins. “They should have been real coins, since it’s my fortieth,” Asha said, smiling, as she set into her cake.

Her cellphone rang again. It had been ringing for most of the last fifteen minutes, and she’d been enfolding it ever deeper into the lap of her dark blue sari. A police officer named Wagh was impatient to see her.

“An emergency?” Manju asked after a while. “Calling so many times.”

“It’s that woman Reena,
shakha
work,” Asha lied. Shiv Sena women’s-wing business. Then a minute later, she said, uncertainly, “Maybe I will need to go.”

“What? Tell her you can’t come—it’s your birthday party,” Manju commanded cheerfully, just before Asha answered the phone.

“Can’t,” she said into the receiver. Long pause. “No, not possible. Tomorrow? You see—” Long pause. “Listen, I …”

Suddenly she was standing at the mirror, powdering her cheeks with talcum, adjusting her sari, combing her thick hair off her face. She could see her husband and Manju staring at her through the mirror.

“My necklace must look real,” she chattered, nervous. “A guy at the train station today told me to put it away or it would get stolen. Did you know coriander is only five rupees at the Ghatkopar market? I went to my friend’s house for tea there earlier, then missed the bus. Good, fresh coriander, better than we get here—”

“Mother,” said Manju quietly. “Don’t go.”

The cellphone rang again.

Asha said, “Yes, I said I’m coming. I
am
hurrying. But where?”

The talcum powder was all over the cellphone, streaking down her neck. She was sweating. Her husband’s eyes had filled with tears.

“Mother,” Manju said again, reaching for her hand. “Please. Mother.”

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.

This pink hotel was the most expensive of the lot. Golden-pink now, as hundreds of lights illuminated the curves of its Jaipur-stone front. Asha glowed, too, standing on the other side of the fence, a slash of white talc across one cheek.

She suspected, rightly, that at home, Manju’s tears were falling on a slice of chocolate cake. For years, Asha had hoped that her daughter wouldn’t guess about the men. Now she wished she had raised Manju to be worldly enough to understand. This wasn’t about lust or being modern, though she knew that many first-class people slept around. Nor was it just about feeling loved and beautiful. This was about money and power.

Her mind moved more quickly than other people’s. The politicians
and policemen had eventually recognized this dexterity, come to depend on it. Even so, it had not been enough. At twenty, she was a poor, uneducated refugee from the droughtlands whose husband had no appetite for work. Tonight, at forty, she was a kindergarten teacher and the most influential woman in her slum. A woman who had given her daughter a college education and soon, she hoped, a brilliant marriage. The flourishing of Manju, alone, had justified the trade-offs. Even the nightmares about dying of AIDS.

She should get the blood test done. She knew that. She should be watching Airport Road for the arrival of the officer. But a society wedding was spilling out onto the Grand Maratha’s lawn. This day was an auspicious one in the Hindu calendar, astrologist-certified for weddings. She had forgotten. A brass band was playing music she didn’t recognize. Paparazzi were jostling for photos, blocking her view of the bride. Bits of red and pink confetti blew over the fence and landed at her feet, before the gusts winged them off. A white police van pulled up. For her. Asha slowly turned from the lights and the band and the celebration, as the back door of the van slid open.

One dawn in late July, Sunil found a fellow scavenger lying in the mud where Annawadi’s rut-road met the airport thoroughfare. Sunil knew the old man a little; he worked hard and slept outside the Marol fish market, half a mile away. Now the man’s leg was mashed and bloody, and he was calling out to passersby for help. Sunil figured he’d been hit by a car. Some drivers weren’t overly concerned about avoiding the trash-pickers who scoured the roadsides.

Sunil was too scared to go to the police station and ask for an ambulance, especially after what was rumored to have happened to Abdul. Instead he ran toward the battleground of the Cargo Road dumpsters, hoping an adult would brave the police station. Thousands of people passed this way every morning.

Two hours later, when Rahul left Annawadi for school, the injured man was crying for water. “This one is even drunker than your father,” one of Rahul’s friends teased him. “Drunker than
your
father,” Rahul retorted unimaginatively as they turned onto Airport
Road. Rahul wasn’t afraid of the police; he’d run to them for help when his neighbor dumped boiling lentils on Danush, his sickly baby. The man on the road was just a scavenger, though, and Rahul had to catch a bus to class.