Behind the Beautiful Forevers (24 page)

One of the released boys, named Karan, fled Annawadi, fled the city, and never returned. Another, Sanjay Shetty, frantically collected garbage and took it to the Husains in order to finance his own getaway.

Zehrunisa gasped when she saw him. “What happened to your face?” she asked. “Why are you crying?”

Sixteen-year-old Sanjay stood out from the other road boys for his uncommon height, his beauty, and his pronounced South Indian drawl. “Every word you say has a loving sound,” Zehrunisa had once
teased him. “You will melt a person, the way you talk.” Now Sanjay could barely make words.

“Calm yourself,” Zehrunisa told him. “Say what happened.”

Between sobs he told her he had seen Kalu attacked by a gang of men in the darkness by the Air India gate. Then he told her of his own beating, in the police station. Sanjay didn’t know what to fear more: that Kalu’s attackers would discover he’d been a witness and come after him, or that the cops would pick him up for another round of violent interrogation.

He couldn’t sleep on the Annawadi rut-road any longer and was heading to his mother’s house, because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. After his family’s hut at the airport had burned down, she’d moved five miles south to Dharavi, the largest slum in the city.

Zehrunisa agreed that Dharavi was a better place than Annawadi for a boy to get lost in. She put the money in Sanjay’s hand and watched him run.

When Sanjay reached Dharavi, his fourteen-year-old sister, Anandi, was making tomato chutney for dinner. She nearly dropped the bowl when she saw the fear in his face. The two were close, and recently, in rare possession of disposable income, he’d had her first initial tattooed next to his own on his forearm. Anandi often chided him that any brother who loved his sister as much as he professed to would come home more often. But their sixty-square-foot hut was too small for three people, and Sanjay liked to be near the airport—said it made him feel he had a chance to get away.

Sanjay took his sister’s hand, and as they sat knee-to-knee on the floor, told her of seeing a group of men swarm Kalu all at once. “They killed my friend,” he kept repeating. “Just threw him off.” Like he was garbage.

Recovering himself, Sanjay began to lecture Anandi: that she shouldn’t cause heartache for their mother, who was still at work, tending to an elderly woman in a middle-class neighborhood; that she should take her studies more seriously.

His sister looked at him, confused. “What are you saying, Sanjay? Study? Like you, I have to work and earn. And you’re the one who gives Mother tension, not me.”

“You also should sleep properly,” he said, not hearing her. “I don’t think you sleep so good.”

Anandi didn’t know what to make of her brother’s paternal tone. Was it Eraz-ex? She stood up, impatient. She was sorry that this Kalu had been murdered. She’d met him once; he’d praised her cooking, made her laugh. But she couldn’t just sit here holding Sanjay’s hand when she had the vegetables and rice to do. As she turned back to the stove, Sanjay stretched on the floor and closed his eyes, perhaps to model his idea of proper sleep.

When his mother walked in an hour later, Sanjay was up and restless, listening to a duet from an album called
Phir Bewafaai: Deceived in Love
. “Sanjay’s broken-heart music,” his mother liked to call it, rolling her eyes.

“Just a single misunderstanding,” the guilty husband was singing, as his betrayed wife sang back her plan of revenge. Sanjay’s mother’s voice rose above them both: “Going to be sick! Oh, I ate something rotten at lunch!”

Bolting for the toilet, she called, “Wait, Sanjay. Don’t run off.”

“I won’t,” he promised. When his mother returned, his sister was hysterical and he was convulsing on the floor. Pulling Sanjay up, thinking that he was having a seizure, his mother caught a chemical reek on his breath. His sister retrieved a white plastic bottle from the corner of the room. She’d seen him toying with it earlier, assumed it
contained soap for blowing bubbles—Sanjay was crazy for soap bubbles. But the empty plastic bottle was rat poison.

Sanjay rolled over to face the wall, refusing the salt water his mother prepared to force him to vomit. He lived for two hours after reaching the public hospital. After midnight, returning home to Dharavi ancient with grief, his mother tossed into the gutter the prescriptions the doctor had written for Sanjay. There had been no time to go out to the road and fill them.

The police inquiry into her son’s death was closed as swiftly as the inquiry into Kalu’s death had been. In the public record, Sanjay Shetty would be neither a vulnerable witness to a murder nor the victim of police threats and beatings. He would be a heroin addict who had decided to kill himself because he couldn’t afford his next fix.

In Delhi, politicians and intellectuals privately bemoaned the “irrationality” of the uneducated Indian masses, but when the government itself provided false answers to its citizens’ urgent concerns, rumor and conspiracy took wing. Sometimes, the conspiracies became a consolation for loss.

Trying to make sense of the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay, Sunil and Abdul grew closer. Not quite friends—rather, an unnameable, not-entirely-willing category of relationship in which two boys felt themselves bound to two boys who were dead. Sunil and Abdul sat together more often than before, but when they spoke, it was with the curious formality of people who shared the understanding that much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

Sunil felt certain that Air India security guards had murdered
Kalu upon catching him in their recycling piles. Abdul suspected Kalu had been killed by drug dealers on whom he’d informed. “It was a dog’s death, either way,” Abdul said, often, which made Sunil think of the strangled dog in the Will Smith movie that he and Kalu had seen at Pinky Talkie Town.

Mirchi felt both boys should drop the subject. “Yeah, he stole garbage, but it was
their
garbage. So of course he was going to die like that.”

Road boys blamed other road boys. “Mahmoud—my full doubt is on him.” “Karan probably did it then ran away.” A corrosive, free-floating distrust worked its way down the slumlanes. Fatima’s ghost may or may not have been involved.

Kalu’s father turned against the woman whose Airport Road stall Kalu had frequented for chicken-chili rice. She heard things, and Kalu’s father had counted on her to tell him what had really happened. “Kalu what? Kalu who?” she had said, staring into her cook-pot. In the end, for the refusal of the police and the morgue to tell the truth about the death of his son, he would blame the chicken-chili rice woman most of all.

Sanjay’s mother didn’t know whom to blame. For weeks after her son’s suicide, she walked unsteadily through Annawadi, asking everyone she passed if they could tell her why her son had taken his life. “How do I sleep without knowing?” she asked her daughter. “The whole world is in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.”

Sunil and the road boys were torn when they saw Sanjay’s mother coming. They’d known her before she’d moved to Dharavi. That she now looked three hundred years old suggested just how much she’d loved her son. But how to explain Sanjay’s death without talking about Kalu’s, without talking about the Sahar police? Even the Tamil who ran the game shed, and whose police contacts were intimate,
was afraid to say Kalu’s name. So Sanjay’s mother learned only what another mother, who slept on pavement, dared to whisper: “Your boy died with fear in his heart.”

The soil outside the red-and-white Air India gates was good and loamy. Gradually, with the ministrations of the airport gardening crew, a boy-sized break in the flowers filled in. One afternoon, Sunil crouched there, studying the skin of the earth. He could find no trace of damage.

By late September 2008, Asha was in control of Annawadi. There had been no clinching event, no slum-boss coronation. Rather, it had been a campaign of small advances toward the moment when the line of supplicants extended outside her hut, policemen promptly returned her calls, and Corporator Subhash Sawant, on hand to address the residents, offered her the plastic chair beside his own. Her patron had regained his confidence, now that the faked-caste-certificate case against him seemed tied up in court. Seated beside him on the stage by the sewage lake, Asha looked nearly his equal, sporting a gold chain much like his own. Hers had been financed by her self-help group and the high-interest loans it made to poorer women.

Relaxing into her authority, Asha stopped making elaborate excuses to her family about the men she met late at night. When her husband threatened suicide, she consoled him but made no promise to change. She let herself gain ten pounds, which softened the lines beneath her eyes—a last trace of her years in the fields.

Her main regret was the lack of a confidante with whom to relish this fledgling triumph. Her secrets had isolated her from other women; she’d had to close certain doors to herself. “What friend do I really have,” she would say to Manju. But now even her daughter seemed remote. On the rare occasion that Manju met her eye, she would bring up Asha’s least favorite subject, the One Leg.

While the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay shook the boys who lived on the road, Fatima’s death was the one that strobed in and out of the minds of Annawadi women. Two months after the public spectacle of her burning, it had insinuated itself into countless private narratives. Fatima’s regret at what she’d done had been forgotten, her act reconstrued as a flamboyant protest.

What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.

One night the brothelkeeper’s wife doused herself with kerosene in the maidan, called out Fatima’s name, and threatened to light a match. Another night, a woman beaten by her husband
did
light the match. She survived in such a state that Manju and her friend Meena, in their secret nightly meetings at the public toilet, began discussing more foolproof means of suicide.

Only fifteen-year-old Meena knew that Manju had considered taking her life the night that Asha had run out on her fortieth birthday party, and on other nights after that. As Manju became consumed with shame and worry over her mother’s affairs, Meena could only offer perspective. Her own parents and brothers beat her regularly,
with force, and the big expeditions punctuating her housekeeping-days were visits to the public tap and the toilet. In Meena’s opinion, any mother who financed her daughter’s college education, rarely slapped her, and hadn’t arranged her marriage at age fifteen could be forgiven for other failings.

Meena encouraged Manju to express the worst of her thoughts. It was said to be the modern, healthy way of coping. “You always say that the flowers I put in my hair never turn sticky and brown,” she told Manju one night at the toilet. “My flowers live because I don’t keep anything dark in my heart. I let the bad things come out into the air.”

Manju winced. She didn’t want her mother’s behavior to be more in-the-air than it already was. “My heart must be black, then,” she replied, deflecting. “The flowers in my hair die in two hours.”

Manju thought it wiser to practice the denial about which she’d been learning in psychology class—just stop thinking about her mother altogether. “If I don’t block it out, I won’t be able to study,” she said. The exams that would determine whether she would become Annawadi’s first female college graduate were only a few months away.

Based on his theory of the unconscious, Freud tells us how a fantasy is an unsatisfied wish which is fulfilled to the imagination. He divides fantasies into two main groups:

a) ambitious wishes

b) erotic

Young men have mostly ambitious wishes. Young women have mostly erotic ones. The ordinary person feels ashamed of his fantasies and hides them.