Behind the Beautiful Forevers (28 page)

Peculiarly, most of these “witnesses” had not been on hand for the fight that had preceded the burning. Among them were Fatima’s husband and her two closest friends.

On the accused bench, Kehkashan was glad for her burqa, which obscured the fact that she was dripping sweat. She’d contracted jaundice in jail, and a lingering fever had just shot up, which she attributed to her anxiety. She considered her family’s behavior on the crucial day to have been ragged and shameful. She wished she hadn’t said, during the fight with Fatima, that she would twist off her neighbor’s other leg; she wished her father hadn’t threatened to beat Fatima up. But ugly words were unlikely to send them to prison. They would go to prison if enough of the supposed witnesses backed Fatima’s revised hospital statement to the police about being throttled and beaten.

Poornima Paikrao, special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra, had helped craft that hospital statement, after which she’d told Zehrunisa that the accounts of other witnesses would be equally damaging, unless the Husains paid her off. She’d made her second attempt at extortion this morning, right outside the courthouse.

The Annawadi witnesses might remember new, devastating details of the night in question, the special executive officer had told Karam. She herself might have to testify about Fatima’s dying declaration in such a manner that a guilty verdict was all but guaranteed. The special executive officer didn’t want to do it. She wanted to help
them. “But what else can I do?” she asked, palms up, as always. “Think again about what might happen. You and your children will go to jail. So what do you suggest?”

“I won’t pay,” Karam had sputtered. “Already my son and daughter have seen the inside of the jail—the terrible things you threaten have already happened. But we’re paying the lawyer, not you, to fix it. The lawyer will make the judge see the truth. And if this judge doesn’t see it,” he had concluded with bravado, “I will take it all the way to the Supreme Court!”

Awaiting the first of their neighbors in a trashed-out courtroom, both father and daughter hoped this belief in the Indian judiciary had a basis in reality.

First to the wooden witness stand was one of Fatima’s two close confidantes, a destitute girl named Priya. Priya was probably the saddest girl in Annawadi, and Kehkashan had known her for years. This morning, the two young women had shared an autorickshaw from the slum to the train station, sitting thigh to dampening thigh, each in her own unhappy bubble. Avoiding Kehkashan’s eyes, Priya had hugged herself, repeating, “I will not go, I am not going.” Priya had avoided most people’s eyes since the burning. “Fatima was the only person who knew my heart’s pain,” she once said. A tougher girl might have been able to forget her friend’s cries for help, her thrashings. But at the stand, as in Annawadi, Priya wore her damage like a slash across the face.

It wasn’t the kind of damage that turned a girl into a fabulist, though. Trembling, Priya told the prosecutor she hadn’t been on the maidan when the fight occurred, and had seen Fatima only after she’d been burned. Fatima provoked a lot of fights in the slum, Priya allowed to the defender before being dismissed from the stand.

Succeeding her in front of the judge was a handsome, articulate man named Dinesh, who loaded luggage at the airport. Kehkashan
had never spoken to him, but she’d heard rumors that his testimony would be damaging. She felt sicker than ever when she saw him take the stand with a clenched jaw, a livid face. Because he was speaking in Marathi, some minutes passed before Kehkashan figured out that his anger was not directed at her family but at the Sahar Police.

Shortly after the burning, an officer had recorded a witness statement under Dinesh’s name describing the fight. The statement was false, Dinesh told the judge. He’d been at home in another slumlane, hadn’t seen the fight, and didn’t see why he’d been called as a key prosecution witness. He cared little about the Husains or whether they ended up in prison. What he cared about was having to forgo a day’s income because of an inaccurate police statement.

The surprised prosecutor quickly wrapped up his questioning, the hearing came to an end, and Kehkashan and her father returned to Annawadi feeling almost giddy.

Despite the insinuations of the special executive officer, the first witnesses hadn’t lied in order to ruin them. Looking back, Kehkashan would remember this afternoon’s shock of optimism, before the seams of the celebrated fast-track court began to show.

By April, the case of the Husains was poking along in bitty hearings, and Judge P. M. Chauhan was annoyed. Her stenographer, adept in only the Marathi language, was hopeless at translating the slum Hindi of the Annawadi witnesses into the English required for the official transcript. Impatient at the translation delays, the judge began telling the stenographer what to write. And so a slumdweller’s nuanced replies to the prosecutor’s questions became monosyllabic ones—the better to keep the case moving along. At the end of a particularly tedious hearing, the judge rose for lunch and sighed to the prosecutor and defender, “Ah, fighting over petty, stupid, personal
things—these
women
. All that and it reached such a level they made it a case.” It was becoming apparent that the outcome of the trial mattered only to the people of Annawadi.

For Kehkashan and her father, ten years of incarceration were at stake. But as the weeks progressed, they found it impossible to understand what was being said for or against them in the front of the courtroom. The windows had been opened on account of the April heat, so instead of hearing the testimony upon which their liberty depended, they heard the cacophony of an industrial road. Car horns. Train horns. Throttling engines. The beep-beep of trucks reversing. This outside noise seemed to be sucked in by the ceiling fan, churned and flung outward by its metal blades. Hearing over. Next hearing. Now something had gone wrong with the fan, and its whirring had become a loud clatter.

What was the policeman telling the judge? What was the judge telling the prosecutor? The prosecutor had an orange comb-over, stiff with hair spray, and when he nodded vigorously, one clump of hair came loose and traveled upward. More vigorous nodding and it was straight in the air, like a finger pointing to the heavens. Hearing over. Come back in a week. Kehkashan stopped leaning forward, started sagging in her seat. She was so poised the day Fatima’s husband took the stand.

A few months back, Fatima’s husband, Abdul Shaikh, had brought his daughters to the Husain home for Eid, the holiest day of the Muslim year. Young Abdul had dejugulated a goat on the maidan, and old Abdul had worked with him shoulder to shoulder, stripping back the muscle to mine the meat for the feast. Same as they’d always done at Eid. A good goat this year, a good time. But the
trial was a matter of honor for Fatima’s husband, just as it was for the Husains.

The old garbage sorter had been able to hear more than the Husains could, from his seat in the middle of the courtroom. As the trial progressed, he realized that Fatima’s deathbed account of a beating and a throttling was being undermined. Witnesses kept saying the fight had been one of hot words. Abdul Shaikh was disturbed by this contradiction of the first and last official statement of his wife.

He and Fatima had not been happy, after the first warm year. They’d fought regularly about her lovers, the force with which she beat the children, the force with which he beat her when drunk. He didn’t have it in him to prettify their history. But day in and day out since Fatima’s death, he had had to live beside the Husains, hearing Zehrunisa singing to her daughters, hearing Mirchi making everyone laugh. Fatima’s suicide had thieved him of the chance, however remote, of finding peace with his wife and giving his beloved daughters a happy home.

He wanted to blame someone other than his wife for this loss of future possibility. He wanted the judge to convict the Husains. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what the Husains had or hadn’t done to Fatima, and had said so in his original statement to the police. He’d been at work, arriving home only to see his wife grotesquely injured. His daughters, underfoot during the fight, had told him that no one had hit anyone. But where did that leave those girls? He didn’t want them to grow up knowing that their mother had burned herself, lied, and died.

His daughters were back at Annawadi now. He’d removed them from Sister Paulette’s care upon finding bruises on their arms and legs. They’d been elated to leave. “Always we had to say ‘Thank you, Jesus’ to a picture of a white man,” his younger daughter said. “It was
so boring!” Since coming home, they hadn’t once asked about their mother, but Noori, who’d seen the burning through the window, had changed. She’d stand in the road as if she wanted the oncoming cars to hit her, and had developed a nervous habit of chewing her head scarf.

Today, though, she’d been excited to take the train across the city to the courthouse, and especially enthusiastic about the television cameras set up outside. “Some big trial must be happening today,” Abdul Shaikh had told his daughters, who’d run in front of one camera to smile and wave. Other Annawadians said the younger daughter, Heena, smiled just like her mother. Abdul Shaikh thought this was correct, though he didn’t have a great mental reserve of Fatima smiles to reflect on.

“Will they show us on TV now?” Noori had asked as the three of them went through a low metal security gate. Turning to answer, Abdul Shaikh banged his head hard on the gate. He still felt dazed an hour later, standing in the wooden witness box.

In his right hand he clutched a creased plastic bag containing his wife’s death certificate, two photos of her dressed nicely—the pink outfit and the blue—and the government document about her disability that had secured her metal crutches, free of charge. These remainders of her presence stank of mildew and contained words he couldn’t read, but he wanted them in his hands as he gave the testimony he hoped would put the Husains in prison.

The judge looked at him kindly while swearing him in, but when the prosecutor cleared his throat, Abdul Shaikh’s knees buckled. He had to grab the stand to stay upright. He had never been in such a place, talking to such intimidating people. At the most basic questions of the prosecutor—a man he understood to be on his side—he grew flustered.

“Who do you live with?” the prosecutor asked.

His wife, he said, as if she were not dead. To the next question, he insisted he was thirty-five years old. He got his daughters’ names right, but his home address eluded him. He wasn’t sure where he was supposed to look when he answered. Should he look at the judge, who was considering him placidly from her perch high above the stand, or at the prosecutor, who stood opposite him, on his level? When he looked at the defense lawyer, he became still more confused, for the defender was grinning at the judge for no discernible reason.

He decided to look only at the judge. To her, he got out his account of finding Fatima at home and taking her to the hospital.

“Was your wife in a condition to speak to you that night?”

This was the first crucial question that Abdul Shaikh had to answer. He had to rally, and did. “Yes, she could speak,” he said forcefully. He appeared relieved that the words came out right.

“What did your wife tell you on the way to Cooper Hospital?”

“She told me they called her a prostitute and would take her other leg,” he began. This was what he’d told the police in his original statement, nine months earlier, but it did not sound awful enough in this courtroom—just ordinary Annawadi words. After a long pause, he continued. “She told me they beat her.” Another long pause, thinking. Then he said, “She told me that they held her by the neck and beat her with a big stone.”

There. The words of a dying woman that he hoped might turn around the case.

The prosecutor seemed delighted, and the Sahar policemen in attendance were happy, too. As the Husains’ mop-haired, pin-striped defender began the cross-examination, Abdul Shaikh’s composure continued to grow. No, his wife had not been depressed after their daughter Medina drowned in a pail. No, his wife hadn’t poured kerosene
on herself twice before. By the time he staggered off the stand and collapsed into a white plastic chair, he believed he had avenged his children’s loss.

“Now what, what next?” said Judge Chauhan, by way of calling the final Annawadi witness to the stand.

Cynthia Ali, Fatima’s best friend, had resented the Husains ever since her husband’s garbage business went under. Late on the night of the burning, as Abdul hid in his storeroom, she’d stood in the maidan trying to convince her neighbors to march to the police station and demand the arrest of the whole Husain family.

Although Cynthia hadn’t seen the fight between Fatima and the Husains, the following day she had given the police a witness statement to the contrary. Then, through the brothelkeeper’s wife, she had informed the Husains that her testimony would send them to jail, unless they paid her twenty thousand rupees before she took the stand. The Husains, having refused to pay, had been bracing for her vengeance for months.

“I feel as if I am going crazy,” Zehrunisa had said to Abdul the previous day as they waited for scavengers at the scales. She had a wild look in her eyes that he hadn’t seen since she’d stood at the window of the Sahar Police Station’s unofficial cell. “After lying in court, what honor will she have?” Zehrunisa asked. “If you lose your honor, how can you show your face in Annawadi?”

Abdul found his mother’s question absurd.

Cynthia had washed her hair for her court date and put on her best sari, purple with a blue-and-gold border. There was nothing to be done about the teeth. In recent days, she’d envisioned her testimony as a decisive occasion, laying her anticipated performance against climactic trial scenes in Hindi movies.

It had been painful to watch the Husains’ income grow as her family’s foundered. She thought that Zehrunisa had been lucky, having
a sorting machine like Abdul come out of her body, but Zehrunisa acted as if she’d been smart. Moreover, Zehrunisa gossiped about how Cynthia, a Christian, had once worked in an exotic-dance bar—a chapter of Cynthia’s life long closed. Lately, she called herself a social worker and was trying to get into the anti-poverty business, just like Asha. There was a lot of government and international money going around.