Behind the Beautiful Forevers (7 page)

Abdul was always twitchy, but by February 2008 the scavengers saw he was more so: jingling coins in his pocket, shaking his legs as if preparing to sprint, chewing a wooden matchstick while his tongue did something weird behind his teeth. Across the city, gangs of young Maharashtrians had begun beating up migrants from the North—
bhaiyas
, as they were called—in hope of driving them out of the city and easing the scramble for jobs.

Though Abdul had been born in Mumbai, the fact that his father had come from the North qualified the family as targets, and not abstractly. Rioters chanting “Beat the bhaiyas!” were moving through the airport slums, ransacking small North Indian businesses, torching the taxis of North Indian drivers, confiscating the wares that migrant hawkers displayed on blankets.

These poor-against-poor riots were not spontaneous, grassroots protests against the city’s shortage of work. Riots seldom were, in modern Mumbai. Rather, the anti-migrant campaign had been orchestrated
in the overcity by an aspiring politician—a nephew of the founder of Shiv Sena. The upstart nephew wanted to show voters that a new political party he had started disliked bhaiyas like Abdul even more than Shiv Sena did.

Abdul quit working and stayed inside to avoid the violence, about which roaming scavengers brought lurid reports. Ribs broken, heads stomped, two men on fire—“Enough,” Abdul cried out one night. “Can you please stop talking about it! The riots are just a show, a few bastards making noise and intimidating people.”

Abdul was repeating the reassurances of his father, Karam, who sought to keep his children incurious about aspects of Indian life beyond their control. Though Karam and Zehrunisa occasionally spoke in whispers of the city’s 1992–1993 Hindu–Muslim riots and the 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots in the bordering state of Gujarat, they raised their children on a diet of patriotic songs about India, where tolerant citizens of a thousand ethnicities, faiths, languages, and castes all got along.

Better than the entire world is our Hindustan

We are its nightingales, and it our garden abode

This song, based on verses by the great Urdu poet Iqbal, played every time Karam’s cellphone rang. “First these children have to learn to run after bread and rice,” he told his wife. “When they’re older, they can worry about the other things.”

But Sunil Sharma, a perceptive twelve-year-old scavenger, could read the frantic matchstick in Abdul’s mouth. The garbage sorter was already worried.

Sunil, a Hindu bhaiya, wondered about Abdul, who he thought worked harder than anyone else in Annawadi—“keeps his head down night and day.” Sunil was startled once when he saw the garbage
sorter’s face in full sunlight. Except for the child-eyes, black as keyholes, Abdul looked to him like a broken old man.

Sunil was a seed of a boy, smaller even than Abdul, but he considered himself more sophisticated than the other scavengers. He was especially good for his age at discerning motives. It was a skill he had acquired during his on-and-off stays at the Handmaids of the Blessed Trinity orphanage.

Though Sunil was not an orphan, he understood that phrases like
AIDS orphan
and
When I was the second-hand woman to Mother Teresa
helped Sister Paulette, the nun who ran the Handmaids of the Blessed Trinity children’s home, get money from foreigners. He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate. Sunil rarely got angry when he discovered the secret reasons behind the ways people behaved. Having a sense of how the world operated, beyond its pretenses, seemed to him an armoring thing. And when Sister Paulette decided that boys over eleven years old were too much to handle and Sunil was turned out onto the street, he tried to concentrate on what he had gained in her care. He’d learned how to read in the Marathi language as well as his native Hindi, and to count to a hundred in English. How to find India on a map of the world. How to multiply, sort of. How nuns weren’t as different from regular people as nuns were commonly said to be.

His sister Sunita, two years younger, didn’t want to stay in the orphanage without him, so together they’d walked back to Annawadi, where their mother had died of TB long ago. Their father still rented a hut on Annawadi’s stenchiest lane, where the feral pigs gorged on rotten hotel food. The house was ten feet long, six feet wide, filthy, lightless, and crammed with firewood for cooking, and Sunil felt nearly as ashamed of it as he did of his father.

When the man was drunk, he smelled like a stove. When not drunk, he did road work in order to smell like a stove again, rarely setting aside money for food. Sunil alone watched out for Sunita. Once, when he was five or six, he’d lost her for a week, but he’d been careful not to misplace her after that.

Losing Sunita was one of Sunil’s few clear memories of early childhood—how upset Rahul’s mother, Asha, had become. Suddenly his ally, she’d tracked down Sunita in the south of the city, then barreled into his father’s hut to say his children were going to die, the way he was drinking. Not long after, Sunil and Sunita ran across Airport Road, each holding one of Asha’s hands, as if they were any old family. When they reached the black iron gate of the orphanage, though, Asha had dropped their hands and left.

In the years since, Sunil had come back to Annawadi frequently—whenever he’d had chicken pox or jaundice or some other goddess-in-the-body situation that threatened the health of Sister Paulette’s other wards. He was therefore used to the transition: reaccustoming himself to scavenging work, to rats that emerged from the woodpile to bite him as he slept, and to a state of almost constant hunger.

In the old days, Sunil and Sunita had stood silently outside the huts of their neighbors at dinnertime. Sooner or later, some pitying woman would emerge with a plate. Sunita could still work this angle, but Sunil had now crossed an age line over which charity did not reliably extend. He looked closer to nine years old than to twelve, a fact that pained him on a masculine level, and might at least have been a practical help. But no one felt sorry for him anymore.

He minded being unpitiable only at mealtime. At the orphanage, when rich white women visited, Sunil had refused to beg for rupees. Instead he’d harbored the idea that one of the women might single him out, reward his dignified restraint. For years, he had waited for
this discriminating visitor to meet his eye; he planned to introduce himself as “Sunny,” a name a foreigner might like. Eventually, he’d come to realize the improbability of his hope, and his general indistinction in the mass of need. But by then, the habit of not asking anyone for anything had become a part of who he was.

In his first weeks back home, scavenging skills rusty, he took the sandals from the feet of his sleeping father and sold them to Abdul for food. He had consumed five vada pav by the time his father woke to thrash him. Another day, he’d sold his father’s cooking pot. His own sandals he’d exchanged for rice, after which there was little left to sell. The hunger cramps could be treated by hits off discarded cigarettes. Lying down also helped. But nothing soothed his apprehension that the hunger was stunting his growth.

Sunil had inherited his father’s full lips, wide-set eyes, and the pelt of hair that swooshed up from his forehead. (One distinction of his father was that his hair looked good even when his head was in a ditch.) But Sunil feared he’d also inherited his father’s puniness.

A year earlier, at the orphanage, he’d stopped growing. He’d tried to believe that his body was just pausing, gathering strength in advance of some strenuous enlargement. But Sunita had since grown taller than he.

To jumpstart his system, he saw he’d have to become a better scavenger. This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.

Sunil had his own guess: the deranged guy who talked to the hotels and believed the Hyatt was trying to kill him. “I think his guarantee
is over,” he told Abdul. But Abdul said it would be a Tamil guy whose eyes had gone from yellow to orange, and Abdul turned out to be right.

Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter’s end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack was empty on this first leg of his daily route, so it could be tucked under his arm or worn over his shoulders like a superhero cape. When Sister Paulette passed by in her chauffeured white van, it could be draped over his head. Sister Paulette-Toilet was how he thought of her now. He imagined her riding down Airport Road looking for children more promising than he.

On this road in the early morning, well-dressed young women hustled from the bus stop to their jobs inside the hotels, carrying handbags as big as household shrines. He hated meeting those purses on a crowded sidewalk. They could knock a kid into the street. But at dawn, the city felt roomy enough for everyone. Instead of being pushed along by the pedestrian stream, he could poke around the gardens that the airport’s new management had installed on the roadsides. He was an expert climber and intended to make use of the coconut trees when they fruited. He took care not to step on the emaciated junkies who nodded out behind the lilies.

It interested him that from Airport Road, only the smoke plumes of Annawadi’s cooking fires could now be seen. The airport people had erected tall, gleaming aluminum fences on the side of the slum that most drivers passed before turning into the international terminal. Drivers approaching the terminal from the other direction would
see only a concrete wall covered with sunshine-yellow advertisements. The ads were for Italianate floor tiles, and the corporate slogan ran the wall’s length:
BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER
. Sunil regularly walked atop the Beautiful Forever wall, surveying for trash, but Airport Road was unhelpfully clean.

For waste-pickers, the road where air cargo was loaded and unloaded was the most profitable, and therefore competitive, part of the airport. Crammed with trucks, truck bays, overflowing dumpsters, and small food joints, the place was every week more overrun by scavengers. Some of the men flashed knives to keep Sunil out of promising dumpsters; more often, they waited until he had filled his bag, then kicked his ass and stole it. Women from the Matang caste, traditional waste-pickers, hurled stones. The Matangs worked in red and green saris, dowry jewels in their noses, and were nice to him back at Annawadi, where everyone waited in line to put their bags on a scale. But people of other castes were encroaching on the Matangs’ historical livelihood, because steady work was hard to come by, and trash was always there. To the Matangs, people like Sunil, who belonged to an Uttar Pradesh carpenter caste, were invaders on Cargo Road.

Worse for the Matangs, and for Sunil, was the increased professional competition for trash. An army of uniformed workers kept the environs of the international terminal free of rubbish. Big recycling concerns took most of the luxury-hotel garbage—“a fortune beyond counting,” as Abdul put it, in a whisper. And on the streets, new municipal garbage trucks were rolling around, as a civic campaign fronted by Bollywood heroines attempted to combat Mumbai’s reputation as a dirty city. Stylish orange signs above dumpsters were commanding,
CLEAN UP!
Some freelance scavengers worried that, soon, they would have no work at all.

At the end of Sunil’s brutal days, he sold to Abdul what hadn’t been stolen from him. While the Matangs averaged forty rupees a
day, his take was rarely more than fifteen—about thirty-three U.S. cents. Sunil felt he would never grow unless he discovered scrounging places that other people hadn’t thought of, and to that end, started paying less attention to the other scavengers and more attention to the people who threw things away. It was what Annawadi crows did, circling and observing before trying to seize.

Rich travelers surely dropped fantastic garbage outside the international terminal, but airport security guards chased off the scavengers who came near it, even small ones who just wanted to hear if the signboard listing incoming flights went
chuck-a-chuck-a-whirrr
when updated, as Annawadi old-timers insisted. The construction workers building the new terminal would also leave trash, but their site was enclosed by blue-and-white aluminum fencing, which provided no traction for climbing. The officers at the Sahar Police Station, which was located on airport grounds, would have a trash flow, too, but like most people in Annawadi, Sunil was afraid of the police. He focused instead on a stand of yellow-and-black taxis next to the station.

A food stall at the taxi stand served the drivers who awaited arrivals. Most of the drivers quaffed their plastic cups of tea, ate their samosas, and dropped their trash where they stood. This choice territory belonged to other scavengers, but Sunil noticed that not all of the drivers behaved the same.

Some of the taximen tossed their cups and bottles over a low stone wall behind the food stand. On the other side of the wall, seventy feet down, was the Mithi River—actually, a concrete sluice where the river had been redirected as the airport enlarged. The drivers probably liked to imagine their garbage hitting the water and floating away, but Sunil had climbed the wall and discovered a narrow ledge on the other side, five feet down. By some trick of wind in the sluice, trash tossed over the wall tended to blow back and settle on this sliver of concrete. It was a space on which a small boy could balance.