Behind the Beautiful Forevers (8 page)

Of course, if he stumbled, jumping down, he’d be in the river. Sunil knew how to swim, having learned in Naupada, a slum next to the Intercontinental hotel that went underwater each monsoon. He’d never heard of anyone drowning in Naupada, though. Naupada was the local definition of fun. The Mithi River, with its unnatural currents, was the place with the body count. After a few jumps, he trusted his feet.

The ledge stretched four hundred feet from the taxi stand to a traffic ramp, and people driving up the ramp sometimes slowed and pointed at him as he crouched there, high above the water. He liked the idea that the ledge work looked dramatic from a distance. In truth, it was less scary than working Cargo Road or scavenging during the riots, with the “Beat the bhaiyas!” men running around. And he was willing to take risks in order not to be a runt and a stub. His sack grew bulky and awkward as he moved down the ledge, and he learned to concentrate only on the trash immediately in front of him, looking neither down nor ahead.

By March, the riots over, their deepest effect began to surface in slums like Annawadi. Many North Indians had been afraid to work for two weeks. Unable to recover from the loss of wages, some migrants were belatedly fulfilling the hopes of the new political party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which sought to uproot them from Mumbai.

Abdul’s parents rented a forty-five-square-foot room in the back of their hut to the extended family of a Hindu autorickshaw driver from the northern state of Bihar. One afternoon in mid-March, the driver’s distressed wife came to see Abdul’s mother. Zehrunisa took her two-year-old son, Lallu, to her breast as she heard her tenant out.

The woman’s husband and his brother rented their autorickshaw for two hundred rupees a day. Although they hadn’t worked during
the riots, they’d still had to pay the rent on the three-wheeled taxi. Now they didn’t have money to buy gas for it, nor the rent they owed the Husains. The Bihari woman asked Zehrunisa’s forbearance. “What can I do? Please don’t chuck us out!”

“Ah, but the riots hurt us all,” said Zehrunisa. “Abdul had to stop working, too. What do I hide from you? You know what the health of my children’s father is like. We are four days away from sleeping on the footpath ourselves.” It was her habit to exaggerate her poverty to her neighbors, the scavengers, and the policemen who came for bribes.

“But your business will keep you going,” the Bihari woman said, fiddling with the ends of the sheer green pallu that covered her head. “Your house will not go away. You know the way we live—we earn to eat. You see my husband works hard, that my children are good.” Her middle son was the best student in the small school run by Asha’s daughter, Manju. He knew an English word for every letter of the alphabet:
jog kite lion marigold night owl pot queen rose
.

Zehrunisa tried to steer the conversation to politics. “Allah, those fucking Shiv Sena people, and whatever this new party is. For so many years they’ve tried to run us off. We work hard. Who is relying on their charity? Do they come to put food on our plates? All they do is create a useless
tamasha—
”

The ends of the Bihari woman’s pallu were now balled in her fists. She didn’t want to talk about politics, especially with Zehrunisa, who could run on like a train without brakes. She studied a lizard on the wall as it fanned out its throat. Finally, she interrupted her landlady. “What does your heart say? I won’t complain about taking the children back to the village, looking like a fool in front of my people. At least I can grow food there. But my husband and his brother—what? To leave them on the pavement?” She searched Zehrunisa’s face until the Muslim woman looked away.

It was as the scavengers always said of Abdul’s mother: Ten men pulling couldn’t get her purse out of her pocket. As tears filled the Bihari woman’s eyes, Zehrunisa cradled Lallu and began to sing to him. The scavengers said this, too: She wore that big, spoiled baby like a shield. And so the Bihari men were on the pavement, and the wife and children were on the three-day train ride back home.

“She said listen to your heart, and I did,” Zehrunisa told Abdul a few days later. “My heart said if we let the money go, how will we pay the next installment on this land in Vasai? What if your father goes back to hospital? Finally we are making a little money, but once we start to think we’re safe, we’ll be stuck in Annawadi forever, swatting flies.”

“New people will come after the monsoon,” Abdul told Sunil and the other scavengers, because that is what his father told him. “Where else are they going to go?” The city was rough on migrants, terrible sometimes, and also better than anywhere else.

For decades, the airport on which Annawadi livelihoods depended was a realm of duct tape, convulsing toilets, and disorganization. Now, in the name of global competitiveness, the government had privatized the place. The new management consortium, led by an image-conscious conglomerate called GVK, was charged with building a beautiful, hyperefficient new terminal—a piece of architecture that might impress on travelers Mumbai’s rising status as a global city. The new management was also deputized to raze Annawadi and thirty other squatter settlements that had sprouted on vacant airport land. Though the airport-slum clearance had been proposed and postponed for decades, GVK and the government seemed poised to get it done.

Securing the airport perimeter was one reason to reclaim the land
from the roughly ninety thousand families squatting there. The value of the land was another, since the huts sprawled across space that could be developed vertically at enormous profit. The third reason, in an airport branded “the New Gateway of India,” with a peacock-feather logo, was national pride. For among the things that breakneck globalization had changed about India was its sensitivity about its slums.

As big banks in America and Britain failed, restless capital was looking eastward. Singapore and Shanghai were thriving, but Mumbai had profited less handsomely. Though it, too, had an abundance of young, cheap, trainable labor, there were opportunity costs attached to the fact that the Indian financial capital was alternatively known as Slumbai. Despite economic growth, more than half of Greater Mumbai’s citizenry lived in makeshift housing. And while some international businessmen descending into the Mumbai airport eyed the vista of slums with disgust, and others regarded it with pity, few took the sight as evidence of a high-functioning, well-managed city.

Annawadians understood that their settlement was widely perceived as a blight, and that their homes, like their work, were provisional. Still they clung to this half-acre, which to them was three distinct places. Abdul and Rahul lived in Tamil Sai Nagar, the oldest and most salubrious section, which was anchored by the public toilets. Sunil’s stretch of Annawadi, poorer and cruder, had been built by Dalits from rural Maharashtra. (In the Indian caste system, the most artfully oppressive division of labor ever devised, Dalits—once termed untouchables—were at the bottom of the heap.) Annawadi’s Dalits had christened their slumlanes Gautam Nagar, after an eight-year-old boy who had died of pneumonia during one of the airport authority’s periodic demolitions.

The third side of Annawadi was a cratered road at the slum’s entrance
where many scavengers lived. This side had no huts. Scavengers slept on top of their garbage bags to prevent other scavengers from stealing them.

Petty thieves slept on the rut-road, too. Their main targets were construction sites around the airport, where builders were sometimes careless with screws, rods, and nails. Before the airport was privatized, many of the thieves had worked there, carrying travelers’ luggage to cars in exchange for tips. But as part of the makeover that had made the grounds of the international terminal nearly as lush as those of the luxury hotels, the ragtag loaders had been banished, along with the mothers who held up babies and begged for milk money, and the children hawking pocket gods.

The luggage-loaders-turned-thieves made a bit more money than waste-pickers like Sunil, and spent most of it on chicken-chili rice from a Chinese woman’s Airport Road stall. They typically topped off their dinners with Eraz-ex, the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out. People in the office buildings threw out the bottles prematurely. Annawadi road boys knew the value of the dregs. Dilute with spit, daub onto a rag, inhale: an infusion of daring for after-midnight work.

Sniffing Eraz-ex was problematic in the long run, though. As Abdul pointed out to Sunil, the addicts were either thin as match-sticks or had big, troubling balls in their bellies.

Abdul felt vaguely protective of the undersized scavenger. The boy got excited about unusual things, like a map of the city he’d recently seen outside an airport workers’ canteen. Back at Annawadi, Sunil talked about that map as if it were a gold brick he’d found in the gutter, and seemed surprised when other scavengers took no interest. Abdul recognized this tendency to get punchy about discoveries to which other people were indifferent. He no longer tried to explain his private enthusiasms, and figured Sunil would learn his own aloneness, in time.

As for Sunil, he couldn’t help noting that the stoned thieves were having more fun than sober, drudgy Abdul. When spring came, they amassed raucously at Annawadi’s first entertainment center, a shack on the road with two hulking red video-game consoles inside.

The game parlor was a loss leader for an old Tamil man who had begun competing with Abdul for the scavengers’ goods. The Tamil was nearly as clever as Asha. He lent the scavengers the one rupee it cost to play Bomberman or Metal Slug 3. He lent them bars of soap and money for food. To the thieves, he lent tools for cutting concertina wire or wedging off hubcaps. Indebted, the scavengers and thieves had to sell their goods to him.

The Husains considered this unfair competition, and one night, seeking revenge, Mirchi broke into the game shed and cleaned out the consoles’ coin boxes. When the Tamil discovered the culprit, he laughed. The game-shed profits were negligible against his larger return from stolen goods.

To Sunil, one road boy stood apart from the others: an antic fifteen-year-old named Kalu, who was the closest thing Abdul had to a friend. Kalu mocked the game-parlor man for wearing his lungis too short, and disputed his contention that Muslims like Abdul were cheats with magnets hidden under their scales. Kalu’s specialty as a thief was airport recycling bins, which often contained aluminum scrap. Though the bins were in compounds secured by barbed-wire fences, his tolerance for pain was a thing of legend. Thanks to Eraz-ex, which was also the local balm for concertina-wire wounds, he could make three round-trips over the fences in a night. After selling his metal to Abdul, he sometimes slipped Sunil a few rupees for food.

Like Sunil, Kalu had lost his mother when he was young, and he’d been working since age ten. One of his jobs had been polishing diamonds in a heavily guarded local factory, contemplation of which drove the other boys batshit.

“Why didn’t you put a diamond in your ear?”

“Or ten diamonds up your asshole!”

They weren’t convinced by Kalu’s description of the diamond-detecting machines he’d had to pass through at the end of each day.

What Sunil loved about Kalu were his inspired enactments of movies he’d seen, for the benefit of kids who’d never been to a theater. With a high-pitched approximation of Bengali, Kalu would become the possessed woman in the Bollywood thriller
Bhool Bhulaiya
. With a guttural approximation of Chinese, he’d be Bruce Lee in
Enter the Dragon
. He refused to do
King Kong
anymore, despite popular requests. Becoming Deepika in
Om Shanti Om
pleased him more.
“Arre kya item hai!”
he’d say, sashaying. “Only she can pull off those old-style outfits!”

Kalu himself was plain, if you broke the face down to features: small eyes, flat nose, pointy chin, dark skin. When other road boys gave him his nickname—
Kalu
, meaning “black boy”—they hadn’t meant it as a compliment. But he had status, not just for the pain tolerance but for his ability to manufacture fun. When bored with mimicking film stars, he’d act out the leading freaks of Annawadi, including the lipsticky One Leg who walked with her butt stuck out and who was lately screwing a heroin-addicted road boy when her husband went to work. That a road boy was getting sex, even with a defective like the One Leg, was immense.

Sunil often eavesdropped on Kalu’s conversations after dark, and in this way learned that policemen sometimes advised the road boys about nearby warehouses and construction sites where they might steal building materials. The cops then took a share of the proceeds. One midnight, Sunil overheard Kalu, uncharacteristically serious, tell Abdul about a thieving expedition he’d botched near the airport.

A police officer had turned him on to an industrial site with metal lying on the ground and no barbed-wire fences—a place Kalu called
“the workshops.” He went at 11
P.M
. and found some pieces of iron, but a security guard had come after him. Ditching the metal in high weeds, he’d run back home.

“If I don’t get the iron before morning, another boy will find it,” Kalu told Abdul. “But I’m too tired to go back now.”

“So ask one of these boys out here to wake you later,” Abdul suggested.

The other boys were high, though, and anyway had a loose sense of time.

“I could wake you,” Sunil offered. The rats in his hut left him sleepless.

“Good,” said Kalu. “Come at three
A.M.
, and if you don’t, I’ll be finished.”

Kalu said
finished
lightly, the way he said most things, but Sunil took it hard. He lay down on the maidan, a few feet from Abdul, and tracked the time by the movement of the moon. At his best guess of 3
A.M.
, he found Kalu curled up asleep in the backseat of an autorickshaw. Rising, the fifteen-year-old wiped his lips and said, “The boy who was going to go with me is too stoned. Will you come?”

Sunil was startled, then honored.