Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [101]
She was terrified, and the eunuchs felt bad, making her tremble like that. They had come on different business. Asha being the most powerful person they knew, they hoped she would help them register to vote in the election, a week away. Like most Annawadians, they wanted to be part of the exhilarating moment when politics was forced from its cryptic quarters and brought into the open air.
The parliamentary elections would be the largest exercise of democracy in the history of the world: nearly half a billion people standing in line to vote for their representatives in Delhi, who would in turn select the prime minister. The parliamentarian who would represent Annawadians was hardly in doubt. It would be the incumbent from the Congress Party, Priya Dutt, a kind, unassuming woman who personified two historical weaknesses of the Indian electorate: for filmi people and for legacies. Her parents had been Bollywood superstars, and her father had held the parliamentary seat before her.
The previous week, a Congress Party truck had pulled up outside Annawadi, and workers unloaded eight stacks of concrete sewer covers. A crowd amassed on the road, excited at the pre-election gift. Thanks to Priya Dutt’s party, the slumlanes would have no more open sewers.
A few days later, the Congress Party workers returned in the truck. Instead of installing the sewer covers, they reclaimed them. The covers were needed in one of the district’s larger slums, where the prop might influence a greater number of voters. Older Annawadians laughed as they watched the truck depart. The blatancy was refreshing.
The eunuchs, who were migrants from Tamil Nadu, saw little difference among the political parties, but they were eager to vote nonetheless. Their problem was that district elections officials sometimes failed to process registration forms submitted by migrants and other reviled minorities. While Asha and her husband had voter cards and I.D. numbers that allowed them each two votes, in two different precincts, many non-Maharashtrians in Annawadi had yet to secure their one vote. Zehrunisa and Karam Husain were local record holders in disenfranchisement, having spent seven years trying unsuccessfully to register to vote.
To the excluded Annawadians, political participation wasn’t cherished because it was a potent instrument of social equality. The crucial thing was the act of casting a ballot. Slumdwellers, who were criminalized by where they lived, and the work they did, living there, were in this one instance equal to every other citizen of India. They were a legitimate part of the state, if they could get on the rolls.
The tallest eunuch bowed toward Asha, then crouched at her feet. “Teacher,” the eunuch said, “one year ago we went to register at the office but still we have not received our voting cards. We have done the needfuls but then, nothing. The election is so near. Will you take our forms and give them to the right people and make them give us a vote?”
Asha picked up a hand mirror.
The eunuch coughed. “Can you help? Teacher?”
Manju furrowed her brow. Her mother was acting as if the eunuchs were not even there. Asha picked up a tub of moisturizing cream and rubbed her face, slowly. She poured talc on her palms and massaged it onto her cheeks. She was getting ready to go someplace else.
“What! Putting on makeup!” hissed one of the eunuchs to another, too loudly. But in the someplace for which Asha seemed already to have departed, she didn’t hear.
Asha had quit being slum boss. She was done with politics. Done with disenfranchised eunuchs and all the other inhabitants of Annawadi, “finished with all these small deals that keep me running here and there.” Whether the Husains went to prison or an entire slumlane expired of TB or Fatima’s ghost got bored with her hauntings and took it upon herself