Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [102]
“At the petrol pump,” the man had said on the phone. “In the pink housedress, the one I like.”
So behind the lace curtain, smiling, Asha wound around her body a silk sari in a tasteful black-and-white print. What she liked. The person she had become.
“You look good,” said Manju, upon consideration. “Better than that pink.”
“Oh ho, nice,” concurred one of the eunuchs sullenly, as the new Asha stepped into the dark.
In mid-May, the election results came in. The reform-minded elites had not turned out to vote, after all. Most of the incumbent parliamentarians were reelected, they returned the prime minister to office, and the radical improvements in governance promised before the voting were quietly shelved. A few weeks later, the bulldozers of the airport authority began to move across the periphery of Annawadi.
The Beautiful Forever wall came down, and in two days, the sewage lake that had brought dengue fever and malaria to the slum was filled in, its expanse leveled in preparation for some new development. The slumdwellers consoled one another, “It’s not us yet, just at the edges.” The demolition of airport slums would occur in phases over several years, so there was still plenty of time for the residents to unite to ensure that the businessmen and politicians who’d been buying up huts wouldn’t be the only beneficiaries of the promised rehabilitation.
In the meantime, the earth-flattening at Annawadi’s borders gave the children something to do. They stood where the sewage lake used to be, rapt, as the bright yellow bulldozers churned the ground. The machines were unearthing the recyclable remainders of an earlier city: a suede oxford, once white; rusty screws and other bits of plastic and metal. Salable commodities, all.
One Saturday afternoon, the little Husains wandered out with Fatima’s daughters to join other child prospectors at the edge of the site. As the children kept their eyes on the shovels, they debated what was going to be built on the newly reclaimed land.
“A school,” someone said.
“No, a hospital is what I heard it is going to be.”
“One of those hospitals for babies being born.”
“No, fool. What they’re doing is for the airport. A taxi stand. And planes will come here also.”
“That ground is too small for planes. They are making a place for us to play cricket only.”
Fatima’s younger daughter tensed. Something was gleaming at the edge of a new gash in the earth. She sprinted out toward a bulldozer, darting under a lowering shovel.
“Don’t,” yelled a woman passing by. The little girl did: crouched and tugged, jumped back just in time to avoid getting clocked, and, after the bulldozer passed, squatted again to dig. It was a whole, real something—a heavy steel cooking pot! She seized it and tore back to Annawadi, beaming, her bare feet kicking up dirt clouds as she ran.
The old pot was worth at least fifteen rupees, and at the sight of it two women in the maidan began to laugh. From progress and modernization, at least one Annawadian would make a profit. Fatima’s daughter lifted her treasure high for all of her envious peers to see.
A few weeks later, the children found a still more exciting diversion: journalists bearing cameras with long black snouts. Suddenly, Annawadi was in the news.
The proximate cause was a cheerful, if illegal, June tradition—a Sunday afternoon horse-and-carriage race on the gleaming Western Express Highway. Small bets were placed, and people lined the highway to watch.
The deposed slumlord, Robert the Zebra Man, was running two of his horses harnessed to an undermaintained carriage, freshly painted red and blue. Late in the race, as the pretty cart reached the crest of an overpass,