Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [14]
Guilt of the sort that had overcome Robert was an impediment to effective work in the city’s back channels, and Asha considered it a luxury emotion. “Corruption, it’s all corruption,” she told her children, fluttering her hands like two birds taking flight.
As Asha arrived home from her teaching job one afternoon, her step didn’t quicken when she saw supplicants lined up against the wall of her hut. From the Corporator she had learned the psychological advantage of making people wait and stew. With barely a nod to her visitors, she stepped behind a lacy curtain at the back of her hut and unraveled the deep red sari she’d worn to work.
Now that she was older, her eyes drew more attention than her breasts. She could weaponize them in an instant, and boys caught gaping at her magnificent nineteen-year-old daughter, Manju, would reel backward as if they’d been struck. When Asha thought about money, her eyes narrowed. She thought about money most of the time; Annawadians called her Squint behind her back. But the real distinction of her eyes was their brightness. Most eyes dulled with age and disappointment. Hers looked far more radiant now than they did in the photograph she possessed of her youth. A tall, stooped, emaciated farm girl with sun-darkened skin, freshly embarked on a disastrous marriage: When Asha looked at that photo, she laughed.
She emerged from behind the curtain in a shapeless housedress, another strategy picked up from the Corporator. He often presided over his lavender-walled, lavender-furnished living room in an undershirt, legs barely covered by his lungi, while his petitioners flop-sweated in polyester suits. He might as well have said it aloud: Your concerns are so unimportant to me that I haven’t bothered to dress.
Settling on the floor, Asha accepted the cup of tea brought by Manju and nodded for the first of her neighbors to speak. An old woman with a creased, beautiful face and matted coils of silver hair, she hadn’t arrived with a problem. She was weeping in gratitude, because on this date, three years earlier, Asha had helped her secure a temp job with the city government, extricating trash from clogged sewers for ninety rupees a day. Before Asha had learned better, she had performed many such kindnesses for free.
From her pay, the older woman had bought Asha a cheap green sari. Asha didn’t care for the color. Still, it was good for the other visitors to hear the old woman’s blessings, see the way she pressed her forehead to Asha’s bare feet.
Another weeper spoke next: an overweight exotic dancer who had lost her job in a bar and was now getting by as the concubine of a married policeman. She had to service the officer in the hut she shared with her mother and her children, which was prompting family hysterics. “He says he’s going to stop coming, because of the drama. Then what will we eat?”
Asha clucked. A morals campaign had driven most of the sex trade out of the airport area, and Annawadi’s “outline women,” as they were known, now had three bad options for satisfying their clients: in their family huts; behind a line of trucks parked nightly outside of Annawadi; or in the goaty, one-room brothel.
Briskly, Asha issued her advice: Explain more clearly to your family the long-term advantages of the liaison. “Maybe the officer doesn’t give you too much now, but later, he might fix your house. So tell them to stay quiet and wait and see.”
As she spoke, she ran her fingertips over her new orange ceramic floor tiles. Eight years back, when Annawadi was a flimsy encampment, her three children had jumped truckbeds to steal the wood and aluminum scrap from which the family had hammered up a shack. Now the hut had plaster walls, a ceiling fan, a wooden shrine with an electric candle, and a high-status, if nonfunctioning, refrigerator. The place was narrow and cramped, though. That had been the trade-off. To finance the improvements that might persuade her neighbors of her rising status, she’d rented bits of her living space to some of the continual stream of newcomers to Mumbai. Migrant tenants