Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [16]
Mr. Kamble had decided his imaginary business would be a food stall like the one where he’d been working when his luck changed. If he got a loan of fifty thousand rupees, and from that paid five thousand each to Asha, the bank manager, and the government official, he would be only five thousand rupees short of the heart valve, and could go to a loan shark for the rest.
“You can see my situation, Asha,” he said. “No work, no income, until I have the operation. And if I don’t have the operation—you understand.”
She looked him over, made the ch-ch sound she often made when she was thinking. “Yes, I can see you are in a bad state,” she said after a minute. “What you should do, I think, is go to the temple. No, go to my godman, Gajanan Maharaj, and pray.”
He looked stunned. “Pray?”
“Yes. You should pray for what you want every day. A loan, good health—pray to this godman. Keep hope, tell him to help you, and you might get it.”
Asha’s daughter Manju inhaled sharply. Growing up, she had sometimes wished that the gentle Mr. Kamble had been her father. And she knew, as Mr. Kamble did, that when Asha said go to the temple and the godman, it meant to come back with a better financial proposal.
“But we are friends—you have known me, so I thought …” Mr. Kamble sounded as if he’d swallowed sand.
“Fixing a loan is not a simple thing. It is because we are friends that I want the gods to help you. So you live a long good life.”
As Mr. Kamble limped away, Asha felt confident that he’d come back to her before he would go to any temple. A dying man should pay a lot to live.
Lately, Asha had been shirking the temple herself. She considered herself a religious woman, but in recent weeks she’d noticed that she got what she wanted from the gods regardless of whether she prayed or fasted. For some time she’d been meaning to pray for the downfall of a neighbor woman who said rude things about the nature of Asha’s relationship to the Corporator, but before Asha had gotten around to it, the woman’s husband fell ill, her elder son got hit by a car, and her younger son fell off a motorcycle. Asha concluded from this and other evidence that she had fallen into a cosmic groove of fortune. Perhaps the very groove that Mr. Kamble had recently vacated.
Across the room, her daughter was throwing a tantrum—the quiet kind, the only kind Manju ever threw. She was flinging the chopped onions into the frying pan with such force that some bounced out and onto the floor. Asha raised an eyebrow. Later tonight, the girl would sneak out to meet her friend Meena in the eye-watering public toilet, no doubt to cry over her mother’s rejection of a dying neighbor. Asha wasn’t supposed to know about those toilet tell-all sessions, but little happened in Annawadi that didn’t get back to her eventually.
Asha was pleased with Manju’s obedience, her locally heralded beauty, and the college studies that brought strange names like “Titania” and “Desdemona” to the household. But Asha considered it a failure of her parenting that Manju was sentimental. The girl spent her afternoons teaching English to some of the poorest Annawadi children—a job that had been Asha’s idea, since it brought in three hundred rupees a month—but now Manju was always talking about this or that hungry child whose stepmother beat her.
Asha grasped many of her own contradictions, among them that you could be proud of having spared your offspring hardship while also resenting