Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [17]
As habitually as Asha sought a financial angle in her neighbors’ complaints, so far most were merely tedious—for instance, the bickering between the Muslim breeder, Zehrunisa Husain, and Fatima the One Leg over whose small child had pinched whose. Asha didn’t care for either woman. Fatima beat her children with her crutches. And Asha found Zehrunisa intolerably smug. Just three years back, in a killing monsoon, the Husains had no roof over their heads, at which time Rahul had perfected a wicked imitation of Zehrunisa, weeping. But now she and her morose son Abdul were rumored to be making money. “Dirty Muslim money, haram ka paisa,” was how Asha put it. Her own aspirations centered on anti-poverty initiatives, not garbage.
A government-sponsored women’s self-help group looked somewhat promising, now that she knew how to game it. The program was supposed to encourage financially vulnerable women to pool their savings and make low-interest loans to one another in times of need. But Asha’s self-help group preferred to lend the pooled money at high interest to poorer women whom they’d excluded from the collective—the old sewer cleaner who had brought her a sari, for instance.
Still, when foreign journalists came to Mumbai to see whether self-help groups were empowering women, government officials sometimes took them to Asha. Her job was to gather random female neighbors to smile demurely while the officials went on about how their collective had lifted them from poverty. Manju would then be paraded in as Asha delivered the clinching line: “And now my girl will be a college graduate, not dependent on any man.” The foreign women always got emotional when she said this.
“The big people think that because we are poor we don’t understand much,” she said to her children. Asha understood plenty. She was a chit in a national game of make-believe, in which many of India’s old problems—poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor—were being aggressively addressed. Meanwhile the other old problems, corruption and exploitation of the weak by the less weak, continued with minimal interference.
In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.
As Manju finished cooking, Asha flipped on her TV, which had been the first in Annawadi, though something had since gone wrong with the color. The newscaster was hot pink as he provided an update on the famous Baby Lakshmi, a toddler born with eight limbs and duly named after the multi-limbed Hindu goddess. A few months back, a crack team of Bangalore surgeons had undertaken her de-limbing. The news story followed the usual script: the marvel of medical technology, the heroism of the surgeons, a video clip of the two-year-old girl at home, supposedly happy and normal. But even on a bad TV screen, it was obvious that the girl was not fine. Asha thought the family could have done better, financially, if they’d left Lakshmi alone and run her as a circus act. Still, it was the kind of medical-transformation report that would get Mr. Kamble, who watched the same Marathi-language channel, further riled up.
Everyone in Annawadi wanted one of the life-changing miracles that were said to happen in the New India. They wanted to go from zero to hero, as the saying went, and they wanted to go there fast. Asha believed in New Indian miracles but thought they happened only gradually, as incremental advantages over one’s neighbors were parlayed into larger