Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [18]
Her long-term goal was to become not just slumlord but the Corporator of Ward 76—a dream made plausible by progressive, internationally acclaimed legislation. In an effort to ensure that women had a significant role in the governance of India, the political parties were required to put up only female candidates for certain elections. The last time Ward 76 had an all-female ballot, Corporator Subhash Sawant had put up his housemaid. The maid had won, and he had kept running the ward. Asha thought that he might just pick her to run in the next all-female election, since his new maid was a deaf-mute—ideal for keeping his secrets, less so for campaigning.
Ward 76 contained many slums larger than her own, but Asha had just made her first move to develop a reputation beyond Annawadi’s boundaries: investing in a large plastic banner with her name, color photo, and a list of her accomplishments as a representative of Shiv Sena’s women’s wing. The banner was now strung up at an open-air market half a mile away. Unfortunately, she’d had to include the photos of three other Shiv Sena women. The Corporator had warned her more than once about hogging credit.
“But I had to pay the whole whack,” she complained to her husband, who had appeared for dinner cheerful-drunk instead of fighty-drunk, a relieving change. “These other women, they still have the village mentality,” she told him. “They don’t understand that if you spend a little up front, you get more later.”
Rahul and her youngest son, Ganesh, came in, too. Asha stood, laughing, to yank Rahul’s cargo shorts up from his hips. “I know, it’s the style, your style, American style,” she said. “All that, and it’s still foolish.” They each took a plate of lentils, soggy vegetables, and lopsided wheat-flour rotis, a meal whose tastelessness seemed intentional, and perhaps the product of Manju’s silent rage about Mr. Kamble.
Asha knew her daughter judged her for her plots and side deals, and for the nighttime meetings with the Corporator, policemen, and government bureaucrats that these schemes always seemed to entail. But the politics for which Manju had contempt had bought her a college education, and might someday lift them all into the middle class.
“So do I have to teach you all over again how to make the rotis round?” Asha teased her daughter, merrily holding one of them up. “Come on! Who will marry you when you make such ridiculous bread?”
The roti dangling in Asha’s fingertips was such a forlorn specimen that even Manju had to laugh, and Asha decided, wrongly, that her daughter had forgotten Mr. Kamble.
Abdul was always twitchy, but by February 2008 the scavengers saw he was more so: jingling coins in his pocket, shaking his legs as if preparing to sprint, chewing a wooden matchstick while his tongue did something weird behind his teeth. Across the city, gangs of young Maharashtrians had begun beating up migrants from the North—bhaiyas, as they were called—in hope of driving them out of the city and easing the scramble for jobs.
Though Abdul had been born in Mumbai, the fact that his father had come from the North qualified the family as targets, and not abstractly. Rioters chanting “Beat the bhaiyas!” were moving through the airport slums, ransacking small North Indian businesses, torching the taxis of North Indian drivers, confiscating the wares that migrant hawkers displayed on blankets.
These poor-against-poor riots were not spontaneous, grassroots protests against the city’s shortage of work. Riots seldom were, in modern Mumbai. Rather, the anti-migrant campaign had been orchestrated in the overcity by an aspiring politician—a nephew of the founder of Shiv Sena. The upstart nephew wanted to show voters that a new political party he had started disliked bhaiyas like Abdul even more than Shiv Sena did.
Abdul quit working and stayed inside to avoid the violence, about which roaming scavengers brought lurid reports. Ribs broken, heads stomped, two men on fire—“Enough,” Abdul cried out one night. “Can you please stop talking about it! The riots are just a show,