Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [21]
It interested him that from Airport Road, only the smoke plumes of Annawadi’s cooking fires could now be seen. The airport people had erected tall, gleaming aluminum fences on the side of the slum that most drivers passed before turning into the international terminal. Drivers approaching the terminal from the other direction would see only a concrete wall covered with sunshine-yellow advertisements. The ads were for Italianate floor tiles, and the corporate slogan ran the wall’s length: BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER. Sunil regularly walked atop the Beautiful Forever wall, surveying for trash, but Airport Road was unhelpfully clean.
For waste-pickers, the road where air cargo was loaded and unloaded was the most profitable, and therefore competitive, part of the airport. Crammed with trucks, truck bays, overflowing dumpsters, and small food joints, the place was every week more overrun by scavengers. Some of the men flashed knives to keep Sunil out of promising dumpsters; more often, they waited until he had filled his bag, then kicked his ass and stole it. Women from the Matang caste, traditional waste-pickers, hurled stones. The Matangs worked in red and green saris, dowry jewels in their noses, and were nice to him back at Annawadi, where everyone waited in line to put their bags on a scale. But people of other castes were encroaching on the Matangs’ historical livelihood, because steady work was hard to come by, and trash was always there. To the Matangs, people like Sunil, who belonged to an Uttar Pradesh carpenter caste, were invaders on Cargo Road.
Worse for the Matangs, and for Sunil, was the increased professional competition for trash. An army of uniformed workers kept the environs of the international terminal free of rubbish. Big recycling concerns took most of the luxury-hotel garbage—“a fortune beyond counting,” as Abdul put it, in a whisper. And on the streets, new municipal garbage trucks were rolling around, as a civic campaign fronted by Bollywood heroines attempted to combat Mumbai’s reputation as a dirty city. Stylish orange signs above dumpsters were commanding, CLEAN UP! Some freelance scavengers worried that, soon, they would have no work at all.
At the end of Sunil’s brutal days, he sold to Abdul what hadn’t been stolen from him. While the Matangs averaged forty rupees a day, his take was rarely more than fifteen—about thirty-three U.S. cents. Sunil felt he would never grow unless he discovered scrounging places that other people hadn’t thought of, and to that end, started paying less attention to the other scavengers and more attention to the people who threw things away. It was what Annawadi crows did, circling and observing before trying to seize.
Rich travelers surely dropped fantastic garbage outside the international terminal, but airport security guards chased off the scavengers who came near it, even small ones who just wanted to hear if the signboard listing incoming flights went chuck-a-chuck-a-whirrr when updated, as Annawadi old-timers insisted. The construction workers building the new terminal would also leave trash, but their site was enclosed by blue-and-white aluminum fencing, which provided no traction for climbing. The officers at the Sahar Police Station, which was located on airport grounds, would have a trash flow, too, but like most people in Annawadi, Sunil was afraid of the police. He focused instead on a stand of yellow-and-black taxis next to the station.
A food stall at the taxi stand served the drivers who awaited arrivals. Most of the drivers quaffed their plastic cups of tea, ate their samosas, and dropped their trash where they stood. This choice