Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [22]
Some of the taximen tossed their cups and bottles over a low stone wall behind the food stand. On the other side of the wall, seventy feet down, was the Mithi River—actually, a concrete sluice where the river had been redirected as the airport enlarged. The drivers probably liked to imagine their garbage hitting the water and floating away, but Sunil had climbed the wall and discovered a narrow ledge on the other side, five feet down. By some trick of wind in the sluice, trash tossed over the wall tended to blow back and settle on this sliver of concrete. It was a space on which a small boy could balance.
Of course, if he stumbled, jumping down, he’d be in the river. Sunil knew how to swim, having learned in Naupada, a slum next to the Intercontinental hotel that went underwater each monsoon. He’d never heard of anyone drowning in Naupada, though. Naupada was the local definition of fun. The Mithi River, with its unnatural currents, was the place with the body count. After a few jumps, he trusted his feet.
The ledge stretched four hundred feet from the taxi stand to a traffic ramp, and people driving up the ramp sometimes slowed and pointed at him as he crouched there, high above the water. He liked the idea that the ledge work looked dramatic from a distance. In truth, it was less scary than working Cargo Road or scavenging during the riots, with the “Beat the bhaiyas!” men running around. And he was willing to take risks in order not to be a runt and a stub. His sack grew bulky and awkward as he moved down the ledge, and he learned to concentrate only on the trash immediately in front of him, looking neither down nor ahead.
By March, the riots over, their deepest effect began to surface in slums like Annawadi. Many North Indians had been afraid to work for two weeks. Unable to recover from the loss of wages, some migrants were belatedly fulfilling the hopes of the new political party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which sought to uproot them from Mumbai.
Abdul’s parents rented a forty-five-square-foot room in the back of their hut to the extended family of a Hindu autorickshaw driver from the northern state of Bihar. One afternoon in mid-March, the driver’s distressed wife came to see Abdul’s mother. Zehrunisa took her two-year-old son, Lallu, to her breast as she heard her tenant out.
The woman’s husband and his brother rented their autorickshaw for two hundred rupees a day. Although they hadn’t worked during the riots, they’d still had to pay the rent on the three-wheeled taxi. Now they didn’t have money to buy gas for it, nor the rent they owed the Husains. The Bihari woman asked Zehrunisa’s forbearance. “What can I do? Please don’t chuck us out!”
“Ah, but the riots hurt us all,” said Zehrunisa. “Abdul had to stop working, too. What do I hide from you? You know what the health of my children’s father is like. We are four days away from sleeping on the footpath ourselves.” It was her habit to exaggerate her poverty to her neighbors, the scavengers, and the policemen who came for bribes.
“But your business will keep you going,” the Bihari woman said, fiddling with the ends of the sheer green pallu that covered her head. “Your house will not go away. You know the way we live—we earn to eat. You see my husband works hard, that my children are good.” Her middle son was the best student in the small school run by Asha’s daughter, Manju. He knew an English word for every letter of the alphabet: jog kite lion marigold night owl pot queen rose.
Zehrunisa tried to steer the conversation to politics. “Allah, those fucking Shiv Sena people, and whatever this new party is. For so many years they’ve tried to run us off. We work hard. Who is relying on their charity? Do they come to put food on our plates? All they do is create a useless tamasha—”
The ends of the Bihari woman’s pallu were now balled in her fists. She didn’t want to talk about politics, especially with Zehrunisa, who could run on like a train without brakes.