Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [23]
It was as the scavengers always said of Abdul’s mother: Ten men pulling couldn’t get her purse out of her pocket. As tears filled the Bihari woman’s eyes, Zehrunisa cradled Lallu and began to sing to him. The scavengers said this, too: She wore that big, spoiled baby like a shield. And so the Bihari men were on the pavement, and the wife and children were on the three-day train ride back home.
“She said listen to your heart, and I did,” Zehrunisa told Abdul a few days later. “My heart said if we let the money go, how will we pay the next installment on this land in Vasai? What if your father goes back to hospital? Finally we are making a little money, but once we start to think we’re safe, we’ll be stuck in Annawadi forever, swatting flies.”
“New people will come after the monsoon,” Abdul told Sunil and the other scavengers, because that is what his father told him. “Where else are they going to go?” The city was rough on migrants, terrible sometimes, and also better than anywhere else.
For decades, the airport on which Annawadi livelihoods depended was a realm of duct tape, convulsing toilets, and disorganization. Now, in the name of global competitiveness, the government had privatized the place. The new management consortium, led by an image-conscious conglomerate called GVK, was charged with building a beautiful, hyperefficient new terminal—a piece of architecture that might impress on travelers Mumbai’s rising status as a global city. The new management was also deputized to raze Annawadi and thirty other squatter settlements that had sprouted on vacant airport land. Though the airport-slum clearance had been proposed and postponed for decades, GVK and the government seemed poised to get it done.
Securing the airport perimeter was one reason to reclaim the land from the roughly ninety thousand families squatting there. The value of the land was another, since the huts sprawled across space that could be developed vertically at enormous profit. The third reason, in an airport branded “the New Gateway of India,” with a peacock-feather logo, was national pride. For among the things that breakneck globalization had changed about India was its sensitivity about its slums.
As big banks in America and Britain failed, restless capital was looking eastward. Singapore and Shanghai were thriving, but Mumbai had profited less handsomely. Though it, too, had an abundance of young, cheap, trainable labor, there were opportunity costs attached to the fact that the Indian financial capital was alternatively known as Slumbai. Despite economic growth, more than half of Greater Mumbai’s citizenry lived in makeshift housing. And while some international businessmen descending into the Mumbai airport eyed the vista of slums with disgust, and others regarded it with pity, few took the sight as evidence of a high-functioning, well-managed city.
Annawadians understood that their settlement was widely perceived as a blight, and that their homes, like their work, were provisional. Still they clung to this half-acre, which to them was three distinct places. Abdul and Rahul lived in Tamil Sai Nagar, the oldest and most salubrious section, which was anchored by the public toilets. Sunil’s stretch of Annawadi, poorer and cruder, had been built by Dalits from rural Maharashtra. (In the Indian caste system, the most artfully oppressive division of labor ever devised, Dalits—once termed untouchables—were at the bottom of the heap.) Annawadi’s Dalits had christened their slumlanes Gautam Nagar, after an eight-year-old boy who had died of pneumonia during one of the airport authority’s periodic demolitions.
The third side of Annawadi was a cratered