Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [30]
Annawadians agreed that Manju was nicer than she had to be, given her looks, her mother’s political connections, and her punishing schedule. Mornings, she went to college. Afternoons, in the family hut, she ran the slum’s only school. In the other hours, she provided cooking, cleaning, water-collection, and laundry services to her household of five. These obligations were fulfilled by sleeping only four hours a night, and rarely impinged on her temperament. But this spring, her composure was being tested by a series of mysterious infections and fevers.
Asha worried that her daughter’s body ran hot, which increased the risk that she’d lose her virtue. Manju was hardly in danger. She had spent her teenaged years turning herself into a model of proper and gentle deportment—deportment she thought her own mother lacked.
One afternoon, her brother Rahul stood at a small mirror tacked on the wall of their hut. As he massaged his face with Manju’s Fair and Lovely skin-lightening lotion, he considered her through the brown freckled glass. She was kneeling on the floor, glossy braid flung over her shoulder, murmuring English words with an escalating desperation.
“What a face you’re making,” Rahul said. Manju looked up.
“Rahul, not so much cream!”
The Fair and Lovely lotion was crucial to maintaining her light complexion, and thereby her status in the marriage market, but Rahul and their younger brother, Ganesh, applied it more liberally than she did.
Rahul turned on the TV, where the cartoon mouse Jerry, disguised in shoe polish, was convincing Tom that he’d swallowed enough explosives to blow up a city. Manju watched for a minute, then sighed again. “I don’t know what I am doing,” she said. “My students will come in an hour, and I’m behind on my own work. My computer teacher said, ‘Ask your mother what she wants you to do—your Photoshop assignment or your housework?’ Else he will fail me. And did I tell you what happened yesterday in psychology class? I left my purse under the desk to go to the toilet and someone took my money. What sort of people! And the other girls have more money than I do. But why do I bother telling you? Your eyes are inside the TV—not even listening.”
“I am listening,” Rahul protested. “You’re just sitting on so many tensions I don’t know which one to think about.”
Rahul had his own tensions, balancing ninth-grade exams and late-night hotel temp work. By now he could expertly mimic the way the Intercontinental waiters fixed their faces when they got near a guest. There had to be both an upward tilt, saying I am alert and obliging, and a chin-down servile thing: I am invisible to you, sir, if you’d prefer that. His own face was open, with amusement-seeking eyes. Annawadi girls came around to it quickly. But he thought that a better-managed face might have spared him the humiliation he had suffered at a recent hotel party.
The trouble had begun with a deejay who, after midnight, seemed to be reading his telepathic requests. A Christina Aguilera belter—I am beautiful, no matter what they say—segued into “Rise Up,” a dance song that was Rahul’s current favorite.
Rise up! Don’t be falling down again
Rise up! Long time I broke the chains.
The lyrics, in English, were meaningless to him, the bass line irresistible. Every time he heard it, he vibrated inside. When the first echoing chords came through the hotel speakers, he might have smiled, or tapped a foot. Suddenly two young hotel guests were tugging his arm, asking him to demonstrate some “Mumbai moves.”
Sozzled white people were known to be generous tippers. He began, discreetly he thought, to demonstrate a few steps—no shoulders and hands, just head and feet.
“Have you gone mad, asshole?”
A hotel superior grabbed him. Other managers came running from across the room. It was if he’d stabbed a Bollywood star with a fork. The permanent waiters sniggered as he was dragged on his heels into the trash room. Only later, recovering at home, did he find the