Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [31]
As cartoon Tom blew a house to smithereens, Rahul turned back to the mirror, and Manju began her reading for her major, English literature. Today’s assignment was eighteenth-century Restoration drama and Congreve’s The Way of the World.
Manju hadn’t read The Way of the World, nor did her professors expect her to. Except in the best colleges, dominated by high-caste, affluent students, Indian liberal arts education was taught by rote. At her mediocre all-girls college, founded by the Lions Club, she was simply required to memorize a summary the teacher provided for each literary work on the syllabus, then restate it on the test and, later, on state board exams. Manju had a gift for memorization—she called it “my by-hearting.” But she found the characters in The Way of the World hard to keep straight.
“Millament, Mirabell, Petulant—have you ever heard such names? And there are so many more,” she told Rahul after a while. “Everyone is telling lies and tricking people to get money, but where my teacher wrote what the story means, I don’t understand.”
“Love is subordinated” was the trouble spot. Although she had never held the hand of a boy her own age, love was an English word about which she felt confident. Subordinated, though, evoked only irritation at her mother, who hadn’t kept her promise to buy Manju an English-Marathi dictionary. Neither Rahul nor her mother knew English, and both took umbrage that the language of India’s former colonizers was considered requisite for decent jobs in offices and hotels, when Marathi was just as venerable a language.
To Manju, the new importance of English was a by-product of something she generally welcomed: a more globalized, meritocratic India. It didn’t much matter whether a person learned the language by studying Congreve or by practicing Chase Manhattan Visa Card dialogue at Personaliteez Spoken English or one of the training courses for international call-center work. Competence in English—a credential bespeaking worldliness and superior education—was a potential springboard out of the slums. Her own English was still slow and wooden, though good enough to be the second-best in Annawadi.
The best English was spoken by Prakash, the economics student who lived near the temple. In the intricate social hierarchy of Annawadi’s young people—something now based less on caste than on future economic prospects—Prakash was the guy at the top. He had once been middle class, studying in a good private school, before his father got hit by a train. In his spare time, he sold mutual funds for ICICI Bank, making cold calls for a paltry commission.
Manju figured that Prakash would know the meaning of the word subordinated, but she had never spoken to him. A young woman in the slum had to weigh the value of each potential interaction with a male against the rumors it would inspire. Already people were gossiping about a cricket player who had secured her photo and laminated it in the shape of a heart. So as she went outside to scrub the laundry, she didn’t even glance at the fellow college student who was reading outside his hut, a few yards away.
“Mirabell—beau. Millament—gallant. Mr. Fainall—cuckold.” She murmured bits of plot summary as she applied the stone to her mother’s large panties, her father’s small shirt.
“No, Mirabell is the gallant.” She took the wrung-out clothes inside and hung them on a string against the wall. Part of the wall stopped two feet from the roof, and her father had been promising to close the gap for ages, but that was as likely as her mother arriving home with an English-Marathi dictionary.
As she cleaned the two-burner stove, she repeated, “Themes are love affairs, social position, and money.” Roaches, a hundred of them, scattered. Stepping over Rahul, now asleep on the floor, she took some food scraps outside and dumped them in the sewage lake, which the hot season had magicked into