Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [33]
Her eyes then moved from the mud tracks on the floor to his face, which was covered in blood.
“Oh,” the boy said, holding his head. “A taxi …”
Annawadi kids were always getting hit on the chaotic roads—usually, while crossing a treacherous intersection to get to Marol Municipal School. New drivers talking on new cellphones could be a lethal combination. Manju leaped up, grabbed the turmeric by the stove, and poured the yellow powder over Devo’s head. Turmeric, as good for wounds as for brides before weddings. She rubbed the spice until it blended with the blood into a bright orange paste, then pressed down hard. She was checking to see if she’d stanched the bleeding when Devo’s one-eyed, widowed mother came through the door, brandishing a foot-long piece of metal.
“No car will kill you! No god will save you! You went in the road, roaming loose like that, and now you will die at my hands!”
Devo darted under a wooden cupboard where Manju’s family stored their possessions, and emitted a stricken, anticipatory howl. Pulling him out, his mother began to beat him with the strip of metal.
“No!” Manju said. “Not the head! Not where he’s hurt!”
“I’ll break your teeth! I will turn your flesh red,” Devo’s mother shouted. The fastest way to financial ruin in Annawadi was injury or illness, and the woman was already in debt to the loan shark who had financed the final hospital stay of her late husband. “If the driver had hurt you worse, how would I have paid the doctor? Tell me, Devo. Do I have one rupee to spend to save your life?”
“Stop,” Manju cried, trying and failing to catch the woman’s hand. Rahul, awake now, rolled his eyes; he considered the hut school a magnet for family histrionics. In calmer moments, Manju could argue that parents were terrified of losing control of their children in a city where dangers seemed to be multiplying—a city they didn’t fully understand. And as much as Manju hated violence of any stripe, the odd thrashing, like the odd axe blow, could be effective in keeping a child close to home.
Devo’s mother had now moved past the point of constructive teaching, however. Manju lunged between mother and son, managing to capture Devo’s mother in a hug.
“Promise,” Manju said to Devo, panting. “You will not go in the road again.”
“Will not,” he got out between heaving sobs. “Now I won’t make such a mistake.”
Fixing her one eye on Manju before departing, his mother said, “Tomorrow if he does not sit with you and study, I will break his legs and pour kerosene on his face.”
Manju was stanching the boy’s wound for a second time when a little girl said accusingly, “Teacher. You’re late for school.”
Manju untied her dupatta, which was streaked with blood and spice. “Come, let’s get the others.” Left unattended in the house, her students could be as extravagant as her brothers with the Fair and Lovely.
Manju always looked angry when emerging from her hut. Everyone who left her house got tight in the lip unless they wanted a mouthful of flies, the only creatures in the slum enthusiastic about the stale goods in her mother’s new store. “Class, come,” she called out as she crossed the maidan, stepping lightly around the piles of trash being sorted by Abdul. She knew who he was because Rahul hung out with his brother, Mirchi, but of course she didn’t speak to him. The garbage boy didn’t speak to anyone, as far as she could tell.
“Children, quickly now,” she called, clapping her hands as she turned into one of the slumlanes. “Phut-a-phut! It’s late!” Her official position was that having to round up her students was a bother. Shouldn’t they show up voluntarily?
In fact she liked being outside, peering into doors and collecting snatches of neighborhood gossip, in these minutes when the mantle of teacher protected her from rumor. Today’s raging controversy involved clipboards that advertised Honda motorcycles,