Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [34]
One by one her students, mostly girls under age twelve, emerged from their huts. Several of their sun-bleached dresses had broken zippers, exposing bony backs. Manju didn’t worry about little Sharda. The girl was born spiny, like her mother, who’d broken rocks on the road before her lungs went. Lakshmi was the painful case. Her stepmother reserved the food of the house for her own children. The brothelkeeper’s eleven-year-old daughter, kitted in tight black bicycle shorts and dangling earrings, had her brother in tow. Both children liked to be out of their hut when visitors came to have sex, especially when the sex was with their mother. For many of these children, Manju’s little school was no bridge. It was all the education they would get.
The troupe then marched to the hut of Manju’s secret pupil, her friend Meena. Meena’s parents kept the old ways about girls and education: Too much learning reduced a girl’s compliancy. Manju had been teaching Meena English on the sly.
Meena, fifteen, had been the first girl born in Annawadi, arriving two years after her parents helped turn the swamp into a slum. She was a Dalit; Manju belonged to the Kunbi farming caste, a backward caste but higher. Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets.
Now, seeing Manju in her doorway, Meena flashed a smile that was not her wide, thrilling film-star smile—the one that other girls tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Today’s smile was the go-away version, which indicated that she was on lockdown, allowed out only to fetch water or use the toilet. Her crime, as usual, was a failure to hold her tongue with her brothers and parents. Why couldn’t she listen to the boys in the maidan when they were talking about the hotels? Why couldn’t she go to school? During the day, she did her household duty, but at night fury sometimes overcame her, and her mother and brothers would feel compelled to beat it out of her. Such behavior could sabotage the marriage being arranged for her in their Tamil Nadu village.
Manju routinely advised Meena to keep her discontents to herself, as Manju did. Still, the Tamil girl’s defiance spoke to something inside Manju. This morning as Manju was getting ready for college, the small silvery bindi she was putting on her forehead slipped and caught in the small of her neck. It glinted prettily there. Asha had already left for work. Manju let it stay. A girl could be virtuous without being perfect.
Back in the hut, her students arranged themselves on the bloody floor.
“Good afternoon, students,” she said in English.
“Good afternoon, teacher,” the children called back at deafening volume.
She paused, uncertain of what to do next. She didn’t grasp enough of The Way of the World to practice its plot with her students. That would have to be internalized later, while she cooked dinner, and before her mother started fighting with her father about being drunk. The day’s official class assignment was the English names of fruits—apples, bananas, mangoes, papayas. She’d work to it gradually, after a review of a previous lesson on cars, trains, and planes. But first, since the children were poking each other, there would be ten energy-depleting minutes of “Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes.”
Her students’ singing rang out across the maidan, as it always did at this hour. Sunil, the young scavenger, liked to eavesdrop when he brought his goods to sell to Abdul. He’d sat in on Manju’s class for a few days in January, mastering the English twinkle-star song, before deciding that his time was better spent working