Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [36]
This year, the clouds broke early, and for a week the rain came down like nails. Outside Annawadi, construction projects stopped, and daily-wage workers braced for hunger. Hut walls grew green and black with mold, the contents of the public toilet spewed out onto the maidan, and fungi protruded from feet like tiny sculptures—a special torment to those whose native customs involved toe rings.
“I’m going to die of these feet,” said a woman whose fungus fanned out like butterfly wings as she lined up in the rain for water. “The way my children eat, the rice I’ve stored won’t last two weeks,” said the woman behind her, as the seasonal complaints gathered momentum. “I don’t want to be stuck inside with my husband for all these months.” “At least you’re not married to Mr. Kamble—heart valve day and night.” But just as the women settled into the rhythm of monsoon grievance, the rains ceased, replaced by a syrupy yellow sun. Then the women wished the rains would start again; it seemed unnatural for them to quit for so many days.
The children saw the break in the rains differently. While the school year would soon resume, a clear sky permitted a final orgy of play. Abdul’s brother Mirchi started a giant game of ring toss in the maidan, using the flagpole and busted bicycle tubes from Abdul’s storeroom.
“It’s a fluke,” Mirchi said to Rahul, whose inner tube had juddered down the flagpole.
“What fluke?” protested Rahul, as other boys cheered and thumped his back. “Watch me—I can do it again!”
Zehrunisa came out to watch the game, wiping away tears as she considered her exuberant son. Mirchi seemed to have forgotten the pall he’d brought over the household by failing ninth grade. She considered him her brightest child, had even imagined him becoming a doctor. Now his unexpected failure brought the tally of Husain household crises to three. Her husband was in the hospital, struggling to breathe, and her eldest daughter, Kehkashan, had run away from her husband of a year.
Mirchi’s cheerfulness had much to do with the return of his sister. All of the Husain children had been elated to see her. It wasn’t just that she could cook and clean in place of their mother, who spent most of her days at the hospital. To her younger brothers and sisters, Kehkashan had been a second mother—a more organized, less exhausted version of the original. But she’d returned home with heartbreak in her eyes.
Kehkashan’s husband was also her cousin; Zehrunisa and one of her sisters had arranged the marriage when their children were two. But Kehkashan felt that the intimate photos in her husband’s cellphone—of a woman not more beautiful than she—resolved a question that had troubled her since the wedding. Why didn’t her new husband want to make love? “He told me once, ‘It’s because you go off to sleep too early,’ so I would stay up late,” she told her mother. “Then he stopped coming home at night. He says, ‘Don’t correct me, you don’t have any rights over me.’ What kind of life is this?” The women in her husband’s family kept strict purdah—stayed inside the house unless accompanied by a man. “So I sit at home, entirely dependent on this man,” she said, “and then it turns out his heart was never with me.”
Zehrunisa hoped that her sister would be able to bring the husband back in line. But to her daughter’s urgent question—“How is it possible to force someone to love me?”—she had no answer, because the faults of her own husband did not include a lack of love.
The Hindu cricketers took note of Kehkashan’s return, deciding that the Muslim girl’s resplendent looks trumped the taint of her goat-eating and dwelling amid garbage, especially now that she