Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [37]
Zehrunisa blamed Fatima for drawing such dogs in heat to the family doorstep. She’d managed to beat away one of Fatima’s lovers, who kept drifting over to leer at her daughter, but he was frail from a heroin habit. Other men might fight back. Fatima would sit on her neck, too. With Kehkashan crushed, Mirchi a failure, toddlers to chase after, her husband in the hospital, and a fever she couldn’t get rid of, Zehrunisa lacked the energy for a fight with the One Leg.
Zehrunisa tried not to judge the private morality that Fatima had developed; she knew the woman craved affection and respect. But especially when Zehrunisa considered Fatima’s children, her own respect drained away. Recently, Fatima had gone at her eight-year-old, Noori, so hard with the crutches that Zehrunisa and another woman had had to tackle her. And then there was Fatima’s two-year-old, Medina. After the little girl got TB, Fatima had become obsessed about catching the disease herself. Then Medina had drowned in a pail.
“I was in the toilet when it happened,” Fatima had claimed to Zehrunisa. But shared walls leak secrets, one of which was that when Medina drowned in a very small hut, Fatima and her mother were there. Fatima’s six-year-old daughter, Heena, had also been on hand, and said afterward, “Medina was a very nice sister until that day.”
Zehrunisa had paid for the funeral shroud and the burial plot, and tried to convince herself that Medina’s death had in fact been an accident. She thought about her own children, and how she didn’t know what they were up to half the time.
The police came to Annawadi one day to ask about Medina’s death, an inquiry quickly closed. Young girls in the slums died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth. Sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.
One-year-old Danush, who lived two lanes over from the Husains, had gotten an infection in the filthy public hospital where he was born. His skin peeled off, and the touch of a sheet made him scream. His family took loan after loan at usurious interest, spending fifteen thousand rupees trying to cure him. Then one night in March, his father had beaten back his wife and emptied a pot of boiling lentils on the baby in his sari-sling cradle. Asha’s son Rahul had jumped smack into the middle of that horror show—had run to get the police. Zehrunisa admired the hell out of Rahul for that. Danush reached a hospital and survived. Now Zehrunisa ached every time she saw him: that grave, unblinking eye in a burn-mapped face.
After Medina drowned, Fatima seemed oddly liberated. Other women said the worst of her, and she found that she didn’t much care. She drew on dramatic black eyebrows, shellacked her cheeks with powder—“spent fifty rupees to turn into a white lady,” the Husain boys whispered—and picked up a fresh set of lovers. “Did you see how that guy and his friend are looking at me?” she would say to Zehrunisa. “Are you jealous? No man looks at you.” The men she invited inside found her beautiful, she told her neighbor. Said there was no woman like her in all of India. Said she deserved a nicer life than she had.
The Husains felt for Fatima’s husband, who sorted garbage in another slum, earning a hundred rupees for a fourteen-hour day. Mirchi put it bluntly: “She treats that old man like a shoe.” The shoe often came over to complain about his wayward wife, and one night Zehrunisa had teased him. “Idiot, you should have asked me before you married. I could have picked you a nice Muslim woman with two legs who would raise your children and run your household properly.”
Mistake. Thin walls. Fatima was in her face, crutches waving. “Who are you to call me a bad wife!”
Still, when Fatima and her husband fought, she would call out Zehrunisa