Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [38]
“It’s easy to break a single bamboo stick, but when you bundle the sticks, you can’t even bend them,” she told her children. “It’s the same with family and with the people of our faith. Despite the petty differences, Muslims have to join up in big sufferings, and for Eid.”
Black clouds hunched over the hills west of the city, but didn’t break. Annawadi children kept flinging their inner tubes toward the flagpole, and one July morning, Abdul’s father watched the game from his doorway, beaming. His shirt hung as loosely as ever off his shoulders, but Fatima and the other neighbors marveled when they saw his face. Garbage proceeds had financed a two-week stay in a small private hospital, where he’d breathed oxygen instead of foul slum air. Karam was shining. He looked naya tak-a-tak, brand new.
“I can’t believe it,” the Tamil woman who ran the liquor still told Zehrunisa. “Ten years gone from his face, like that. He looks like some Bollywood hero—Salman Khan.”
“He ought to look good,” said Zehrunisa. “We paid twenty thousand rupees to that hospital. But it’s true, he got so young—like a boy! I see him from the corner of my eye and I think, oh shit, I forgot that I had another child. Now I will have to arrange another marriage! Allah knows I have enough marriages to do already.”
The next marriage would be Abdul’s. Though the financials remained to be worked out, she and her husband had settled on a likely girl, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a scrap dealer in Saki Naka, the industrial slum where Abdul sold his goods. The girl was pretty, no moles evident. Crucially, she was habituated to filthy men. She had come to the house three times, demure in a burqa, her younger sister in tow. From what Mirchi could make out, this younger sister was extremely hot, and in her honor, he painted a large red heart on the front of the family hut.
Mirchi claimed to be eager for marriage. One day, well out of his father’s earshot, he said, “Mother, I want a wife just like you—she’ll do all the work, and I’ll do nothing.” But Abdul was as cautious about marrying as he was about everything else.
“I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don’t feel it, and I myself don’t know why,” he fretted. “These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away—they cut their arms with a blade, they put a cigarette butt out in their hand, they won’t sleep, they won’t eat, they’ll sing—they must have different hearts than mine.”
He told his parents, “You don’t hold a hot iron in your palm, do you? You let it cool. You think on it slowly.”
“No, I think we should marry him quickly,” Zehrunisa told her husband as she cooked lunch a few days after his homecoming. He’d asked for meat to build his strength, and she was crouched on the floor breast-feeding Lallu while stirring a cartilaginous stew. “A marriage would make him happy, I think. So much turmoil inside him—I don’t think he’s been happy for a single day in Annawadi.”
“Who is happy, living here?” her husband replied, fishing a silver-foil packet of prednisolone from a plastic bag of medicines he’d tacked on the wall. “Am I happy? All around us, third-class people and no one with whom I can relate. Does anyone here even know of the American war in Iraq? All they know of is each other’s business. But I don’t complain to you. Why is Abdul complaining?”
“Do you know your own son? He says nothing—just does his work, does what we ask him. But why is it only his mother who sees that he is sad?”
“He will be happier when we go to Vasai,” he replied.
“Happier in Vasai,” she quietly repeated, with a sarcasm he chose to ignore.
The small plot of land on which they’d made a deposit in January was an hour and a half farther outside the city, in a community of construction suppliers and