Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [39]
The first time Karam visited the place, he’d been struck by a group of men clutching newspapers and speaking animatedly at a tea stall. He imagined they were discussing the black man in the United States who was trying to become the country’s president. Karam had heard that this Obama was secretly a Muslim, and was rooting for him.
The dirt roads twisting upward from the tea stall had been giddy with chickens, which reminded him of his native village. He wasn’t sentimental about that village, in a district where there was little work except in sugarcane fields and children died at one of the highest rates in India. But he felt that urban slums surrounded by affluence turned children contemptuous of their parents—“because we can’t give the brand-name clothes, the car.” He considered it fortunate that Mirchi was merely lazy, not a defiant consumer of Eraz-ex, but there were six other children after Mirchi. To Karam, Vasai was the ideal village-city hybrid: a place where opportunity and parental respect weren’t mutually exclusive.
“And at least there they would not be insulted for their religion,” he told his wife.
Zehrunisa felt it premature to invest their dreams for their children in a part-owned bit of dirt that lacked even four bamboo poles and a tarp under which to sleep. “Our ghost house,” she’d taken to calling the property. She’d given him permission to make the deposit. He always consulted her on financial decisions, since the results had been dire the two times he ignored her advice. But it irritated her that he hadn’t yet taken her to see the land.
“How can I take you, with all these children to care for?” he’d been saying all year. But Kehkashan was now here to help, and she still hadn’t seen the place. She wondered if the community was so like his native village that it had gotten him to thinking like the conservative Muslim men who lived there.
Before her husband’s hospitalization, the developer had visited to discuss the property payments. She’d worn her burqa, served tea, then crouched in a corner, as her mother had done in Pakistan. Covered and unseen by men outside her family was the way Zehrunisa had expected to live out her adult life. But shortly after marriage brought her to Uttar Pradesh, she was working the sugarcane fields—at night, among men. She had prayed constantly for her husband’s TB to relent so that she could go back into purdah. “I couldn’t even speak in those days,” she told her children. “I was scared of the whole world.” Having a man to deal with that world on her behalf had seemed to her a fine thing.
She had stopped praying for a return to purdah after Kehkashan was born. She believed in focusing her requests to Allah, troubling Him with only one matter at a time. So she prayed for the health of Kehkashan and then for the health of Abdul, who entered the world in a pile of dirt by the Intercontinental hotel. Her husband had brought the family to Mumbai in hopes of finding work less strenuous than farming. Renting a pushcart to transport waste to recyclers was the work he could find.
Abdul had been a sulky infant—refused his mother’s breast as often as he took it. But he had survived, unlike the next boy. Then Mirchi came, fat and pretty, followed by six more, also healthy. Nothing in Zehrunisa’s life had brought her more satisfaction than the fact that her children took after her, not her husband, in their haleness. Not an undersized one in the lot, after Abdul.
Soon, one of the younger boys would prove clever enough to take over her role in Abdul’s business—negotiating with scavengers, thieves, and police. Then she would gladly stay in the house. But to go back to purdah? It had belatedly dawned on her that this might be expected in Vasai. It would exacerbate her husband’s condescension,