Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [42]
“You’re all hammering too loud! I can’t hear my radio!” Fatima yelled through the wall after a while. The younger Husain boys looked at one another, amused. Each of the last three times they’d made small repairs to their house, she’d thrown one of her famous fits.
“We’re breaking the floor, putting in a kitchen,” Zehrunisa called back. “I wish the tiles and shelf would magically jump into place, but they won’t, so there will be some noise today.”
Abdul ignored the exchange, intent on his own problem. His mother’s cooking shelf was driving him mad. The four-foot gray slab was uneven, as was the floor, so the shelf wobbled perilously on two supports he’d built to hold it up. Nothing in this idiot house was straight. The only way to stabilize the shelf, and make it level, would be to cut into the brick wall, itself uneven, and cement the slab in place.
Asha’s husband being too hungover to work today, another neighbor had offered to help, for money up front. This man seemed wobbly, too, but Abdul put it out of his head as the two of them began chipping away at the brick. Zehrunisa said, “We’ll really hear from the One Leg now.” Thirty seconds later, Fatima began to shout.
“What’s happening to my wall?”
“Don’t take tension, Fatima,” Zehrunisa called back. “We’re doing the shelf now. Just give us this day—we also want it done fast, before the rains come.”
Abdul kept working. He was a categorizer of people as well as garbage, and as distinctive as Fatima looked, he considered her a common type. At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope—that the good fortune of others might one day be hers. His mother claimed that back when every life at Annawadi was roughly equal in its misery, neighborly resentments didn’t get out of hand, though Zehrunisa was known to be sentimental about history.
“You bastards! You’re going to break down my wall!”
Fatima, again.
“Your wall?” said Zehrunisa, irritated. “We built this wall and never took a paisa from you. Shouldn’t we be allowed to put a nail in it from time to time? Be patient. If anything happens, we’ll repair it once the shelf is in.”
Fatima went quiet, until bricks began crumbling on her side. “There is rubble in my rice!” she shouted. “My dinner is ruined! Sand is spraying everywhere!”
Abdul was dismayed. The readiness of the bricks to disintegrate, long suspected, was now confirmed. They’d been made with too much sand, and the mortar between them had deteriorated. Crap bricks that weren’t even glued to one another—less a wall than a tremulous stack. As he considered how to install the kitchen ledge without toppling the whole house, Zehrunisa went outside. So did Fatima, and the two women started shoving each other. Neighbors came out to watch, the children debating which of the two women was more like the Great Khali, an Indian fighter in the World Wrestling Entertainment franchise.
“If you don’t stop breaking my house, motherfucker, I will put you in a trap,” shouted Fatima.
“It’s my wall to break, prostitute,” Zehrunisa shouted back. “If we’d waited for you to build a wall, we’d all still be seeing each other naked!”
Abdul ran outside and pushed the two women apart. Taking his mother by the neck, he dragged her back home.
“Don’t you have children?” he said, disgusted. “You’re no better than the One Leg, fighting outside in front of everyone!” Such scenes violated his first principle of Annawadi: Don’t call attention to yourself.
“But she used bad language first,” his mother protested.
“This woman talks badly to her own man,” Abdul said. “Would she hesitate to throw