Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [43]
Fatima was still swearing when she crossed the maidan and departed Annawadi. Abdul heard female neighbors laughing at her as she went, but the things that females laughed at did not interest him. He registered only that Fatima’s absence gave him a chance to finish installing the ledge in peace. Except that the neighbor he’d hired to help him had now collapsed, taking the slab down with him.
“You are drunk!” Abdul accused his neighbor, who was pinned to the floor by the stone. The man could not deny it. He had advanced TB and explained, “Lately, if I don’t drink, I don’t have the strength to lift anything.”
Abdul felt like crying when he saw the wall’s fresh degradation. Fortunately, the stone hadn’t broken when it fell, and the neighbor seemed sobered by the accident. He assured Abdul that they could finish the job in an hour. Abdul calmed himself by imagining that if his mother had a nicer house, she might start practicing a nicer way of speaking.
But now a neighbor arrived to report an extraordinary sight. Fatima, a woman with few rupees to spare, had been seen riding off in an autorickshaw.
Another report, fifteen minutes later: Fatima was in the Sahar Police Station, accusing Zehrunisa of violent assault.
“Allah,” said Zehrunisa. “When did she become such a liar?”
“Go quickly,” Kehkashan told her mother. “If you don’t get to the station fast, they will have only her story to judge by.”
Karam returned home as his wife was departing. Tiles were more expensive than he’d realized, and he’d been two hundred rupees short. She told him, “Stop delaying. Get the money, buy the tiles. If the police come and see all that we have outside, they’ll clean us out.” The younger boys were already picking up the family possessions and tossing them into the storeroom.
“Don’t worry about me,” Zehrunisa told Abdul. “Just don’t stop working, get it done.”
When Zehrunisa reached the station, winded from the half-mile run, Fatima was sitting at a desk telling her story to a tall female officer named Kulkarni.
“This is the one who beat me, and you see I am a cripple, with only one leg,” Fatima said.
“I did not beat her!” Zehrunisa protested. “So many people were outside watching, and not one would say I did. She came and started a fight.”
“They broke my wall! Got sand in my rice!”
“She said she wanted to put us in a trap! When all we do is work and mind our own business—”
Fatima was crying, so Zehrunisa turned on her own waterworks.
The officer put up her palms. “Are you women mad, bothering us like this? You think the police have nothing better to do than listen to you fighting about some small thing? We are protecting the airport. You go home and cook your dinner and mind your children,” she told Fatima. To Zehrunisa, she said, “You sit over there.”
Zehrunisa took a seat on a row of bucket chairs and doubled over. Now her tears were real. Fatima had put her in a trap, as threatened. She would soon be back at Annawadi telling everyone that the police were holding Zehrunisa like a common criminal.
When she recovered from her bout of sobbing, Asha was in the seat beside her.
Asha had been helping some police officers find a government-subsidized apartment in which to conduct a side business—brokering work for which she hoped to earn real money. The potential profit to be made by patching up a dispute between two Muslims would be small. However, if she didn’t handle the petty conflicts at Annawadi, people would start turning to a woman from the Congress Party whom everyone called “white sari,” and Corporator Subhash Sawant would hear about it.
Asha met Zehrunisa’s eye. For a thousand rupees, Asha said, she’d convince Fatima to make no further trouble. The money wouldn’t be for Asha herself. She would put it—some of it—in Fatima’s hand.
Asha wasn’t always this explicit about money, but she felt she had to be with Zehrunisa. Mirchi had once been picked up by the police for buying stolen goods, and Zehrunisa had