Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [48]
In the new account, Fatima admitted to burning herself, then carefully apportioned the blame for this self-immolation. She accurately reported Kehkashan’s curse at sundown about twisting off her other leg. She accurately reported Karam’s threat about beating her, and his demand that her husband pay for half the wall that divided their huts. She didn’t mention Zehrunisa, who had the best possible alibi, having been in the police station when Fatima burned. Instead, Fatima put the weight of her accusation on Abdul.
Abdul Husain had threatened and throttled her, she said in her statement. Abdul Husain had beaten her up.
How could you bring down a family you envied if you failed to name the boy in that family who did most of the work?
“As my left leg is handicapped, I could not retaliate at them. In anger, I put the kerosene lying in my house on myself, and set myself on fire,” her statement concluded.
Special Executive Officer Poornima Paikrao added to her account, “Record made under clear light of tubelight,” and departed the hospital room to begin her real work. With this improved witness statement, and several other witness statements she hoped to influence at Annawadi, she thought she could make a handsome profit from the Husains.
By Fatima’s third day at the public hospital, the blackened skin on her face had puckered, turning her almond-shaped eyes into rounds. She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t known, lighting the match, what would happen. “The more I talk, the more I hurt,” she said to her husband, who stood at her bedside. Despite the pain, she felt compelled to yell at him from time to time, though her voice was lower-pitched than it had been.
Her husband had always been shovel-faced, but now his face seemed to lengthen by the day. And while he had a garbage sorter’s superior coordination, his stricken state turned him into a bumbler. Grinding Fatima’s pills into powder, he seemed overwhelmed by the complexity of the physical task. He broke the bread he’d brought to feed her down to crumbs.
She wasn’t very hungry, which was fortunate. Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. “Out of stock today” was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in. A small tub of silver sulfadiazine, the burn cream recommended by the doctor, cost 211 rupees and was finished in two days; Fatima’s husband had to borrow money to replace it. As he applied the cream, he feared hurting his wife, especially when touching the part of her belly stripped of pigment. He had thought the nurses might help, but they avoided physical contact with the patients.
The tall young doctor didn’t mind touching patients. He came one night and stretched out one of Fatima’s arms, and then the other, and when he did so, her bandages, which had turned yellow and black, came loose.
“Something’s wrong,” she told him. “I’m so cold.”
“Drink three bottles of water a day,” he said, and put the filthy bandages back in place. Fatima’s husband had no money to buy bottled water after buying the burn cream. The doctor called the old man irresponsible behind his back, for failing to give his wife what she needed.
As the husband returned to work to afford medical supplies, Fatima’s mother took over the hospital care. “The neighbor family set me on fire,” Fatima told her mother, and then she told a different story of what had happened, and the mother became confused. Fatima was confused herself by now, and didn’t want to explain it all over again. Her job was to heal. The police could take care of the fine points of her accusation, now that they had Abdul and Karam Husain in the station.