Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [50]
He feared the police weren’t going to Annawadi to ask, though. This inspired his resigned answer: “She has set herself on fire in a fit of rage. She has taken a small quarrel with my mother and stretched the thing like rubber. But what is the use? Now that she has done that, said that, you will listen to her because she is burned. You aren’t going to listen to me.”
The officers asked his father more interesting questions, like, “Why did you give birth to so many children, Mussulman? You are not going to be able to feed and educate them now. You’ll be in jail for so many years that your wife won’t remember your face.”
“I’d rather be beaten than see them beat you,” Abdul said to his father, who said the same back to him when they were handcuffed together on the floor one sleepless night. The salutary effect of the oxygen Karam had received two weeks earlier at the private hospital had been negated.
As they lay on the tiles, Karam attempted to convince his son that the police didn’t really believe they’d tried to murder Fatima. By now, he whispered, the officers would have at least some sense of what had actually happened, given the hundreds of witnesses. But the specifics of what had or had not been done to a disabled woman were not the officers’ animating concern. The concern, he told his son, was the money that might be made off of the tragedy. “So you’ve made big bucks there at Annawadi,” one officer kept saying to Karam.
The idea was to get terrified prisoners to pay everything they had, and everything they could secure from a moneylender, to stop a false criminal charge from being recorded. Beatings, though outlawed in the human rights code, were practical, as they increased the price that detainees would pay for their release.
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
Abdul wasn’t sure how much money his family had left after fixing the house and paying his father’s hospital bill. But he thought that whatever remained should be paid, in order to be innocent. He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.
“But what if Fatima dies tomorrow,” Karam said. Abdul knew his father was talking to himself, not asking for advice. If they paid now, and Fatima died, their savings would be gone, and the police might still register a criminal case against them. Then how would they afford a lawyer? His father’s voice changed every time he said this bankrupting word, lawyer. Another man being held unofficially had been on trial before, and warned that if they used one of the city’s public defenders, they’d get sent away forever.
As the days in detention went on, Abdul and his father stopped talking, which Abdul felt was just as well. What did he have to say, anyway? That if his parents had been as paranoid and alert as he was, they would have kept their mouths shut with the crazy One Leg? It was better to pretend that he and his father were too tired for talk, having answered all the questions of the lead investigator, Subinspector Shankar Yeram, whose lips Abdul had by now decided looked more like a monkey’s than a fish’s.
Every day, sometimes twice a day, a haggard Zehrunisa appeared at the cell window to explain the compounding price of their freedom. Asha was saying it would cost fifty thousand rupees to make the police case go away. Not that she’d pocket the money herself, of course. She would pay the police and placate Fatima’s husband with a more modest sum.
Zehrunisa had felt grateful to Asha in the first days after the burning. Despite her political antipathy toward Muslims and migrants, Asha had worked hard on behalf of the Husains, and for free. In addition to asking