Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [51]
At the cell window, Zehrunisa told her husband, “The point is, for a few days Asha helped for free, but now she says I’m sitting on money and I have to open the purse strings. I would, to get you both out of here, but I’m not sure that paying her will do it.”
Zehrunisa had already paid Officer Thokale, the man who’d asked her to settle her “account” with him while she was in the station after her own fight with Fatima. After the burning, he’d told her he could help ensure that the investigation was “fair” and that her husband and son wouldn’t be badly hurt during interrogations. “I told him I’d pay anything for that, and I think he feels terrible for us, really,” she told her husband. “He knows it is a frame-up. He could have taken so much more money than he did.”
The special executive officer who took Fatima’s statement in the hospital also wanted money. She’d visited Zehrunisa to report that that statement, and the statements of other Annawadi witnesses, were under her control. She was as gentle with Zehrunisa as she’d been with Fatima, saying, palms open, “What do you want me to do? Good statements or bad statements? I am working for the government, so what I say will decide the matter. It is in your hands, and you will have to decide very soon.”
Zehrunisa told her husband, “She’s like Asha. She says that whatever we pay won’t be for herself—that she would give the money to Fatima’s husband. But I’ve already told him directly that I’ll help his girls and get Fatima into a private hospital—pay for everything, bed, medicine, food. I’m scared to pay this witness-statement woman. What if she steals the money from the husband, and Fatima stays there at Cooper?”
“What does the husband say when you ask about the private hospital?”
“Not a word. He’s upset and can’t take a decision. It’s crazy. Does he want her to die, so he can get a new wife? Cooper is going to kill her, and then everything we have—”
There was a rhyme that Zehrunisa had heard Mirchi sing: “People who go to Cooper, they go upar.” They go above, to heaven. If Fatima went upar, Zehrunisa’s husband, son, and daughter would face a decade or more in prison.
Karam agreed that his wife should ignore the special executive officer and keep pressing Fatima’s husband about a private hospital.
“I will,” she said, starting to cry. “But now you see what will happen. This government woman will be angry and get the investigators to take the statements of the people who want us to be fucked. If it were our own village, with our own people, we might hope the witnesses would care for us and tell the truth. But we are so alone in this city.”
A light rain began to fall, and hearing it on the station roof one night, Abdul remembered an action movie he and Kalu had seen. Zinda. Alive. The hero had been imprisoned for years, not knowing why and going mad in his not-knowing.
Kalu had liked the part at the end when the guy escaped, discovered why he’d been imprisoned, and hammered to death all responsible parties, despite the knife sticking out of his back. In the part Abdul remembered now, the man was still trapped in his cell, but after years of chipping away at a brick wall that was apparently sturdier than the one between the Husains and Fatima, he had managed to make a small hole. The prisoner stuck his hand through, cherishing the rain on his skin.
At home, Abdul had never given his future much thought, beyond vague fantasies about living in Vasai and more concrete, health-related worries. Were his lungs going bad like his father’s? Did his right shoulder hunch forward? That tended to happen after a decade of squatting over scrap.
Having accepted a life of sorting early