Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [52]
He didn’t know if his mother was right about an earlier, peaceful age in which poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly. He just knew that she didn’t really long for companionable misery. She’d known abjectness, loathed its recollection, and raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she’d made him understand that he had to rise. They’d lost a lot in the 2005 floods, but many other Annawadians had, too. He felt his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.
Which day was this? How long had he been here? He was being beaten and phones were ringing in a room next door, which Abdul had concluded was some kind of control room, because of the radio squawks. The officers all spoke in Marathi, which he made the effort to follow. Trying to figure out what the officers were saying gave him something to do besides worrying the obvious problem of being innocent and beaten in a jail cell.
The officers had been going after his hands, the body part on which his livelihood depended. Small hands, with the prominent veins, orange rust stains, and healed cuts that were standard in his profession, they had been seriously injured only once—a bicycle spoke that went deep.
His mind broke a little. The phone conversations in the other room faded out. Only later, when the voices reestablished themselves, did he realize that one officer was speaking about him.
“The ones who attacked the cripple … Not the father, the boy … But no one’s beating anyone, Asha.… No, nothing like that.”
Annawadi’s Asha was on the phone. Abdul was terrified then. She was probably calling to make the beatings worse, so that his mother would change her mind about paying her off.
Suddenly, Officer Thokale was standing in the unofficial cell. “Asha says this boy didn’t set anyone on fire, doesn’t cause any trouble in Annawadi, so there’s no point in hitting him,” he told his colleagues with the straps. Abdul was let up, and neither he nor his father was beaten again. Abdul’s shackles came off, too.
Abdul tried to make sense of this reprieve. Asha’s son Rahul was Mirchi’s best friend. Maybe Rahul had convinced his mother to protect Abdul. Or maybe Asha had noticed Abdul over the years, sorting his trash on the maidan—seen he was a hardworking kid, a quiet loser who didn’t deserve to be brutalized.
Abdul’s father had a better guess. The call was probably a show conducted for father and son, who could be counted on to report it to Zehrunisa. Asha and Thokale often worked together. Now Thokale was demonstrating his power to ensure that Abdul and his father would not be severely injured in police custody—what he’d assured Zehrunisa in exchange for money. For Asha, the show would prove to the Husains that she did have influence at Sahar Police Station, and increase the likelihood that she would get a payoff, too.
But Karam wasn’t about to explain the economics of reprieve to his traumatized son. He thought it better for the boy to believe that someone had noticed his frantic labor on behalf of his family and decided to defend him out of kindness.
At sundown, four days after the burning, a Muslim fakir came to Annawadi with a peacock-feather broom to offer blessings and drive away evil spirits. Fakirs rarely came to Annawadi because the slum contained so few Muslims, the constituency most likely to pay for their extraworldly services. Abdul’s sister Kehkashan jumped up when she saw the old man. Her mother, fearing what might happen to a beautiful young woman in the police station, had pleaded with Officer Thokale to keep her out of