Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [53]
Taking a ten-rupee note from her bra, she closed her eyes as the fakir touched the top of her head with the broom. She was relieved he didn’t beat her with the broom, as some fakirs did when they performed the jhaad-phoonk. She hoped it was because he sensed no diabolical spirits hovering over her, and not just that he had adopted some modern, client-pleasing technique. As Kehkashan sat still, the better to allow his blessing to seep through her body, the fakir moved on to Fatima’s door.
Fatima’s husband stormed out of the hut, wild-eyed. “Are you without hands? Are you without legs? You have come to me to beg? In the name of God! Go earn your living, go get a job!”
The fakir looked at the sky, fingered the golden zari threads in the pocket of his kurta, and backed away.
Now Kehkashan was distraught. “Allah! To turn away a fakir, to take his curse?” Fatima’s husband had set himself up for bad luck, the way he’d spoken to the fakir, and the bad luck most likely to befall him would be a ruination of the Husains as well.
“What has happened to that man,” the fakir wanted to know.
“His wife burned herself,” Kehkashan said in a low voice.
“So when did she die?”
“No! No!” Kehkashan cried out. “Pray that she lives, else we will be in a grave situation.”
Fatima’s daughter Noori leaned against Kehkashan. The girl had been clinging to Kehkashan ever since she’d seen her mother burning. “I am playing a boy today,” Noori said. “Talking like a boy, too.”
“Like my sister Tabu,” Kehkashan replied, distracted. “She only wants to wear boy clothes or she’ll cry.” Kehkashan was resolved not to cry herself.
“Get the rice so I can clean it,” she said to Mirchi, rising and brushing herself off. “And whose turn is it at the tap?”
Her youngest brother, Lallu, was now old enough to curse like his mother: “Give dinner to me fast or I will put your eyes out!” Her youngest sister was having a come-apart, having not received her rightful share of a packet of Parle-G biscuits.
When the fakir completed his ministries and departed Annawadi, the scene through the door of the Husain hut was little different from those unfolding behind the other doors he passed. As night dropped its hood over the slum, dinners were being scrabbled together, abuses were being hurled, tears were getting kissed away. The next morning, Fatima came home in a white metal box.
An infection had killed her. A doctor adjusted the record in the name of hospital deniability. Burns that covered 35 percent of Fatima’s body upon admission to Cooper became 95 percent at her death—a certain fatality, an unsalvageable case. “Greenish yellowish sloughs formation all over burn injuries with foul smell,” read the postmortem. “Brain congested, lungs congested. Heart pale.” Fatima’s file was tied up in red string and sent to the records room of the morgue, where feral dogs slept among the towering stacks of folders on the floor, and birdsong came through the window. A flock of spotted doves had colonized a palm tree outside, the croo-croo-croo of one bird overlapping the call of another.
Fatima had gotten small again, dying—took up less than half of the box. All of Annawadi came outside, as it had when she burned, but this time the onlookers kept their distance. The slum grew quiet, and quieter still when Zehrunisa and Kehkashan emerged from their hut, heads covered, to wash the corpse.
Only other Muslim women could perform this crucial ritual, the washing away of Fatima’s sins. No matter what, Zehrunisa always said, Muslims had to join up for festivals and sufferings. It was the tradition to tell Fatima she was dead now and going to be buried, so the Husain women murmured the words while dipping cotton rags into a vessel of water and camphor oil. Lifting a sheet of white muslin, they began to clean Fatima’s body. They moved up the length of her long leg, then the half leg, working slowly toward the shiny black face. “Close the mouth,” someone said. “Flies