Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [54]
When Fatima was clean and sinless, Kehkashan closed the box and covered the bier with the Husains’ best cotton quilt, the one with tiny blue checks. Fatima would now be taken to a Muslim burial ground a mile away, and Kehkashan would go to jail. A charge would be filed, likely based on Fatima’s second statement that the Husains had beaten her and driven her to self-immolation, which named Abdul as the most violent actor. At the police station, an officer had told Zehrunisa she’d have to pay another five thousand rupees to see the chargesheet.
Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing—the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.
Only men could go to the Muslim burial ground. Mirchi stood beside Fatima’s husband, who held one of the bier’s four poles. It was rush hour as the camphor-scented metal box moved out onto Airport Road.
The procession of dolorous slumdwellers seemed even smaller against the outsized enthusiasms of the airport city. Giant billboards announced the forthcoming launch of an Indian version of People magazine. Chauffeur-driven black sedans rolled out of the Hyatt—attendees of a pharmaceutical convention, taking a break to check out the town. At the Hotel Leela, Americans representing Universal theme parks were feeling optimistic about their plan for entering the Indian market. “The percentage of rich people is small in India, but look at the absolute numbers. Enough of them that we can make this work. Don’t talk to me about Disney—we’re the best brand. Spider-Man, Revenge of the Mummy, and now we’re seeing good results out of Harry Potter. I know, people say I should go to Disney World, check out the rival, but I can’t do it. I’m too competitive—not going to give the opposition a dime—”
The white box proceeded across a hectic intersection, past Marol Municipal School, through the narrow lanes of one slum and then another, until it reached a water-stained green mosque, a papaya tree, and a burial ground filled with pigeons.
Fatima went into the same earth that held her drowned two-year-old daughter. In a matter of days, her other two daughters were entrusted to Sister Paulette.
Fatima’s husband loved his daughters, and grieved as he sent them off. But he worked fourteen hours a day sorting garbage, and local drunks sometimes despoiled little girls left home alone in Annawadi.
Now it poured, a stinging rain. On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August. At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food through mounds of wet, devalued garbage, shitting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stamped the mud from their feet and said, “My stomach is on fire, my chest.” “All up and down this leg, all night.” The sewage lake’s frogs sang sympathetically, but you couldn’t hear the frogsong indoors. Rain banged on the metal rooftops as if slum zebras were stampeding overhead.
Someone had once told Sunil that the rains washed the mean out of people. They certainly washed the stripes off the zebras. For weeks the animals stood revealed as poke-bone, yellow-hide nags, until the slumlord-in-decline, Robert, refreshed the black stripes with Garnier Nutrisse hair dye.
The trail of garbage was sparser in the monsoon than in other seasons, since traffic at the airport declined and construction projects stalled. Sunil’s concrete ledge above the Mithi River was wiped clean by the wind and the rain. He found a little consolation