Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [55]
As Sunil moved through the streets around his secret lotuses, chasing busted flip-flops, plastic bottles, and other floaters, he sometimes passed Zehrunisa Husain, who was uncharacteristically garbed in a burqa. She kept losing her footing, trying to move too fast through muddy ponds that had formed on the roads.
Other scavengers whispered that she’d sold the room in the back of the family hut to pay for a lawyer. Sunil hoped that whatever she was doing for Abdul would spring him from custody, since Mirchi was useless as Abdul’s replacement at the weighing scales. The younger Husain boy didn’t know the value of anything, and when Sunil and the other waste-pickers tried to help him, he made fun of their boils.
Scavengers were sensitive about their boils, and the worth of their goods. The business of the Husains’ competitor, the Tamil man with the video-game parlor, surged accordingly.
Zehrunisa saw that Mirchi’s inexperience was hurting the business, but she was too busy with the criminal case to negotiate with the scavengers herself. She was too busy to bathe or feed her young children. Those children, too, became Mirchi’s responsibility, since the relatives before whom Zehrunisa needed to prostrate herself were scattered in slums across a rain-wrecked city. “Please, will you put up bail to get my sick husband, son, and daughter out of jail?”
In each hut, she’d had to sit through an hour of clucking sympathy and excuses before moving on to the next humiliating visit. Only one begging session had been brief. She’d practically had to swim through Saki Naka slum in the damned burqa in order to reach the hut of Abdul’s soon-to-be-former fiancée. The girl’s father looked at her as if she’d spent the morning at the local liquor still, and that was that.
Her problem was that she lacked collateral to secure the jail bonds. Since she couldn’t read, Mirchi had reviewed the official documents that her husband had stored in a gray plastic case along with some Iqbal poems and a racy Urdu paperback thriller. Mirchi had unearthed a document for each of the five possessions that had changed the family fortunes. A pushcart that had allowed his father to carry garbage to the recycling plants, and thus to become a buyer of scavengers’ goods. The family hut, purchased from a migrant who’d given up on Mumbai. The storeroom next to the hut, which allowed the family to forestall selling their goods when market prices were low. The three-wheeled jalopy with a truckbed that could transport more than the pushcart. The deposit on the land in Vasai. Only Karam Husain’s name was on these papers.
“Mother, be calm. I’m fine here,” lied Kehkashan when her mother came to the women’s wing of the Byculla Jail to explain why she couldn’t post bail.
Karam was less understanding when she arrived at Arthur Road Jail, the city’s largest, most infamous detention center. She’d had to queue for four hours in order to see him, paying off guards and officers long before she’d gotten through the gates. Behind those gates, there were four times as many inmates as official capacity.
“I am desperate,” her husband told her. His cell had so many bodies that no one could lie flat. He couldn’t breathe because of the crowding. He couldn’t choke down the food. He yelled at her for starting the fight with Fatima, then yelled at her to get him out. As if she hadn’t been trying. As if he hadn’t been the idiot who had threatened to beat Fatima. As if he hadn’t been the one to leave his wife’s name off the family papers.
She’d been furious at her husband as she left the jail, but she couldn’t sustain it. Arthur Road Jail was a name that terrified every sentient Mumbaikar, and also Zehrunisa, who was not strictly sentient at this time. That her sick husband would have a fight and become an Arthur Road inmate, facing a ten-year felony sentence, was an eventuality for which neither