Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [59]
On the third morning, the guard said that if he didn’t bathe, he’d miss breakfast and get put in the airless cell that had made him want to eat small children. He decided to accept the Dongri bathing rules. By the fourth morning, his knees and ears and neck were as clean as they’d ever been. The breakfasts received in exchange for this heroic capitulation were dismal. Stones in the rice. Bread so vile that, had his mother served it, he would have put it in his pocket until he could slip it to the pigs. Most of the other boys in his barrack were Muslim—across India, Muslims were overrepresented in the criminal justice system—and when they sat on the floor to eat, they laughed about the terrible food. They called the Children’s Home the chillar home, meaning small change, practically worthless.
Mornings, the barrack was unlocked, the chillar extracted. In the courtyard, the boys were ordered to run in a circle, then sing the national anthem, which they did at the top of their lungs. Afterward, they were sent back to the barrack, where they sat on the floor and did nothing at all. In the warden’s office, an official schedule of daily educational and vocational activities was posted prominently. Abdul wasn’t troubled by this discrepancy. Whatever happened to him at Dongri, or didn’t happen, he was safer than at Arthur Road Jail.
The other detainees passed their free time telling stories and offering one another advice about their cases. There was one recurring counsel: “Just say you did what they say you did, and then you’ll be let out.” The lawyers who came from time to time also said this to their charges. Admit it, the case will be closed, and you can go home.
Abdul wanted to go home so badly that he considered saying he’d beaten up Fatima before her suicide. He still found it strange to think of her as dead, because at Annawadi he hadn’t considered her fully alive. Like many of his neighbors, he had assessed her damage, physical and emotional, and casually assigned her to a lesser plane of existence. But as he’d learned in the police station, being damaged was nothing like being dead.
One night in the barrack, a sixteen-year-old confessed to the other boys that he’d stabbed his father to death. It was a matter of honor, he said, after his father strangled his mother. The police were blaming him for both murders, though.
It sounded like a film story to Abdul. To the other inmates, the boy’s guilt or innocence was less interesting than his claim that he’d come from a family with money—twenty-five lakhs, or fifty-six thousand dollars, in the bank. “So your parents are dead and you’re a rich boy now,” one of the other boys pointed out to the father-killer. Even after the boy explained how a double-murder conviction would interfere with the inheritance, the other children couldn’t stop talking about the cars and the clothes he could buy.
Many of the children had been detained because they’d been caught working. Most child labor had been outlawed even when Abdul was young, but now, occasionally, the law was enforced.
Two boys who looked to be seven years old had been picked up while sweeping floors in a cheap hotel. They reminded Abdul of his little brothers, and he felt emotional being around them. He couldn’t see why the state had taken them from their parents. Being so poor that you had to work so young seemed like punishment enough.
Abdul had kept to himself in his first days at Dongri, aware of his inadequacy in the conversational arts, but the incarceration of the seven-year-olds inflamed him. “What’s the use, keeping them here?” he blurted out one day. “You see their faces? So much enthusiasm for life, they are going to break the walls of this jail. The government people should let them work, let them be free.