Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [62]
“She was one-bone thin, half starving, when we were working the orange groves,” one of her relatives whispered to the others. “You wouldn’t know it now. She’s a double-bone, and the way she talks—you’d think she’d never trod on dirt.”
Asha was glad to be the subject of admiring chatter, and to be away from the troubles of Annawadi. She had come home to market her beautiful daughter, and her own relative prosperity, among the people of her farming caste, the Kunbis. Her husband Mahadeo would play sober; she would play deferential wife; Manju would play herself; and marriage offers would by all rights roll in, despite the nominal occasion of the visit.
This occasion was a stripped-down family wedding: no music, no dancing, no jalebis. The groom, one of Mahadeo’s nephews, was still in mourning for his elder brother, who had died of AIDS shortly after infecting his wife. The disease was rampant in Vidarbha, and vigorously denied. If word got out that it had claimed one of Manju’s relatives, it might diminish her value as a bride. But people in the village weren’t terribly interested in the young man’s death, or in the widow hidden away for the duration of the festivities, or even in Asha’s stories of the city. The farmers’ eyes kept turning to the sky.
The break in the rains, as it was called in Annawadi, had a different name in the countryside: drought. Little rain had fallen in June, and millions of cotton seedlings planted the previous month had died. The villagers had paid a steep price for their seeds: genetically modified ones called “hybrids,” theoretically designed for Vidarbha’s erratic climate. Now more seeds would have to be sown, and new loans arranged to pay for them.
Some Kunbis said that July was the month when the gods slept. Asha’s relatives hoped the gods had changed their schedules this year, and were also awake nights, worrying.
In the two decades since Asha and her husband left their respective farming villages, twenty miles apart, much had changed for the better. Some houses had grown larger and sturdier, thanks to the money those who’d left for the city sent back home. Public money had also altered the landscape: Scattered among desiccated farms were new schools, colleges, and handsome government offices with lawns as well tended as those of the Airport Road Hyatt. The government had built more water projects, too, but these had failed to compensate for the decline of Vidarbha’s natural water systems. Poor rains and illegal siphoning depleted the water table; streams dried up; rivers reversed course. As fish died and crops failed, moneylenders became unofficial village chiefs.
Ashamed and in debt, some farmers killed themselves—an old story, one of the Marathi-movie staples. But the movie reel was still playing. In the new century, the government counted an average of a thousand farmer suicides a year in Vidarbha; activists counted many more. Whatever the number, the suicides had turned the region into international shorthand for the desperation of rural Indian poverty.
The files accumulating dust in the records rooms of the Vidarbha bureaucracy indicated that modern means of suicide—drinking pesticide, mainly—had supplanted self-immolation. Over thousands of mildewed pages, relatives described their loved ones’ distress.
Last two years we had crop failure. He could not repay his loan. Then came a fire in the hut. All the seeds got burned—sunflower, wheat, destroyed. He couldn’t afford to marry his second son, and people would keep asking when the marriage would happen—
His