Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [64]
“People laughed to see me back,” he now told Manju. “I had told them I was going to earn money and see the city, and I didn’t do either. Only major thing I saw were airplanes.”
The night before the wedding, Manju, in her position as the oldest female of her generation, carried a pot of grains through the village to the temple where prayers would be said for the bride and groom. In a peach-sequined chiffon tunic that her aunt in the city had tired of, she led a parade of family and neighbors along dirt roads full of scavenging donkeys. Past some mud-and-dung houses painted a shade of green no longer known in the fields, she clambered up a steep path to the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god.
Earlier, she’d powdered the groom’s face and added glitter around his eyes with a toothbrush. But even in the dark, unelectrified temple she could feel people’s eyes following her, not the sparkle-caked groom. An urban, college-going girl was a firework in the village. But which of the Kunbi men would Asha choose to be her husband? Some of them would consider Manju too educated to be docile; others would be too poor to sustain her mother’s interest.
Manju failed in her efforts to track Asha’s movements at the glum wedding the following day, but soon after, a young soldier appeared at the house where the family was staying. Asha went outside to speak to him privately. From time to time, Manju could hear her mother’s hoarse laugh.
Recently in Annawadi, Manju had watched Asha negotiate a marriage between a shy neighbor girl and a boy from another slum. Manju had been excited at the chance to glimpse the sort of negotiations that would one day decide her own future. It had seemed to be going well, until the girl lifted her head. “Not beautiful!” the boy’s family had objected, blaming Asha for wasting their time.
The harsh pragmatism of that afternoon had armed Manju, so when Asha called for her to bring out tea, she smoothed her hair, lowered her eyes, and tried to keep her heart ice-cold. Taking his cup, the soldier stared at her for a long moment and said, “Don’t stand in the sun—you’ll get too black.”
He wasn’t bad looking, despite the mustache, and Manju’s eyes were not so lowered that she failed to note his own eyes sliding down her body. She felt as if she’d been touched. It sometimes disturbed her how strongly she wanted to be wanted; she felt very nearly ready for marriage, for sex. But if Asha arranged any marriage that sentenced her to a life in Vidarbha, Manju had decided that she would run away.
One night before the family returned to Annawadi, Anil told his cousins of a dream he’d had. He was sprinting away from the farm, and Manju, Rahul, and Ganesh were running alongside him. “We were all escaping, and our mothers were angry. They were saying, ‘If you go, we won’t let you come back.’ And we were saying, ‘Don’t call us back! We don’t want to come back! We’re going somewhere better!’ We were laughing so hard as we ran.”
Back at Annawadi, Asha shut the sordid Fatima drama out of her mind, and shut her door on the frantic Zehrunisa. She wanted to devote the rest of the monsoon season to self-improvement. For one, she needed to take a college course or two, or she would lose her temp job teaching kindergarten at Marol Municipal School. The government of Maharashtra had been trying to increase the quality of its schools, and some of the teachers were being pressured to show they were trying to get an education themselves. Fortunately, Asha’s professor at Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University had assured his class of teachers that he would provide answers to the end-of-year papers and exams.
But Asha wanted