Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [65]
Asha had raised her daughter to believe that she was different from the other children in Annawadi, superior even to her own brothers. At fourteen, Ganesh was gentle and hesitant, while Rahul, for all his confidence, lacked ambition. Having given up on hotel work, he was perfectly content with his new temp job, clearing tables at a canteen for airport employees. More and more, Asha could see her husband in the boys. Having taught them what she thought they could learn—they were now among the fastest male onion-dicers in Annawadi—she let them be. Only she and Manju seemed capable of the intelligent planning that might help carry them into India’s expanding middle class.
Asha remembered how it was when her neighbors heard that she’d gotten a kindergarten post with only a seventh-grade education. They called her “Teacher” snidely. Over time, however, the title stuck and the mockery melted away. Similarly, you could pose as a member of the overcity, wait out the heckles, and become one. It was another form of the by-hearting that Manju did at school.
“And don’t be afraid to talk to the first-class people directly. Some of them are quite nice, they’ll speak back,” Asha instructed her daughter. “Inquire of them how to look better, take their advice.”
Recently, Asha had asked a Shiv Sena man to make a rigorous critique of her image. “He says, don’t wear shoes with heels when you have height, because it cheapens you,” she reported to Manju. “Don’t wear your housedress outside. Wear a sari instead. Put your mangalsutra on a long chain, not a short one. Don’t look as if you’re worried, even if you are—no one wants to look at such lines on your face. And don’t walk with people who look worse than you.”
The Shiv Sena man had been a little blunt, conveying that last tip. She had been walking with him to the Corporator’s house one evening, and he’d said, “I am looking nice, and you are looking ugly, and your ugliness takes away from me, too.”
Manju brought additional information home from college: dangling earrings, low-class; tiny hoops, high-class. High-class women also wear jeans, she told her mother, who subsequently sanctioned a pair of bell-bottoms. One day, looking in the mirror at how the jeans worked with the peach-sequined secondhand tunic, Manju said aloud to herself, “Marquee Effect.” She’d learned the term in computer class, practicing Photoshop.
The Marquee Effect dimmed a bit when Asha’s sister gave both mother and daughter haircuts with feathery bangs. In the humidity, the feathers rose in a great cloud of frizz. But it was fun, spending the monsoon getting modern. Sensing her mother suddenly treating her as an equal, Manju broached a new subject: that many first-class people married outside their own caste, to people they, not their parents, had chosen.
“Rich people all have this different mind-set,” Manju said.
Asha didn’t want to get as first-class as that.
Asha had liked the soldier from Vidarbha, who came from a relatively affluent family, but her husband had objected to the engagement on the unlikely grounds that army men were often drunks like himself. In Annawadi, Sister Paulette had visited Asha twice now to lobby on behalf of another potential groom, a middle-aged man who lived in Mauritius. “He’s my brother,” the nun said, eyes blinking fast. Asha suspected Sister Paulette was operating on commission. Asha was, too, in a way.
Most Annawadians considered daughters a liability, given the crushing financial burden of the dowry. But it had long ago occurred to Asha that a girl as beautiful, capable, and self-sacrificing as Manju might make a marriage so advantageous it would lift up her whole family. The Mauritius man was rich, supposedly, but Asha was uneasy about