Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [66]
Asha believed a person seeking betterment should try as many schemes as possible, since it was hard to predict which one might work. Manju’s first idea had been to sell insurance, as one of her college classmates had done. The Life Insurance Corporation of India was offering free training to aspiring agents in an office building down the road from the Hotel Leela.
Asha was intrigued by the television ads for this insurance, which allowed those who could afford it to insulate themselves from some of the volatility of Indian life. The young husband in one of the commercials had cared enough to buy medical insurance for his wife before the traffic accident. Now, miraculously, she was rising from her wheelchair! Life insurance was turning funerals into celebrations! Selling such policies would put Manju in touch with affluent people, while bringing more money to the household.
The children in Manju’s hut school came early to support her as she learned the English names of the policies: Future Confidence II, Wealth Confident, Invest Confident, Aspire Life. The children’s vocabularies momentarily expanded to include the terms surrender value, rider premium, and partial withdrawal.
In training, Manju learned that she wouldn’t sell anything if she referred directly to tragedy or death. You had to emphasize the profit angle—tell the story of a man who bought forty policies and left his family eye-high in rupee notes.
Manju practiced her pitches and rebuttals until she was fluent, and passed the final exam with high marks. Then: nothing. Who did she know who could afford to buy insurance?
“Everybody wants their profit,” she told the children one day, shaking her head. “They say, if I do this, how much will I make? In college, the girls talk like that, even when they’re talking about each other. ‘Why talk to that weird girl, Pallavi? What’s the profit? What’s the use?’ ”
The brothelkeeper’s eleven-year-old daughter, Zubbu, understood Manju’s concern with profit obsession better than the other children. Her parents were trying to sell her, and the girl felt as if she were going mad. Manju could only pray that Zubbu’s parents would be as unsuccessful in this entrepreneurial venture as they were in all their other ones.
Teaching girls like Zubbu, Manju felt her own luck. Next spring, if she passed her state board exams, she’d have a B.A. degree. With another year of study, to be financed by selling one of the rented rooms in their hut, she’d be a qualified teacher, with a B.Ed. She had no hope of securing a permanent job at a government school, since such jobs typically required paying enormous bribes to education officials. Small private schools were a likelier bet, although most of them paid so little that her classmates in the B.A./B.Ed program had begun to worry that they’d invested in a chump profession. One girl intended to work at a call center upon graduation; another figured she’d make more money as a chef. Manju alone in the group still wanted to teach. But the Annawadi hut school where she honed her skills was irritating her mother more by the day. Asha didn’t see a long-term benefit in networking with low-class children.
The central government funded Manju’s “bridge school” and hundreds like it in Mumbai through contracts with nonprofit organizations. Although public funds for education had increased with India’s new wealth, the funds mainly served to circulate money through the political elite. Politicians and city officials helped relatives and friends start nonprofits to secure the government money. It was of little concern to them whether the schools were actually running.
Manju’s school came under the auspices of a Catholic charity, Reach Education Action Programme, or REAP, that took its obligation to poor students more seriously than some other nonprofits did. The priest