Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [67]
One afternoon, the children were mastering the English words chariot, knee, mirror, fish, and hand. “And what do you do with these hands of yours?” Manju wanted to know.
“Eat!”
“Wash clothes!”
“Fill water!”
“Dance!”
“Raise them to show somebody I’m going to beat him up—”
Heads turned. Asha was in the doorway, enraged.
“How urgent is this teaching?” she shouted at Manju. “What is more important? These children or keeping this house in order for me?”
Dirty children were sprawled on the floor. Notebooks were scattered about. It was a scene unbefitting the home of an almost-slumlord and aspiring elected official. Supplicants would be arriving momentarily to present their problems to Asha. The morning’s laundry was damp. “Wonderful,” Asha said to Manju, feeling a towel. “You put the clothes on the string inside, when the sun is shining outside. Can’t you do one thing properly in my absence?” Manju turned away to keep her students from seeing her face.
After that, Manju began teaching her class every other day, or every third day. The children understood that the choice was not her own. When a new school opened in the pink temple by the sewage lake, many of them gravitated to it, but it closed as soon as the leader of the nonprofit had taken enough photos of children studying to secure the government funds.
In Manju’s newly free time, she pursued a second idea for widening her social networks. She joined the Indian Civil Defense Corps, a group of middle-class citizens trained to save others in the event of floods or terror attacks.
Like many people in Mumbai, she was increasingly concerned about terrorism. In July, there had been bomb blasts in Bangalore, then blasts in Ahmedabad—nineteen explosions in the heart of the city. The bombers weren’t Maoists: Maoists were rural India’s problem. The urban hazard was religious militants, some of them acting in the name of Allah, as they wrote in their emails to newspapers.
Mumbai, the financial capital, was an obvious target, so sniffer dogs joined the security phalanxes at the five-star hotels. At the airport, sandbag bunkers proliferated. On the Western Express Highway, electronic signboards urged the citizenry to be alert: STRANGER IN YOUR AREA? CALL POLICE. The Civil Defense Corps seemed to Manju a more substantial way to protect her city than calling the police about strangers.
In the cavernous basement of a government building, she and forty other Maharashtrians—middle-aged women and two idealistic college boys—simulated crises and practiced techniques for saving lives. In a bomb blast, stay calm and make sure you are safe first. Then calm the others and lead them to safety. In a flash flood, pumpkins and empty plastic water bottles may be used as flotation devices. Tie your dupatta to someone too weak to swim, and pull them behind you.
Of the cadre, Manju was the slenderest, and too weak for the all-important “farmer’s lift,” so her usual assignment in the training exercises was to be deadweight—the injured object of rescue. Splayed on the linoleum floor, hair fanned, she worked all the distress moves she could think of from Hindi movies, from the chest heave to the terrified eye-flit to the old sigh-and-tremble. Then she’d get thrown over someone’s shoulder and carried to safety. Being touched was permissible here, and loveliest when she let her body relax in the arms of Vijay, an earnest, square-jawed college boy who led the battalion. He appreciated the sincere effort Manju put into being a victim.
One night, as Manju left the training in her new jeans and the peach tunic, Vijay called her name. As they crossed the road to the bus stop together, he gripped