Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [73]
Sunil wished Kalu didn’t have to go. Annawadi would lose a lot of its color without him. It would lose the dramatic, hip-propelled reenactments of Om Shanti Om and the subtler entertainment of Kalu’s hair, which changed in accordance with his favorite movies. Recently he’d grown it long and lank like the crazy college boy played by Salman Khan in that old film Tere Naam.
Moreover, thieves like Kalu had status that garbage-pickers lacked, and with Kalu’s departure, Sunil would be more firmly fixed in his own identity as a scavenger, like Sonu the blinky boy—the kind of person other people allowed to suffer unaided and die alone on the road.
A few days before leaving, Kalu told Sunil, “My real name is Deepak Rai. Don’t tell anyone. Also, my main god is Ganpati.” He thought Ganpati, the elephant god, the remover of obstacles, should be Sunil’s main god, too. To convince him, Kalu took him on a barefoot nine-mile penitents’ pilgrimage to the Siddhivinayak temple in central Mumbai.
Which saints and gods to follow was something about which many road boys had strong feelings. Some said Sai Baba was quicker than fat Ganpati. Others contended that Shiva could open his third eye and explode both of them. Sunil’s mother had died before she could teach him about the gods, and he was too unsure of their respective merits to decide upon a favorite. Still, from what he had observed in Annawadi, the fact that a boy knew about the gods didn’t mean the gods would look after the boy.
ONE AFTERNOON, Abdul’s mother arrived at the Dongri detention facility rain-soaked, the skin under her eyes dark as mango stones. Abdul was sulking when he came out of the barrack—kept his head down, kicked a hard clump of mud. She had come to take him home. A judge had decided he wasn’t the type to run away before his trial in juvenile court, releasing him with strict instructions: Until the trial, report to Dongri every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to prove you haven’t absconded.
Abdul followed his mother down a long stinking hallway packed with children, across the courtyard, and out onto the street. The rain had turned to drips, and there was a weak sun, low and paling. “So when’s my trial?” he asked her. “When is my father’s trial?”
“No one knows, but don’t worry,” Zehrunisa said. “Just leave everything to God and keep praying. Now we have a lawyer who will say the right words, and then it will end, because the judge will pick up the truth.”
“Pick up the truth,” he repeated skeptically. As if truth were a coin on a footpath. He changed the subject.
“How is my father?”
“They don’t give medicine in Arthur Road Jail, and there’s no room to sleep. Oh, it is terrible to see him there—his face has become so small. But Kehkashan says it is not so bad in her jail. She prays a lot, for all of us. She says it’s what Allah wants, troubles coming at us from all four sides at once.”
“Why didn’t you get Father out first?” he asked. “It’s not right that I get out before him.”
Sighing, Zehrunisa told him of all the relatives and friends who had declined to help with the bail, and of her humiliation before the family of his supposed fiancée.
“For these others, what has happened to us is just entertainment—something to talk about when they’re bored,” Abdul said grimly. “Now we know for certain that no one cares about us.”
A rich silence followed. Then he asked his mother about his garbage business.
Under Mirchi’s supervision, it had collapsed. The scavengers all sold to the Tamil who ran the game parlor.
Abdul emitted a sound like an amplified hiccup. He might have guessed it. His parents had raised Mirchi for something better than garbage work. Even Abdul had wanted something better for Mirchi.
“Okay,” he said after a while, pressing a finger deep into his twitching lower lip. It