Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [74]
His mother seemed fine with his decision. He hoped she’d actually been listening. She seemed half absent in her exhaustion, and definitely hadn’t been listening later, when he asked if his suffering might be rewarded with an iPod.
The scavengers found Abdul to be more talkative on his return from Dongri. At the scales, he kept asking whether they had procured their goods honestly. Between rounds of this newly interrogatory purchasing, he made weird little announcements: “Can I tell you something?” “This is the thing I have to say.” Upon which, he talked endlessly about a teacher at Dongri who had seen the taufeez, the refinement, in his nature.
Abdul claimed that he spoke to The Master all the time—that the guy had been so taken with Abdul that he’d given him his cellphone number. Everyone knew the garbage sorter was lying. Road boys didn’t mind deception; extravagant fabrications passed the time. They were just amused that he would lie about a friendship with a teacher. The only other boy who told that kind of loser-lie was Sunil, who liked to pretend to new boys that he was a fifth-grade student, top of his class.
Abdul had a fresh audience for his stories about The Master when his semi-friend Kalu returned from the Karjat construction site in mid-September. Kalu had gained weight, on account of the shortage of Eraz-ex outside the city.
Zehrunisa, surprised to see Kalu back so soon, called him into the house for a plate of leftovers, of which there were more than usual, since the Husains were fasting for the month of Ramadan. Zehrunisa was fond of Kalu, thought he was in need of mothering. Kalu did not dispute this. He’d been calling Zehrunisa Amma, or Mother, for a year—an endearment that made Abdul a little tense.
“Your father is still there in the mountains?” she asked.
“Yes, but Amma, I had to leave it. I didn’t want to be out in the country now.” Mumbai was in the midst of the giddy festival in honor of his beloved Ganpati. Two days from now, to the sound of drumbeats and cheering, millions of citizens from across Mumbai would bring lovingly crafted idols of the elephant god to the sea to immerse them. It was a celebratory practice of which environmentalists took a dim view, but which marked the high point of Kalu’s year.
“You should have stayed,” Zehrunisa admonished him. “I can barely recognize you, you’re so healthy. Why forget your father like that? You’ll just slip back into your old bad ways, being here.”
“I’m not getting back into stealing,” he promised her. “I’m good and improved now, can’t you see?”
“Yes, good and improved now,” Zehrunisa agreed. “But can thieves really change? If they can, I haven’t seen it.”
The next day, Kalu scavenged for trash at the airport with Sunil. In the evening, after selling the trash to Abdul, they lingered with him outside the game shed. The three boys were ranging across the usual subjects—food, movies, girls, the price of waste—when a disabled man named Mahmoud, stoned and glassy-eyed, slugged Abdul in the chest for reasons known only to himself. Another raging One Leg. Of course Abdul wasn’t going to fight him. He headed home to sleep. Sunil did, too.
Kalu had no home to retreat to. He decided to go to the airport, taking off across the thoroughfare toward the bright blue signs that lead the way to the international terminal. ARRIVALS down. DEPARTURES up. HAPPY JOURNEY.
The following morning, Kalu lay outside Air India’s red-and-white gates: a shirtless corpse with a grown-out Salman Khan haircut, crumpled behind a flowering hedge.
A hulking, mustachioed constable named Nagare rode his motorcycle into Annawadi, the disabled junkie who’d punched Abdul the previous night balanced on