Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [75]
No, she was being paranoid like Abdul. The constable simply wanted to know the whereabouts of Kalu’s relatives, and Mahmoud, the disabled junkie, had told him she was likely to know. Zehrunisa felt lightheaded with relief, until Nagare told her why he was asking.
“Boy’s dead,” he said with a frown, and she barely had time to grieve when he sped away, because the next thing she heard was the sound of Abdul breaking down.
For weeks her eldest son had tried to forget what had happened to him in the police cell. Now, in an instant, something sealed inside him had split open. He couldn’t remember the mechanics of breathing, and began to speak in a clipped, frantic tone. Kalu, his only sort-of friend: dead. So now he would be arrested for the murder. The police would trap him, just as Fatima had done. “I know it,” he kept saying. The addict, Mahmoud, would already have told the police that Abdul had been standing on the road with Kalu the night before. This would be the evidence on which Abdul would be convicted. There would be more police beatings and, after that, decades in Arthur Road Jail. He crouched and gulped, then rose and ran inside his hut, where even Kehkashan, now out on bail, could not console him. He felt he needed to go into hiding again, but not, this time, in his trash pile—
“Kalu got murdered! Eyes poked out! Sickle up his ass!”
Other boys, less traumatized by life, had run to see the body, and their reports now flew through the slumlanes. Sunil refused to believe them, needed to see for himself. He took off, dodging the cars on Airport Road.
The other boys had said that Kalu’s body was in the garden, but which garden? Two years into the aesthetic makeover of the airport, led by the conglomerate GVK, the place was choking with flowers. There were also gardens by the Hotel Leela, weren’t there? In his distress, Sunil’s mental map of his airport terrain got turned around.
When he finally arrived at the correct garden, Air India and GVK executives had gathered, and the police were keeping everyone else far away. Another boy told Sunil that crows had taken Kalu’s eyeballs and dropped them in the coconut trees.
Sunil watched from a distance as Kalu’s half-naked corpse was loaded into a police van. He watched the van drive away. All that remained to stare at was yellow police tape—dumb plastic ribbon twisting through a stand of orange heliconia, their flowers like the open beaks of baby birds.
Sunil turned and walked home, past the immense pilings of the elevated expressway being constructed in the middle of Airport Road, past a line of signs GVK had planted that said WE CARE WE CARE WE CARE, past the long wall advertising floor tiles that stay beautiful forever. He felt small and sad and useless. Who had done such a thing to his friend? But the fog of shock and grief didn’t fully obscure his understanding of the social hierarchy in which he lived. To Annawadi boys, Kalu had been a star. To the authorities of the overcity, he was a nuisance case to be dispensed with.
Officially, the Sahar police precinct was among the safest places in Greater Mumbai. In two years, only two murders had been recorded in the whole precinct, which included the airport, hotels, office buildings, and dozens of construction-site camps and slums. Both murders had been promptly solved. “All murders we detect, 100 percent success,” was how Senior Inspector Patil, who ran the Sahar station, liked to put it. But perhaps there was a trick to this success rate: not detecting the murders of inconsequential people.
Succumbed to an “irrecoverable illness” was the swift conclusion of Maruti Jadhav, the inspector in charge of Kalu’s case. At the morgue