Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [76]
Active, fence-climbing boys don’t suddenly drop dead of tuberculosis; one thing Annawadians know as well as pathologists is that TB deaths are torturously slow. But the evidence of Kalu’s body was swiftly turned to ash in a pyre at the Parsiwada Crematorium on Airport Road, the false cause of death duly noted in an official register that had been burned through the middle by a resting cigarette. Then photos of the boy’s corpse, taken in accordance with police regulations, vanished from the files at the Sahar station.
As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise. The death did, however, provide the police with an opportunity to clear the airport grounds of other Annawadi road boys.
After Kalu’s death, five of the road boys were picked up and taken to the Sahar Police Station’s “unofficial” cell. They were beaten in the name of an investigation and released with the understanding that, if they didn’t stay away from the increasingly elegant airport, they might find themselves charged with Kalu’s murder. The boys didn’t know that the police had already filed away the case as a natural death.
One of the released boys, named Karan, fled Annawadi, fled the city, and never returned. Another, Sanjay Shetty, frantically collected garbage and took it to the Husains in order to finance his own getaway.
Zehrunisa gasped when she saw him. “What happened to your face?” she asked. “Why are you crying?”
Sixteen-year-old Sanjay stood out from the other road boys for his uncommon height, his beauty, and his pronounced South Indian drawl. “Every word you say has a loving sound,” Zehrunisa had once teased him. “You will melt a person, the way you talk.” Now Sanjay could barely make words.
“Calm yourself,” Zehrunisa told him. “Say what happened.”
Between sobs he told her he had seen Kalu attacked by a gang of men in the darkness by the Air India gate. Then he told her of his own beating, in the police station. Sanjay didn’t know what to fear more: that Kalu’s attackers would discover he’d been a witness and come after him, or that the cops would pick him up for another round of violent interrogation.
He couldn’t sleep on the Annawadi rut-road any longer and was heading to his mother’s house, because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. After his family’s hut at the airport had burned down, she’d moved five miles south to Dharavi, the largest slum in the city.
Zehrunisa agreed that Dharavi was a better place than Annawadi for a boy to get lost in. She put the money in Sanjay’s hand and watched him run.
When Sanjay reached Dharavi, his fourteen-year-old sister, Anandi, was making tomato chutney for dinner. She nearly dropped the bowl when she saw the fear in his face. The two were close, and recently, in rare possession of disposable income, he’d had her first initial tattooed next to his own on his forearm. Anandi often chided him that any brother who loved his sister as much as he professed to would come home more often. But their sixty-square-foot hut was too small for three people, and Sanjay liked to be near the airport—said it made him feel he had a chance to get away.
Sanjay took his sister’s hand, and as they sat knee-to-knee on the floor, told her of seeing a group of men swarm Kalu all at once. “They killed my friend,” he kept repeating. “Just threw him off.” Like he was garbage.
Recovering himself, Sanjay began to lecture Anandi: that she shouldn’t cause heartache for their mother, who was still at work, tending to an elderly woman in a middle-class neighborhood; that she should take her studies more seriously.
His sister looked at him, confused.