Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [77]
“You also should sleep properly,” he said, not hearing her. “I don’t think you sleep so good.”
Anandi didn’t know what to make of her brother’s paternal tone. Was it Eraz-ex? She stood up, impatient. She was sorry that this Kalu had been murdered. She’d met him once; he’d praised her cooking, made her laugh. But she couldn’t just sit here holding Sanjay’s hand when she had the vegetables and rice to do. As she turned back to the stove, Sanjay stretched on the floor and closed his eyes, perhaps to model his idea of proper sleep.
When his mother walked in an hour later, Sanjay was up and restless, listening to a duet from an album called Phir Bewafaai: Deceived in Love. “Sanjay’s broken-heart music,” his mother liked to call it, rolling her eyes.
“Just a single misunderstanding,” the guilty husband was singing, as his betrayed wife sang back her plan of revenge. Sanjay’s mother’s voice rose above them both: “Going to be sick! Oh, I ate something rotten at lunch!”
Bolting for the toilet, she called, “Wait, Sanjay. Don’t run off.”
“I won’t,” he promised. When his mother returned, his sister was hysterical and he was convulsing on the floor. Pulling Sanjay up, thinking that he was having a seizure, his mother caught a chemical reek on his breath. His sister retrieved a white plastic bottle from the corner of the room. She’d seen him toying with it earlier, assumed it contained soap for blowing bubbles—Sanjay was crazy for soap bubbles. But the empty plastic bottle was rat poison.
Sanjay rolled over to face the wall, refusing the salt water his mother prepared to force him to vomit. He lived for two hours after reaching the public hospital. After midnight, returning home to Dharavi ancient with grief, his mother tossed into the gutter the prescriptions the doctor had written for Sanjay. There had been no time to go out to the road and fill them.
The police inquiry into her son’s death was closed as swiftly as the inquiry into Kalu’s death had been. In the public record, Sanjay Shetty would be neither a vulnerable witness to a murder nor the victim of police threats and beatings. He would be a heroin addict who had decided to kill himself because he couldn’t afford his next fix.
In Delhi, politicians and intellectuals privately bemoaned the “irrationality” of the uneducated Indian masses, but when the government itself provided false answers to its citizens’ urgent concerns, rumor and conspiracy took wing. Sometimes, the conspiracies became a consolation for loss.
Trying to make sense of the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay, Sunil and Abdul grew closer. Not quite friends—rather, an unnameable, not-entirely-willing category of relationship in which two boys felt themselves bound to two boys who were dead. Sunil and Abdul sat together more often than before, but when they spoke, it was with the curious formality of people who shared the understanding that much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
Sunil felt certain that Air India security guards had murdered Kalu upon catching him in their recycling piles. Abdul suspected Kalu had been killed by drug dealers on whom he’d informed. “It was a dog’s death, either way,” Abdul said, often, which made Sunil think of the strangled dog in the Will Smith movie that he and Kalu had seen at Pinky Talkie Town.
Mirchi felt both boys should drop the subject. “Yeah, he stole garbage, but it was their garbage. So of course he was going to die like that.”
Road boys blamed other road boys. “Mahmoud—my full doubt is on him.” “Karan probably did it then ran away.” A corrosive, free-floating distrust worked its way down the slumlanes. Fatima’s ghost may or may not have been involved.
Kalu’s father turned against the woman whose Airport Road stall Kalu had frequented for chicken-chili rice. She heard things, and Kalu’s father had counted on her to tell him what had really happened. “Kalu what? Kalu who?” she had said, staring