Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [78]
Sanjay’s mother didn’t know whom to blame. For weeks after her son’s suicide, she walked unsteadily through Annawadi, asking everyone she passed if they could tell her why her son had taken his life. “How do I sleep without knowing?” she asked her daughter. “The whole world is in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.”
Sunil and the road boys were torn when they saw Sanjay’s mother coming. They’d known her before she’d moved to Dharavi. That she now looked three hundred years old suggested just how much she’d loved her son. But how to explain Sanjay’s death without talking about Kalu’s, without talking about the Sahar police? Even the Tamil who ran the game shed, and whose police contacts were intimate, was afraid to say Kalu’s name. So Sanjay’s mother learned only what another mother, who slept on pavement, dared to whisper: “Your boy died with fear in his heart.”
The soil outside the red-and-white Air India gates was good and loamy. Gradually, with the ministrations of the airport gardening crew, a boy-sized break in the flowers filled in. One afternoon, Sunil crouched there, studying the skin of the earth. He could find no trace of damage.
By late September 2008, Asha was in control of Annawadi. There had been no clinching event, no slum-boss coronation. Rather, it had been a campaign of small advances toward the moment when the line of supplicants extended outside her hut, policemen promptly returned her calls, and Corporator Subhash Sawant, on hand to address the residents, offered her the plastic chair beside his own. Her patron had regained his confidence, now that the faked-caste-certificate case against him seemed tied up in court. Seated beside him on the stage by the sewage lake, Asha looked nearly his equal, sporting a gold chain much like his own. Hers had been financed by her self-help group and the high-interest loans it made to poorer women.
Relaxing into her authority, Asha stopped making elaborate excuses to her family about the men she met late at night. When her husband threatened suicide, she consoled him but made no promise to change. She let herself gain ten pounds, which softened the lines beneath her eyes—a last trace of her years in the fields.
Her main regret was the lack of a confidante with whom to relish this fledgling triumph. Her secrets had isolated her from other women; she’d had to close certain doors to herself. “What friend do I really have,” she would say to Manju. But now even her daughter seemed remote. On the rare occasion that Manju met her eye, she would bring up Asha’s least favorite subject, the One Leg.
While the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay shook the boys who lived on the road, Fatima’s death was the one that strobed in and out of the minds of Annawadi women. Two months after the public spectacle of her burning, it had insinuated itself into countless private narratives. Fatima’s regret at what she’d done had been forgotten, her act reconstrued as a flamboyant protest.
What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.
One night the brothelkeeper’s wife doused herself with kerosene in the maidan, called out Fatima’s name, and threatened to light a match. Another night, a woman beaten by her husband did light the match. She survived in such a state that Manju and her friend Meena, in their secret nightly meetings at the public toilet, began discussing more foolproof means of suicide.
Only fifteen-year-old Meena knew that Manju had considered taking her life the night that Asha had run out on her fortieth birthday party, and on other