Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [79]
Meena encouraged Manju to express the worst of her thoughts. It was said to be the modern, healthy way of coping. “You always say that the flowers I put in my hair never turn sticky and brown,” she told Manju one night at the toilet. “My flowers live because I don’t keep anything dark in my heart. I let the bad things come out into the air.”
Manju winced. She didn’t want her mother’s behavior to be more in-the-air than it already was. “My heart must be black, then,” she replied, deflecting. “The flowers in my hair die in two hours.”
Manju thought it wiser to practice the denial about which she’d been learning in psychology class—just stop thinking about her mother altogether. “If I don’t block it out, I won’t be able to study,” she said. The exams that would determine whether she would become Annawadi’s first female college graduate were only a few months away.
Based on his theory of the unconscious, Freud tells us how a fantasy is an unsatisfied wish which is fulfilled to the imagination. He divides fantasies into two main groups:
a) ambitious wishes
b) erotic
Young men have mostly ambitious wishes. Young women have mostly erotic ones. The ordinary person feels ashamed of his fantasies and hides them.
By-hearting the psychology notes her teacher provided, Manju realized she needed to block out a second painful subject: Vijay, the middle-class hero of the Civil Defense Corps, who had once gripped her hand. “In my next birth, you can be my wife,” he had recently told her. “Not this time.”
Late September was the season of romantic contemplation for many young women in Annawadi. The annual flirtfest, the Navratri festival, was about to begin.
The holidays the boys anticipated most were Holi and Haandi. On Holi, they attacked each other with balloons full of colored water; on Haandi, they made human ladders and belly-flopped into the mud. Slum girls weren’t allowed to roll in mud. Navratri—nine nights of dance—was the festival in which they could be equals, even betters, of the boys. Over these nights at the end of the monsoon season, the goddess Durga was said to battle the evil of the universe and triumph. Feminine divinity was celebrated, and even Meena received parental permission to dance and shine.
On the first night of the previous Navratri, Meena and Manju had spent hours getting ready. A dark blue sari for Manju, who could pull it off now that she had breasts and hips, like her mother. Stylish red salwar kameez for Meena, who stayed reedy no matter how many Good Day biscuits she put away.
Meena found it hard work not to be dazzled by Manju: her figure, her fairness, her ability to stand back straight, butt in, perfectly still. Meena’s own deportment was fidget-and-twist. But when she threw back her head and laughed, teeth gleaming, hers was the edgier beauty. She looked like one of those girls who made exciting things happen. Exciting things didn’t happen, though—and certainly not on the Navratri of 2007. The two girls had swanned onto the maidan for the first night of dancing only to be drenched by the season’s final downpour. The stage by the sewage lake was the only mud-less place. The feral pigs that camped beside it reeked of a too-long monsoon.
The Navratri of 2008 could only be better, since Asha would be choreographing it. She knew what these nine nights meant to girls. Among her plans were a band, a deejay with powerful speakers, a large pandal to house an idol of the goddess Durga, and fairy lights strung up over the maidan, under which the dancing would wheel. The leaders of Shiv Sena and the rival Congress Party had contributed