Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [80]
Annawadians were in need of exuberant distraction, as a recession that had begun in the West arrived in India. Suddenly, once-profitable links to the global markets were pushing the slumdwellers backward. The price of recyclable goods declined. Temp work in construction dried up as projects that had stopped in the monsoon stalled again for lack of foreign financing. Meanwhile, the price of food was soaring, largely on account of poor rains and harvests in Vidarbha and other agricultural strongholds.
The political response to this hardship—deejays and colored lights—was a time-honored tradition in Mumbai. On festival days before elections, the city slums became as bright as the wealthy neighborhoods with their pucca buildings, and ten times louder. Meena was all for bands, amps, and twinkling lights. This would be her last Navratri before starting a life she dreaded, as a teenaged bride in a Tamil Nadu village.
Meena had once taken pride in having been the first girl born in Annawadi. But as she prepared to leave Mumbai, it troubled her that domestic labor in the slum was all she had learned of her city. Nothing a girl cleaned in Annawadi stayed clean. Why did people see it as a failure of the girl? Why did her mother scream at her when, like everyone else, she lost two hours of her morning standing in line for water at a dribbling tap?
Everything on television announced a new and better India for women. Her favorite Tamil soap opera was about an educated single girl who worked in an office. In her favorite commercials, a South Indian movie siren named Asin was recommending, along with Mirinda orange soda, more fun, a little wildness.
This new India of feisty, convention-defying women wasn’t a place Meena knew how to get to. Maybe Manju would get there, with her college degree. Meena couldn’t say, not knowing any woman who had finished college. But watching the soap operas and Mirinda commercials, she sometimes felt her own life to be a husk of an existence. Things were inflicted upon her—regular beatings, the new engagement to marry. But what did she ever get to decide?
A boy, not her fiancé, had recently fallen in love with her. In the soap operas, such a thing would be explosive. In her constricted life, it was a small but welcome distraction. The boy was a friend of her older brother: a factory worker from a nearby slum who was about to take a housecleaning job in the Persian Gulf—the only way he thought he could make enough money to someday support a wife and family. One night, while visiting her brother, he slipped Meena his phone number. Another night, at a public phone, she dialed it. During the sixth or eighth illicit phone call, he said she was the future wife for whom he was striving.
The flirtation had gone too far. Meena gave him what she thought was a respectable response: “It’s okay if you love me. I’m glad that you do. But I am going to be married to someone else, so you must think of me only as a friend.”
Manju was relieved to hear it, since Meena was a see-through kind of girl, poorly suited to sneaking around. Her brothers had twice caught her on the phone and slapped her for it.
“Anyway,” Manju pointed out, “you said last month that you liked the village boy.”
Meena did like the village boy, who called on Sundays. He washed his own dinner plate—an astonishment to Meena and Manju, since he could have ordered his sister to do it for him. The boy was not the problem; the problem was an arranged marriage at age fifteen.
Meena’s father spoke rapturously of the feeling she was supposed to have, being engaged: “The first time your hearts meet, nothing else is left.”
Manju’s father took a more cynical view: “No marriage is happy after it happens. It’s only before, thinking of it, that it’s happy.”
But Meena didn’t feel euphoric anticipation. She couldn’t see how love would alter the daily practicalities. What if over the verge of marriage stretched