Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [83]
This was one decision about her life she got to make. It wasn’t a choice easily shared with a best friend.
Meena sat again with a heaviness that had nothing to do with her weight. A woman materialized with a bowl of water and salt. “This will make her vomit,” she said, tipping back Meena’s head. She swallowed. Everyone waited. Dry heaves. Nothing.
Water and laundry soap, another woman suggested, running home to chop up a foul-smelling bar of Madhumati. Meena held her nose as the second brew went down her throat. Finally, she vomited a jet of bright green froth.
“I feel better,” Meena announced, eventually. “It’s all out.” Her face slick with sweat, she stood unsteadily, and her mother led her inside to sleep off the effects of the poison. As the door shut behind them, the women of the slumlane exhaled. Feminine discretion had averted a scene, perhaps saved a wedding. Meena’s future in-laws might not come to hear that they’d chosen an impetuous bride.
The shopkeeper two huts down kept selling milk and sugar, unaware. Construction workers returning from work tramped through soapy green vomit. Manju registered through a screen of exhaustion that it was evening and that she needed not to be standing, disheveled, outside her friend’s closed door. She needed to wash her face and get the goddess Durga.
As she and Asha left to pick up the idol, Meena’s elder brother arrived home, learned that his sister had consumed rat poison, and beat her for it. Meena wept and went to sleep. Just before midnight, she started to cry again. Eventually her father realized that this was not sad crying.
On the first night of Navratri, as the young people of Annawadi, minus Manju, danced in the illuminated clearing, Meena answered the question of a police officer who had come to her bedside at Cooper Hospital. Had anyone incited her to attempt suicide? “I blame no one,” said Meena. “I decided for myself.”
On the third night of Navratri, Meena stopped talking, at which point Cooper Hospital doctors extracted five thousand rupees from her parents in the name of “imported injections.”
On the sixth day of Navratri, Meena was dead.
“She was fed up with what the world had to offer,” the Tamil women concluded. Meena’s family, upon consideration, decided that Manju’s modern influence was to blame.
The lights of Navratri came down. Rahul tried to make Manju laugh again, and thought she’d smiled a little the day he pointed out that Meena’s younger brother had lost something, too. “That boy will never want to eat an omelet again.”
In a certain morning light, Manju could see the name MEENA traced faintly in a broken piece of cement just outside the toilet. “Only in that light,” she said, “and even then, it’s barely there.” Another, lesser Meena lived in Annawadi, and a man who loved that Meena had once carved her name on the inside of his forearm. Manju thought he’d probably written MEENA in the wet cement, too. It stood to reason. But she preferred to believe that Meena’s own finger had made the letters, and that the first girl born in Annawadi had left some mark of herself on the place.
In November, the waste market in free fall, the Tamil who owned the game shed tried to help the scavengers grasp why their trash was worth so little. “The banks in America went in a loss, then the big people went in a loss, then the scrap market in the slum areas came down, too”: This was how he explained the global economic crisis. A kilo of empty water bottles once worth twenty-five rupees was now worth ten,