Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [88]
In February, the impatient Taufeeq beat Sunil up and assumed control of the operation to rob Taj Catering Services. Sunil was relieved to be demoted to one of four soldiers. The boys went through the hole in the stone wall once a week for three weeks, acquiring twenty-two small pieces of iron. One night, when security guards came running, the boys pelted them with stones. Sunil now had enough to eat, plus ten extra rupees to buy a skull-shaped silver-plate earring that he’d seen outside the Andheri train station. He’d always wanted to own something shining.
There was more German silver in the car park, and in the industrial warehouses over the river. A ladder hoisted from a security kiosk was worth a thousand rupees, divided five ways. Weeks passed in which Sunil was mostly not hungry, and in which he was granted a wish for something greater than a silvery earring.
At first he didn’t believe it—thought it was a trick of shadow and light-slant on the wall of his hut. But standing back to back with Sunita, it was confirmed. He was taller. As a thief, Sunil Sharma had finally started to grow.
While Abdul’s father privately believed that the only Indians who went on trial were those too poor to pay off the police, he had raised his children to respect the Indian courts. Of all the public institutions in the country, these courts seemed to Karam the most willing to defend the rights of Muslims and other minorities. In February, his own trial approaching, he began to follow trials across India in the Urdu papers the way some other Annawadians followed soap operas. Though he disputed many a specific court resolution, and understood that some judges were corrupt, his relative faith in the judiciary obtained.
“In the police station, they tell us only to be silent,” Karam said to Abdul, who remembered enough not to need telling. “In the courts, though, what we say may get heard.” Karam was still more hopeful when he learned that his case had been assigned to the city’s Fast-Track Sessions Court.
In normal courts, five or eight or eleven years sometimes passed between the declaration of charges and the beginning of a trial. To people without permanent work—the vast majority in India—every court appearance involved a forfeit of daily wages. Long trials were economically ruinous. But by fiat of the central government, the massive case backlogs were now being addressed by fourteen hundred high-speed courts across the country. In Mumbai, verdicts were flying out of fast-track courts so quickly that the number of pending trials, citywide, had declined by a third in three years. Many notorious cases, including organized-crime ones, went directly to fast track, since the public was presumably eager to see them resolved. But in addition to the publicized cases, which brought television trucks to the fast-track courthouse, were thousands of small, unnewsworthy trials, like the Husains’.
A judge named P. M. Chauhan had been assigned to decide whether Karam and Kehkashan had driven their neighbor to self-immolation. Abdul would have a separate trial in juvenile court at a later date and would not see the inside of Judge Chauhan’s courtroom. As such, the trial felt to him as if it were happening oceans away, no matter what his sister said about a sixty-minute bus-and-train ride to a south Mumbai neighborhood called Sewri. The matter was one of many in his life that he considered out of his hands. He simply counted on Kehkashan, a more reliable narrator than his father, to keep him apprised of how worried he should be.
The courthouse in Sewri had previously been a pharmaceutical company. “This hardly seems like a court,” Kehkashan said to her father, concerned, on the day the trial began. No teak banisters; nothing stately. The hallways were clotted with encampments—families of other accused people eating, praying, sleeping, leaning