Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [89]
“This lady judge is strict,” a police officer had said. “She does not let the accused go free.” Kehkashan saw at once that this Judge Chauhan was impatient. Pursing her dark red lips, the judge shouted at her father, who had shown up this first day without a lawyer. “It’s a bhaari case, a grave one! Don’t delay me, start it fast, get it going!”
The impatience was structural. Like most fast-track judges, Chauhan conducted more than thirty-five trials simultaneously. A given case wasn’t heard beginning to end, the way Kehkashan had seen on TV serials. Rather, it was chopped into dozens of brief hearings that took place at weekly or fortnightly intervals. On an average day, the judge heard bits of nine trials, so the accused bench where Kehkashan and her father sat, under police supervision, was a crowded affair. There were men on trial for murder, for armed robbery, and for electricity-thieving, many of them shackled. Karam was the oldest man on the bench, Kehkashan the solitary female. Their seats were against the back wall of the courtroom, behind a great assembly of white plastic chairs for witnesses and observers and two tiers of metal desks where a proliferation of clerks, prosecutors, and defenders paged through files. To Kehkashan, the witness stand and the judge with the lipstick seemed very far away.
At the next lightning-fast hearing, the Husains’ lawyer materialized, and a medical officer from Cooper Morgue testified, falsely, that Fatima had been burned over 95 percent of her body. Hearing over. “Now what? What’s next?” asked the judge, pulling out a new file and moving to another case.
Another week, a Sahar police officer testified about the conclusion of the station’s investigation: that the Husains had beaten Fatima and driven her to suicide. “Now what? What’s next?” asked the judge.
What came next was the part of the trial the Husains dreaded. Beginning this March day, and continuing in brief sessions for untold weeks, would be the testimony of neighbors whom the police had chosen to interview from Annawadi, and whom the prosecution had chosen to make its case.
Peculiarly, most of these “witnesses” had not been on hand for the fight that had preceded the burning. Among them were Fatima’s husband and her two closest friends.
On the accused bench, Kehkashan was glad for her burqa, which obscured the fact that she was dripping sweat. She’d contracted jaundice in jail, and a lingering fever had just shot up, which she attributed to her anxiety. She considered her family’s behavior on the crucial day to have been ragged and shameful. She wished she hadn’t said, during the fight with Fatima, that she would twist off her neighbor’s other leg; she wished her father hadn’t threatened to beat Fatima up. But ugly words were unlikely to send them to prison. They would go to prison if enough of the supposed witnesses backed Fatima’s revised hospital statement to the police about being throttled and beaten.
Poornima Paikrao, special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra, had helped craft that hospital statement, after which she’d told Zehrunisa that the accounts of other witnesses would be equally damaging, unless the Husains paid her off. She’d made her second attempt at extortion this morning, right outside the courthouse.
The Annawadi witnesses might remember new, devastating details of the night in question, the special executive officer had told Karam. She herself might have to testify about Fatima’s dying declaration in such a manner that a guilty verdict was all but guaranteed. The special executive officer didn’t want to do it. She wanted to help them. “But what else can I do?” she asked, palms up, as always. “Think again about what might happen. You and your children will go to jail. So what do you suggest?