Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [9]
“Bastard, forget the fish, tell me about the girls,” Mirchi protested. “They want you to look when they dress like that.”
“Seriously, you can’t look. Not even at the rich people’s toilets. Security will chuck you out. The toilets for the workers were nice, though. You have a choice between Indian- or American-style.” Rahul, who had a patriotic streak, had peed in the Indian one, an open drain in the floor.
Other boys joined Rahul outside the Husains’ hut. Annawadians liked to talk about the hotels and the depraved things that likely went on inside. One drug-addled scavenger talked to the hotels: “I know you’re trying to kill me, you sisterfucking Hyatt!” But Rahul’s accounts had special value, since he didn’t lie, or at least not more than one sentence out of twenty. This, along with a cheerful disposition, made him a boy whose privileges other boys did not resent.
Rahul gamely conceded he was a nothing compared with the Intercontinental’s regular workers. Many of the waiters were college-educated, tall, and light-skinned, with cellphones so shiny their owners could fix their hair in the reflections. Some of the waiters had mocked Rahul’s long, blue-painted thumbnail, which was high masculine style at Annawadi. When he cut the nail off, they’d teased him about how he talked. The Annawadians’ deferential term for a rich man, sa’ab, was not the proper term in the city’s moneyed quarters, he reported to his friends. “The waiters say it makes you sound D-class—like a thug, a tapori,” he said. “The right word is sir.”
“Sirrrrrrr,” someone said, rolling the r’s, then everyone started saying it, laughing.
The boys stood close together, though there was plenty of space in the maidan. For people who slept in close quarters, his foot in my mouth, my foot in hers, the feel of skin against skin got to be a habit. Abdul stepped around them, upending an armful of torn paper luggage tags on the maidan and scrambling after the tags that blew away. The other boys paid him no notice. Abdul didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was as if he’d spent weeks privately working over some little idea. He might have had a friend or two if he’d known how to tell a good story.
Once, working on this shortcoming, he’d floated a tale about having been inside the Intercontinental himself—how a Bollywood movie called Welcome had been filming there, and how he’d seen Katrina Kaif dressed all in white. It had been a feeble fiction. Rahul had seen through it immediately. But Rahul’s latest report would allow Abdul’s future lies to be better informed.
A Nepali boy asked Rahul about the women in the hotels. Through slats in the hotel fences, he had seen some of them smoking—“not one cigarette, but many”—while they waited for their drivers to pull up to the entrance. “Which village do they come from, these women?”
“Listen, idiot,” Rahul said affectionately. “The white people come from all different countries. You’re a real hick if you don’t know this basic thing.”
“Which countries? America?”
Rahul couldn’t say. “But there are so many Indian guests in the hotels, too, I guarantee you.” Indians who were “healthy-sized”—big and fat, as opposed to stunted, like the Nepali boy and many other children here.
Rahul’s first job had been the Intercontinental’s New Year’s Eve party. The New Year’s bashes at Mumbai’s luxury hotels were renowned, and scavengers had often returned to Annawadi bearing discarded brochures. Celebrate 2008 in high style at Le Royal Meridien Hotel! Take a stroll down the streets of Paris splurging with art, music & food. Get scintillated with live performances. Book your boarding passes and Bon Voyage! 12,000 rupees per couple, with champagne. The advertisements were printed on glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees, or four U.S. cents, per kilo.
Rahul had been underwhelmed