Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [90]
“I won’t pay,” Karam had sputtered. “Already my son and daughter have seen the inside of the jail—the terrible things you threaten have already happened. But we’re paying the lawyer, not you, to fix it. The lawyer will make the judge see the truth. And if this judge doesn’t see it,” he had concluded with bravado, “I will take it all the way to the Supreme Court!”
Awaiting the first of their neighbors in a trashed-out courtroom, both father and daughter hoped this belief in the Indian judiciary had a basis in reality.
First to the wooden witness stand was one of Fatima’s two close confidantes, a destitute girl named Priya. Priya was probably the saddest girl in Annawadi, and Kehkashan had known her for years. This morning, the two young women had shared an autorickshaw from the slum to the train station, sitting thigh to dampening thigh, each in her own unhappy bubble. Avoiding Kehkashan’s eyes, Priya had hugged herself, repeating, “I will not go, I am not going.” Priya had avoided most people’s eyes since the burning. “Fatima was the only person who knew my heart’s pain,” she once said. A tougher girl might have been able to forget her friend’s cries for help, her thrashings. But at the stand, as in Annawadi, Priya wore her damage like a slash across the face.
It wasn’t the kind of damage that turned a girl into a fabulist, though. Trembling, Priya told the prosecutor she hadn’t been on the maidan when the fight occurred, and had seen Fatima only after she’d been burned. Fatima provoked a lot of fights in the slum, Priya allowed to the defender before being dismissed from the stand.
Succeeding her in front of the judge was a handsome, articulate man named Dinesh, who loaded luggage at the airport. Kehkashan had never spoken to him, but she’d heard rumors that his testimony would be damaging. She felt sicker than ever when she saw him take the stand with a clenched jaw, a livid face. Because he was speaking in Marathi, some minutes passed before Kehkashan figured out that his anger was not directed at her family but at the Sahar Police.
Shortly after the burning, an officer had recorded a witness statement under Dinesh’s name describing the fight. The statement was false, Dinesh told the judge. He’d been at home in another slumlane, hadn’t seen the fight, and didn’t see why he’d been called as a key prosecution witness. He cared little about the Husains or whether they ended up in prison. What he cared about was having to forgo a day’s income because of an inaccurate police statement.
The surprised prosecutor quickly wrapped up his questioning, the hearing came to an end, and Kehkashan and her father returned to Annawadi feeling almost giddy.
Despite the insinuations of the special executive officer, the first witnesses hadn’t lied in order to ruin them. Looking back, Kehkashan would remember this afternoon’s shock of optimism, before the seams of the celebrated fast-track court began to show.
By April, the case of the Husains was poking along in bitty hearings, and Judge P. M. Chauhan was annoyed. Her stenographer, adept in only the Marathi language, was hopeless at translating the slum Hindi of the Annawadi witnesses into the English required for the official transcript. Impatient at the translation delays, the judge began telling the stenographer what to write. And so a slumdweller’s nuanced replies to the prosecutor’s questions became monosyllabic ones—the better to keep the case moving along. At the end of a particularly tedious hearing, the judge rose for lunch and sighed to the prosecutor and defender, “Ah, fighting over petty, stupid, personal things—these women. All that and it reached such a level they made it a case.” It was becoming apparent that the outcome of the trial mattered only to the people of Annawadi.
For Kehkashan and her father, ten years of incarceration were at stake. But as the weeks progressed, they found it impossible to understand what was being said for or against them in the front of the courtroom. The windows had been opened on account of the April heat, so instead of hearing the