Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [94]
As the trial proceeded, the whole family had tried to follow the virtuous path of Abdul’s teacher at Dongri: not buying anything that might have been stolen. Although this decision reduced the family income by 15 percent, it didn’t decrease the attention of the police. Officers came to demand money every day now—“licking at us like dogs, sucking what is left of our blood,” Zehrunisa cried one afternoon. Unable to accuse the family of possessing hot goods, the officers threatened to arrest Abdul for sorting his garbage on the maidan. A usurpation of public space! A crime against Annawadians’ quality of life!
The officers hinted that a new charge might be used to show the judge that the family had a pattern of criminality. So Zehrunisa paid bribe after bribe, as her husband searched for a storeroom in another police district where officers might not know about the court case.
Karam tried to be optimistic about what they would make by selling off the last of their recyclables. “There must be five kilos of German silver here,” he said. “Maybe two kilos of copper.”
“Bullshit,” snapped Zehrunisa. “It is much less than that. Like father like son—Mirchi is like you. Doesn’t want to work, only wants to eat. Both of you want everything for free.”
Mirchi winced. Growing up, he’d been the first to call himself lazy. He’d liked to show his friends a bleached-out photo of Abdul and himself as toddlers. “See how Abdul is moving while I am sitting? It was like that even then!” But the family catastrophe had changed him. He’d become a fast, competent garbage sorter and taken every other job he could find.
He’d worked construction with his best friend, Rahul, finishing two swimming pools in a new boutique hotel on Airport Road. Then he scored the temp work of his dreams: setting up for parties at the Intercontinental hotel. A subcontractor had liked the looks of him and handed him a clip-on bow tie and a uniform coat. The coat’s cloth was as black and glossy as a crow’s wing; his mother had grown silent when she touched it. At the end of the workweek, though, the subcontractor reclaimed the beautiful coat and paid him only a fifth of what he’d been promised. When Mirchi traveled across the city to the man’s office to collect the remainder, security guards turned him away.
His next temp job was at Skygourmet, which made meals served on airplanes. Arriving at work, Mirchi stood under a blower that blasted the city dirt from his body, then loaded food onto pallets inside a cavernous freezer. It was miserable labor, carrying heavy containers when he was too cold to manage his limbs. Ice formed inside his runny nose, and when his flesh touched metal, it stuck. Still, he made two hundred rupees a day, until management cut back the temp staff.
Many businesses dependent on the airport were downsizing as the effects of the terror attacks and the recession persisted. Asha’s political party, Shiv Sena, had been protesting these cuts, sometimes violently. After layoffs at the Intercontinental, a Shiv Sena gang smashed up its elegant lobby, demanding more work for the Maharashtrians—a rampage of which Rahul was one beneficiary. He secured a six-month stint cleaning air-conditioning ducts. Mirchi was happy for Rahul, and only a little resentful that his own parents’ best connections were with scavengers.
“There’s this guy who counts cars in a parking lot, and he said he saw the talent in me,” Mirchi reported one evening at home, breathless in his hope that this new contact might lead to steady work. But there were millions of other bright, likable, unskilled young men in this city.
As the Husains waited for closing arguments in their case, the rest of Mumbai began following another fast-track trial. The lone surviving gunman of the terror attack, a twenty-one-year-old Pakistani named Ajmal Kasab, had