Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [96]
Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably little different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him—the police officers and the special executive officer and the morgue doctor who fixed Kalu’s death. If he had to sort all humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of.
He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.
It wasn’t easy to believe, just now. The lawyer for Kehkashan and Karam had been confident about exoneration after Cynthia’s ragged performance as a prosecution witness. But just before closing arguments, Judge Chauhan had been transferred to a court on the other side of the state. A new judge would have to be appointed and, using the flawed court transcript, try to pick up where the first judge had left off.
The Husains were crushed, a fact not lost on the special executive officer with the gold-rimmed spectacles. She came for a third time to try to extort payment from them, this time accompanied by Fatima’s husband.
The new judge was severe and likely to find the Husains guilty, the special executive officer said. Fortunately, Fatima’s husband was willing to take back the case. He would cancel his testimony and the testimony of his late wife, upon which the trial would shut down. The price for ending the trial would be two lakhs—more than four thousand dollars.
The special executive officer seemed to be banking on the ignorance of slumdwellers: that the Husains wouldn’t understand that the case against them was a criminal one, brought by the state of Maharashtra, and that Fatima’s husband didn’t have the power to call it off, no matter how much the Husains paid.
Before telling the woman off, Abdul’s father checked his facts with his lawyer. He wanted to make sure that what he’d gleaned about legal process from reading Urdu newspapers was correct. It was. Finally, a small triumph of information over corruption.
Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation—the idea that their country’s rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life. In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.
Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. “We try so many things,” as one Annawadi girl put it, “but the world doesn’t move in our favor.”
Three days a week, going through the child-size security gate at Dongri, Abdul scanned the courtyard for The Master. He wanted to tell him about the government official who had tried to trick his parents, and about how well the trial had been going until the female judge was sent away, and how his Annawadi business had been undone by the police. Abdul had told so many lies about The Master, back at Annawadi, that he had started to believe the man actually cared how he was faring.
Abdul didn’t find The Master, though. After signing his name in a register, he returned to the street wondering how he could delay going back to a shed in Saki Naka where he was failing to make his family’s living. One day, trying to recover his energy, he walked an hour from the juvenile jail to Haji Ali, the city’s