Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [99]
Most of the speculators intended to use the rehabilitation flats as rental or investment properties. “The flat I’ll get will be worth ten times what I paid for this place,” said the businessman who bought Abdul’s storage hut. A small-time politician named Papa Panchal had secured a large block of huts by the sewage lake on behalf of a major developer, hiring thugs on commission to persuade the occupants to sell.
Asha had anticipated her own commission when she arranged for a middle-aged hotel supplier to buy the hut of an illiterate young mother of three named Geeta. The fake papers, showing that the businessman was a veteran slumdweller, had come out nicely. Then Geeta began to have second thoughts at high volume.
Such shouting, up and down the slumlanes! Asha had tricked her! Her children would be out on the pavement! Geeta refused to leave her hut, and tried to register a complaint with the police. Asha handled the police end of things, of course. The problem arose when the businessman sent a gang of drunken men to expedite Geeta’s exit—on a Sunday afternoon, when all of Annawadi was on hand to watch.
Asha dispatched her son Rahul to supervise as the men dragged the tiny, flailing Geeta out into the slumlanes by her hair, dumped her belongings into the sewage lake, called her a whore, and poured kerosene over her last bag of rice. Sobbing, Geeta’s young children had crouched to pick up the spoiled rice grains, one by one.
Bad visuals. Damaging to the stature of a slumlord, especially one who had been seen sitting at home, face hard as a knuckle, while the violence in the slumlanes had transpired. Ever since that Sunday, the whispers of her neighbors had trailed Asha like jet streams.
“She’s become like an animal in her greed,” said a Nepali woman, putting her hand to her mouth.
“Always she was sly, but now we know there is no one she won’t hurt for money,” said a Tamil woman.
“She probably made ten thousand rupees in the end,” said Zehrunisa. This hurt the most, when it got back to Asha. Ten thousand would have been tremendous—would have made up for the lost reputation. Instead, the businessman had stiffed her on the commission.
It was an experience so disheartening that when another corrupt and powerful person approached her, promising that, this time, her efforts would be rewarded with a share of the proceeds, she was skeptical.
And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die. She firmly held this position of pessimism until the day she saw she would be living more, which was the day the government check cleared the bank.
The idea that secured her family’s future was not her own. It belonged to an administrator named Bhimrao Gaikwad at the Maharashtra Department of Education. His charge was to implement in Mumbai an ambitious central government program, supported by foreign aid, called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Its aim was to make elementary education universal, bringing tens of millions of child laborers, girls, and disabled children to school for the first time.
In newspaper interviews, Gaikwad spoke of his search for unschooled children and his hope of giving them the sort of education that would lift them out of poverty. His less public ambition was to divert federal money to himself. Working with community development officials across the city, he found frontmen to receive government funds in the name of educating children. Then he and his colluders would divvy up the spoils.
Later, Asha wished that she had come to the attention of Gaikwad because of her intelligence, or even her looks. But his interest was based on something more mundane: the fact that she had a nonprofit organization. In 2003, another man with another scheme had set up the nonprofit for her, promising a city sanitation contract that had failed to materialize.
“Properly registered?