Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

by Katherine Boo

But he felt that urban slums surrounded by affluence turned children contemptuous of their parents—“because we can’t give the brand-name clothes, the car.”

He considered it fortunate that Mirchi was merely lazy, not a defiant consumer of Eraz-ex, but there were six other children after Mirchi. To Karam, Vasai was the ideal village-city hybrid: a place where opportunity and parental respect weren’t mutually exclusive.

Having a man to deal with that world on her behalf had seemed to her a fine thing.

“Just because I can’t read, you pretend to everyone that you’re the hero in this family and I am the nothing,” she’d said to him recently. “Like I would have been stuck in my mother’s womb without you to get me out! Go, act like this big-time shareef, but it is I who have been managing everything!”

Slight and weathered, he was monosyllabic when sober,

Asha, it was rumored, always won.

And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.

At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy.

And at the heart of envy was possibly hope—that the good fortune of others might one day be hers.

“If you don’t stop breaking my house, motherfucker, I will put you in a trap,” shouted Fatima. “It’s my wall to break, prostitute,” Zehrunisa shouted back. “If we’d waited for you to build a wall, we’d all still be seeing each other naked!”

Abdul calmed himself by imagining that if his mother had a nicer house, she might start practicing a nicer way of speaking.

An hour later, she started to believe it would be fine when Officer Kulkarni offered her a cup of tea and advice: “You need to really beat the crap out of this One Leg, finish the matter once and for all.” “Oh, but how can I beat her when she is a cripple?” “But if you don’t beat people like that, you will have to deal with them over and over again. Just whack her, and I will handle it if she complains. Don’t worry.”

But she decided to give Officer Kulkarni a wet-eyed look that conveyed enormous gratitude for the advice about beating her neighbor. Then she turned her attention to a cup of milky tea.

Kehkashan couldn’t hold her tongue. “The police are keeping my mother because of the lies that you told, and you’re dressing up and dancing like some film heroine?” A fresh fight began on the maidan. “Bitch, I can put you in the police station, too,” Fatima shouted. “I won’t leave it—I will put your family in a trap!”

second thought, he wouldn’t do the hitting himself. “Abdul,” he called to his son. “Come and beat her!”

“Yes, you will need your small change for your own funeral,” Fatima replied. “I am going to hurt you all.”

At this hour, cooking fires were being lit all over Annawadi, the spumes converging to form a great smoke column over the slum. In the Hyatt, people staying on the top floors would soon start calling the lobby. “A big fire is coming toward the hotel!” Or, “I think there’s been an explosion!” The complaints about the cow-dung ash settling in the hotel swimming pool would start half an hour later. And now came one more fire, in Fatima’s hut.

The first to come had been her former best friend, Cynthia, whom Fatima blamed for her current situation. Cynthia’s husband had run a garbage-trading business that failed as the Husains’ business prospered, and Cynthia had encouraged Fatima to do something dramatic to prompt a police case against the family that had bested her own. This had been terrible advice, Fatima saw belatedly, though the banana lassi Cynthia brought had been good.

She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t known, lighting the match, what would happen.

“She’s going to die, and it will be a 302,” an officer told Abdul, with what sounded to the boy like delight. Abdul knew that a 302, in the Indian penal code, was murder.

His efforts did not help him maintain his silence. His screaming, then his sobbing, rang out onto the road. But afterward, watching the shiny brown shoes move away, he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t uttered a sound. Although his mother’s wails had become deafening

It was like being in a cabinet showroom, except for the tension and the screaming.

The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.

His father’s voice changed every time he said this bankrupting word, lawyer.

For all Asha’s power in Annawadi, it was inconsistent beyond the slum’s boundaries.

In the part Abdul remembered now, the man was still trapped in his cell, but after years of chipping away at a brick wall that was apparently sturdier than the one between the Husains and Fatima,

Having accepted a life of sorting early on, he considered himself a separate species from Mirchi or the most-everything girl, Manju, or the other young people at Annawadi who believed they might become something different.

Abdul had been aiming for a future like the past, but with more money. The rage of a neighbor with less money had played no part in his calculations.

He just knew that she didn’t really long for companionable misery.

They’d lost a lot in the 2005 floods, but many other Annawadians had, too. He felt his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.

Abdul tried to make sense of this reprieve.

seen he was a hardworking kid, a quiet loser who didn’t deserve to be brutalized.

But Karam wasn’t about to explain the economics of reprieve to his traumatized son. He thought it better for the boy to believe that someone had noticed his frantic labor on behalf of his family and decided to defend him out of kindness.

Now Kehkashan was distraught. “Allah! To turn away a fakir, to take his curse?” Fatima’s husband had set himself up for bad luck, the way he’d spoken to the fakir, and the bad luck most likely to befall him would be a ruination of the Husains as well.

night dropped its hood over the slum,

The next morning, Fatima came home in a white metal box.

An infection had killed her. A doctor adjusted the record in the name of...

“Greenish yellowish sloughs formation all over burn injuries with foul smell,” read the postmortem. “Brain congested, lungs congested. Heart pale.” Fatima’s file was tied up in red string and sent to the records room of the morgue, where feral dogs slept among the towering stacks of folders on the floor, and birdsong came through the window. A flock of spotted doves had colonized a palm tree outside, the croo-croo-croo of one bird overlapping the call of another.

Only other Muslim women could perform this crucial ritual, the washing away of Fatima’s sins.

Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing—the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.

The white box proceeded across a hectic intersection, past Marol Municipal School, through the narrow lanes of one slum and then another, until it reached a water-stained green mosque, a papaya tree, and a burial ground filled with pigeons.

On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August.

Someone had once told Sunil that the rains washed the mean out of people. They certainly washed the stripes off the zebras.

Road Jail was a name that terrified every sentient Mumbaikar, and also Zehrunisa, who was not strictly sentient at this time.

She couldn’t sleep after that. She couldn’t sleep before that. She barely knew which jail she stood in front of this morning.

Maybe she was the zero she’d insisted to her husband she was not. She should have paid Asha to calm

You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.

“Before you were born, Saddam Hussein had been killing a lot of people somewhere. Maybe a year before, or two, I don’t know. Oh, you beat me up when you were inside

Had Abdul been more Saddam-like, she would have been less repulsed by the idea of his being in Arthur Road Jail with contract killers, pedophiles, and mafia dons. But she feared that for an argument she had begun, he would be victimized, perhaps raped, in Arthur Road.

Upon receiving his advice, she sent her money flowing through Marol Municipal School, and into the pocket of the constable. She returned home with just what she’d wanted: a fake school record showing that Abdul Hakim Husain, former student, was sixteen years old. Her son, who had hardly been a child, would at least now be treated like one by the criminal justice system.