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June 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
He didn’t like the moon, though: full and stupid bright, illuminating a dusty
open lot in front of his home. Across the lot were the shacks of two dozen
other families, and Abdul feared he wasn’t the only person peering out from
behind the cover of a plywood door. Some people in this slum wished his
family ill because of the old Hindu-Muslim resentments. Others resented his
family for the modern reason, economic envy. Doing waste work that many
Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large family above
subsistence.
The open lot was quiet, at least – freakishly so. A kind of beach-front for a
vast pool of sewage that marked the slum’s eastern border, the place was
bedlam most nights: people fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending
goats, playing cricket, waiting for water at a public tap, lining up outside
a little brothel, or sleeping off the effects of the grave-digging liquor
dispensed from a hut two doors down from Abdul’s own. The pressures that
built up in crowded huts on narrow slumlanes had only this place, the
maidan, to escape. But after the fight, and the burning of the woman called
the One Leg, people had retreated to their huts.
Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo and the usual belly-down splay of
alcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small,
unspookable boy from Nepal. He was sitting, arms around knees, in a spangly
blue haze by the sewage lake – the reflected neon signage of a luxury hotel
across the water. Abdul didn’t mind if the Nepali boy saw him go into
hiding. This kid, Adarsh, was no spy for the police. He just liked to stay
out late, to avoid his mother and her nightly rages.
It was as safe a moment as Abdul was going to get. He bolted for the trash
shed and closed the door behind him.
Inside was carbon-black, frantic with rats, and yet relieving. His storeroom –
120 square feet, piled high to a leaky roof with the things in this world
Abdul knew how to handle. Empty water and whisky bottles, mildewed
newspapers, used tampon applicators, wadded aluminium foil, umbrellas
stripped to the ribs by monsoons, broken shoelaces, yellowed Q-tips, snarled
cassette tape, torn plastic casings that once held imitation Barbies.
Somewhere in the darkness, there was a Berbee or Barblie itself, maimed in
one of the experiments to which children who had many toys seemed to
subject those toys no longer favoured. Abdul had become expert, over the
years, at minimising distraction. He placed all such dolls in his trash pile
tits-down.
Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea
so fiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form. He had
deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry – the type
that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through
people-choked slumlanes. Almost everything about him was recessed save the
pop-out ears and the hair that curled upwards, girlish, whenever he wiped
his forehead of sweat.
A modest, missable presence was a useful thing in Annawadi, the sumpy plug of
slum in which he lived. Here, in the thriving western suburbs of the Indian
financial capital, 3,000 people had packed into, or on top of, 335 huts. It
was a continual coming-and-going of migrants from all over India – Hindus
mainly, from all manner of castes and subcastes. His neighbours represented
beliefs and cultures so various that Abdul, one of the slum’s three dozen
Muslims, could not begin to understand them. He simply recognised Annawadi
as a place booby-trapped with contentions, new and ancient, over which he
was determined not to trip. For Annawadi was also magnificently positioned
for a trafficker in rich people’s garbage.
Read an interview with Katherine Boo here
Abdul and his neighbours were squatting on land that belonged to the
Airports Authority of India. Only a coconut-tree-lined thoroughfare
separated the slum from the entrance to the international terminal. Serving
the airport clientele, and encircling Annawadi, were five extravagant
hotels: four ornate, marbly megaliths and one sleek blue-glass Hyatt, from
the top-floor windows of which Annawadi and several adjacent squatter
settlements looked like villages that had been airdropped into gaps between
elegant modernities.
‘Everything around us is roses’ is how Abdul’s younger brother Mirchi put it.
‘And we’re the shit in between.’
In the new century, as India’s economy grew faster than any other but China’s,
pink condominiums and glass office towers had shot up near the international
airport. One corporate office was named, simply, ‘More’. More cranes for
making more buildings, the tallest of which interfered with the landing of
more and more planes: it was a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle
course up there in the over-city, from which wads of possibility had tumbled
down to the slums.
Every morning, thousands of waste-pickers fanned out across the airport area
in search of vendible excess – a few pounds of the 8,000 tons of garbage
that Mumbai was extruding daily. These scavengers darted after crumpled
cigarette packs tossed from cars with tinted windows. They dredged sewers
and raided dumpsters for empty bottles of water and beer. Each evening, they
returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like
a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.
Abdul would be waiting at his rusty scale. In the hierarchy of the undercity’s
waste business, the teenager was a notch above the scavengers: a trader who
appraised and bought what they found. His profit came from selling the
refuse in bulk to small recycling plants a few miles away.
Abdul’s mother was the haggler in the family, raining vibrant abuse upon
scavengers who asked too much for their trash. For Abdul, words came stiff
and slow. Where he excelled was in the sorting – the crucial, exacting
process of categorising the purchased waste into one of 60 kinds of paper,
plastic, metal and the like, in order to sell it.
Of course he would be fast. He’d been sorting since he was about six years
old, because tuberculosis and garbage work had wrecked his father’s lungs.
Abdul’s motor skills had developed around his labour. ‘You didn’t have the
mind for school, anyway,’ his father had recently observed. Abdul
wasn’t sure he’d had enough schooling to make a judgment either way. In the
early years, he’d sat in a classroom where nothing much happened. Then there
had been only work. Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned
his snot black. Work more boring than dirty. Work he expected to be doing
for the rest of his life. Most days, that prospect weighed on him like a
sentence. Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt like a hope.
The smell of the One Leg’s burning was fainter in the shed, given
the competing stink of trash and the fear-sweat that befouled Abdul’s
clothing. He stripped, hiding his trousers and shirt behind a brittle stack
of newspapers near the door.
His best idea was to climb to the top of his 8ft tangle of garbage, then
burrow in against the back wall, as far as possible from the door. He was
agile, and in daylight could scale this keenly balanced mound in 15 seconds.
But a misstep in the dark would cause a landslide of bottles and cans, which
would broadcast his whereabouts widely, since the walls between huts were
thin and shared.
To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly
arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the
city every day. Moving left, Abdul felt around the blackness for a mass of
blue polyurethane bags. Dirt magnets, those bags. He hated sorting them. But
he recalled tossing the bundled bags on to a pile of soggy cardboard – the
stuff of a silent climb. He found the bags and flattened boxes by the side
wall, the one that divided his shed from his home. Hoisting himself up, he
waited. The cardboard compressed, the rats made rearrangements, but nothing
metal clattered to the floor. Now he could use the side wall for balance as
he considered his next step.
Someone was shuffling on the other side of the wall. His father, most likely.
He’d be out of his nightclothes now, wearing the polyester shirt that hung
loose on his shoulders, probably studying a palmful of tobacco. The man had
been playing with his tobacco all evening, fingering it into circles,
triangles, circles again. It was what he did when he didn’t know what he was
doing.
A few more steps, some unhelpful clanking, and Abdul had gained the back wall.
He lay down. Now he regretted not having his trousers. Mosquitoes. The edges
of torn clamshell packaging, slicing into the backs of his thighs.
The burn-smell lingering in the air was bitter, more kerosene and melted
sandal than flesh. Had Abdul happened across it in one of the slum lanes, he
wouldn’t have doubled over. It was orange blossoms compared with the rotting
hotel food dumped nightly at Annawadi, which sustained 300 shit-caked pigs.
The problem in his stomach came from knowing what, and who, the smell was.
Abdul had known the One Leg since the day, eight years back, that his family
had arrived in Annawadi. He’d had no choice but to know her, since only a
sheet had divided her shack from his own. Even then, her smell had troubled
him. Despite her poverty, she perfumed herself somehow. Abdul’s mother, who
smelt of breast milk and fried onions, disapproved.
In the sheet days, as now, Abdul believed his mother, Zehrunisa, to be right
about most things. She was tender and playful with her children, and her
only great flaw, in the opinion of Abdul, her eldest son, was the language
she used when haggling. Although profane bargaining was the norm in the
waste business, he felt his mother acceded to that norm with too much
relish.
‘Stupid pimp with the brain of a lemon!’ she’d say in mock outrage. ‘You think
my babies will go hungry without your cans? I ought to take down your pants
and slice off what little is inside!’ This, from a woman who’d been raised
in some nowhere of a village to be burqa-clad, devout.
Abdul considered himself ‘old-fashioned, 90 per cent’, and censured his mother
freely. ‘And what would your father say, to hear you cursing in the street?’
‘He would say the worst,’ Zehrunisa replied one day, ‘but he was the one who
sent me off to marry a sick man. Had I sat quietly in the house, the way my
mother did, all these children would have starved.’
Abdul didn’t dare voice the great flaw of his father, Karam Husain: too sick
to sort much garbage, not sick enough to stay off his wife. The Wahhabi sect
in which he’d been raised opposed birth control, and of Zehrunisa’s 10
births, nine children had survived. Zehrunisa consoled herself, each
pregnancy, that she was producing a workforce for the future. Abdul was the
workforce of the present, though, and new brothers and sisters increased his
anxiety. He made errors, paid scavengers dearly for sacks of worthless
things.
‘Slow down,’ his father had told him gently. ‘Use your nose, mouth and ears,
not just your scales.’ Tap the metal scrap with a nail. Its ring will tell
you what it’s made of. Chew the plastic to identify its grade. If it’s hard
plastic, snap it in half and inhale. A fresh smell indicates good-quality
polyurethane.
Abdul had learnt. One year, there was enough to eat. Another year, there was
more of a home to live in. The sheet was replaced by a divider made of
scraps of aluminium and, later, a wall of reject bricks, which established
his home as the sturdiest dwelling in the row. The feelings that washed over
him when he considered the brick divider were several: pride; fear that the
quality of the bricks was so poor the wall would crumble; sensory relief.
There was now a three-inch barrier between him and the One Leg, who took
lovers while her husband was sorting garbage elsewhere.
In recent months, Abdul had had occasion to register her only when she clinked
past on her metal crutches, heading for the market or the public toilet. The
One Leg’s crutches seemed to be too short, because when she walked, her butt
stuck out – did some switchy thing that made people laugh. The lipstick
provided further hilarity. ‘She draws on that face just to squat at the
shit-hole?’ Some days the lips were orange, other days purple-red, as if
she’d climbed the jamun-fruit tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed it clean.
The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but
the runt leg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken
the single offer they got: poor, unattractive, hard-working, Muslim, old –
‘half-dead, but who else wanted her,’ as her mother had once said with a
frown. The unlikely husband renamed her Fatima, and from their mismating had
come three scrawny girls. The sickliest daughter had drowned in a bucket, at
home. Fatima did not seem to grieve, which got people talking. After a few
days she re-emerged from her hut, still switchy-hipped and staring at men
with her gold-flecked, unlowering eyes.
There was too much wanting at Annawadi lately, or so it seemed to Abdul. As
India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s
caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention.
Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin
arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.
Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing a
starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of
waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or
aligning knives and forks on tables. He wanted a clean job like that. ‘Watch
me!’ he’d once snapped at their mother. ‘I’ll have a bathroom as big as this
hut!’
The dream of Raja Kamble, a sickly toilet-cleaner who lived on the lane behind
Abdul’s, was of medical rebirth. A new valve to fix his heart and he’d
survive to finish raising his children. Fifteen-year-old Meena, whose hut
was around the corner, craved a taste of the freedom and adventure she’d
seen on TV serials, instead of an arranged marriage and domestic submission.
Sunil, an undersized 12-year-old scavenger, wanted to eat enough to start
growing. Asha, a fighter-cock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was
differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord,
then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her
teenage daughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become
Annawadi’s first female college graduate.
The most preposterous of these dreamers was the One Leg. Everyone thought so.
Her abiding interest was in extramarital sex, though not for pocket change
alone. That, her neighbours would have understood. But the One Leg also
wanted to transcend the affliction by which others had named her. She wanted
to be respected and reckoned attractive. Annawadians considered such desires
inappropriate for a cripple.
What Abdul wanted was this: a wife, innocent of words like ‘pimp’ and
‘sisterf***er’, who didn’t much mind how he smelt; and eventually a home
somewhere, anywhere, that was not Annawadi. Like most people in the slum,
and in the world, for that matter, he believed his own dreams properly
aligned to his capacities.
The police were in Annawadi, coming across the maidan towards his home.
It had to be the police. No slumdweller spoke as confidently as this.
Abdul’s family knew many of the officers at the local station, just enough to
fear them all. When they learnt that a family in the slum was making money,
they visited every other day to extort some. The worst of the lot had been
Constable Pawar, who had brutalised little Deepa, a homeless girl who sold
flowers by the Hyatt. But most of them would gladly blow their noses in your
last piece of bread.
Abdul had been bracing for this moment when the officers crossed his family’s
threshold – for the sounds of small children screaming, of steel vessels
violently upended. But the two officers were perfectly calm, even friendly,
as they relayed the salient facts. The One Leg had survived and had made an
accusation from her hospital bed: that Abdul, his older sister and their
father had beaten her and set her on fire.
Later, Abdul would recall the officers’ words penetrating the storeroom wall
with a fever-dream slowness. So his sister Kehkashan was being accused, too.
For this, he wished the One Leg dead. Then he wished he hadn’t wished it. If
the One Leg died, his family would be even more screwed.
To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing
or another. Abdul sometimes bought pieces of metal that scavengers had
stolen. He ran a business, such as it was, without a licence. Simply living
in Annawadi was illegal, since the airport authority wanted squatters like
himself off its land. But he and his family had not burnt the One Leg. She
had set herself on fire.
Abdul’s father was professing the family’s innocence in his breathy,
weak-lunged voice as the officers led him out of the house. ‘So where is
your son?’ one of them demanded loudly as they stood outside the storeroom
door. The officer’s volume was not in this instance a show of power. He was
trying to be heard over Abdul’s mother, wailing.
Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief
ways of starting conversations. But now her children’s sobbing intensified
her own. The little Husains’ love for their father was simpler than Abdul’s
love for him, and they would remember the night the police came to take him
away.
Time passed. Wails subsided. ‘He’ll be back in half an hour,’ his mother was
telling the children in a high-pitched singsong, one of her lying tones.
Abdul took heart in the words ‘be back’. After arresting his father, the
police had apparently left Annawadi.
Abdul couldn’t rule out the possibility that the officers would return to
search for him. But from what he knew of the energy levels of Mumbai
policemen, it was more likely that they would call it a night. That gave him
three or four more hours of darkness in which to plan an escape more
sensible than a skulk to the hut next door.
He didn’t feel incapable of daring. One of his private vanities was that all
the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength – that he
could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. ‘So let’s get a brick,’ replied a
girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction. Abdul had
bumbled away. The brick belief was something he wanted to harbour, not to
test.
Mirchi, two years younger, was braver by a stretch, and wouldn’t have hidden
in the storeroom. Mirchi liked the Bollywood movies in which bare-chested
outlaws jumped out of high windows and ran across the roofs of moving
trains, while the policemen in pursuit fired and failed to hit their marks.
Abdul took all dangers, in all films, overseriously. He was still living
down the night he’d accompanied another boy to a shed a mile away, where
pirated videos played. The movie had been about a mansion with a monster in
its basement – an orange-furred creature that fed on human flesh. When it
ended, he’d had to pay the proprietor 20 rupees to let him sleep on the
floor, because his legs were too stiff with fear to walk home.
As ashamed as he felt when other boys witnessed his fearfulness, Abdul thought
it irrational to be anything else. While sorting newspapers or cans, tasks
that were a matter more of touch than of sight, he studied his neighbours
instead. The habit killed time and gave him theories, one of which came to
prevail over the others. It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived
not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the
accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that
hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t
caught. And while he regretted not being smarter, he believed he had a
quality nearly as valuable for the circumstances in which he lived. He was
chaukanna, alert.
What time was it? A neighbour named Cynthia was in the maidan,
shouting, ‘Why haven’t the police arrested the rest of this family?’ Cynthia
was close to Fatima the One Leg, and had despised Abdul’s family ever since
her own family garbage business failed. ‘Let’s march on the police station,
make the officers come and take them,’ she called out to the other
residents. From inside Abdul’s home came only silence.
After a while, mercifully, Cynthia shut up. There didn’t seem to be a
groundswell of public support for the protest march, just irritation at
Cynthia for waking everyone up. Abdul felt the night’s tension finally
thinning, until steel pots began banging all around him. It was morning. The
clangour around him was Annawadians in adjacent huts, making breakfast. The
only clear thing was that in the gravest situation of his life, a moment
demanding courage and enterprise, he had stayed in Annawadi and fallen
asleep.
At once, he knew his course of action: to find his mother. Having proved
himself useless as a fugitive, he needed her to tell him what to do.
‘Go fast,’ said Zehrunisa Husain, upon issuing her instructions. ‘Fast as you
can!’
Abdul grabbed a fresh shirt and flew. Across the clearing, down a zigzag lane
of huts, out on to a rubbled road. Garbage and water buffalo, slum-side.
Glimmerglass Hyatt on the other. Fumbling with shirt buttons as he ran.
After 200 yards he gained the wide thoroughfare that led to the airport,
which was bordered by blooming gardens, pretties of a city he barely knew.
Butterflies, even: he blew past them and hooked into the airport. Arrivals
down. Departures up. He went a third way, running beside a long stretch of
blue-and-white aluminium fencing, behind which jackhammers blasted,
excavating the foundations of a glamorous new terminal. Abdul had
occasionally tried to monetise the terminal’s security perimeter. Two
aluminium panels, swiped and sold, and a garbage boy could rest for a year.
He kept moving, made a hard right at a field of black and yellow taxis
gleaming in a violent morning sun. Another right, into a shady curve of
driveway, a leafy bough hanging low across it. One more right and he was
inside the Sahar Police Station.
Zehrunisa had read her son’s face: this boy was too anxious to hide from the
police. Her own fear, upon waking, was that the officers would beat her
husband as punishment for Abdul’s escape. It was the eldest son’s duty to
protect a sick father from that. Abdul would do his duty, and almost, almost
gladly. Hiding was what guilty people did; being innocent, he wanted the
fact stamped on his forehead. So what else to do but submit himself to the
stamping authorities – to the law, to justice, concepts in which his limited
history had given him no cause to believe? He would try to believe in them
now.
A police officer in epauletted khaki was splodged behind a grey metal desk.
Seeing Abdul, he rose up, surprised. His lips, under his moustache, were fat
and fishlike, and Abdul would remember them later – the way they parted a
little before he smiled.
‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ (Portobello Books, £14.99) is available for
£12.99 plus £1.25 pp from Telegraph
Books (0844-871 1515)
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