Behind the Beautiful Forevers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the city’s first metro rail was being constructed here, to complement an elevated expressway slowly rising on Airport Road. Abdul feared running out of gas while in the gridlock, but in the last spidery light before nightfall, his wheezing vehicle gained a vast slum called Saki Naka.
    Among Saki Naka’s acres of sheds were metal-melting and plastic-shredding machines owned by men in starched kurtas—white kurtas, to announce the owners’ distance from the filth of their trade. Some of the workers at the plants were black-faced from carbon dust and surely black-lunged from breathing iron shavings. A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “Sa’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.”
    For all Mirchi’s talk of progress, India still made a person know his place, and wishing things different struck Abdul as a childish pastime, like trying to write your name in a bowl of melted kulfi. He had been working as hard as he could in the stigmatized occupation he’d been born to, and it was no longer a profitless position. He intended to return home with both hands and a pocketful of money. His mental estimates of the weight of his goods had been roughly correct. Peak-season recyclables, linked to a flourishing global market, had bestowed on his family an income few residents of Annawadi had ever known. He had made a profit of five hundred rupees, or elevendollars a day—enough to jump-start the plan that inspired his mother’s morning curses, and that even the little Husains knew to keep close.
    With this take, added to savings from the previous year, his parents would now make their first deposit on a twelve-hundred-square-foot plot of land in a quiet community in Vasai, just outside the city, where Muslim recyclers predominated. If life and global markets kept going their way, they would soon be landowners, not squatters, in a place where Abdul was pretty sure no one would call him garbage.

Rahul’s mother, Asha, took note in that winter of hope: The slumlord of Annawadi had gone batty and pious! Although Robert Pires beat his second wife, he let her live. He erected a Christian shrine outside his hut, then a second shrine, to a Hindu goddess. Before these altars every Saturday, he clasped his meaty hands in prayer and atoned for all past crimes by giving tea and bread to hungry children. Weekdays, the attractions of the underworld paling, he passed the hours in slack communion with nine horses he stabled in the slum, two of which he’d painted with stripes to look like zebras. Robert rented the fake zebras, along with a cart, to the birthday parties of middle-class children—a turn to honest work he thought the judging gods might factor in.
    In this reformation, thirty-nine-year-old Asha Waghekar perceived an opportunity. Robert had lost his taste for power just as she was discovering her own. Let others thread the marigolds. Let others sort the trash. For the overcity people who wished to exploit Annawadi,and the undercity people who wished to survive it, she wanted to be the woman-to-see.
    Slumlord was an unofficial position, but residents knew who held it—the person chosen by local politicians and police officers to run the settlement according to the authorities’ interests. Even in a rapidly modernizing India, female slumlords were relative rarities, and those women who managed to secure such power typically had inherited land claims or were stand-ins for powerful husbands.
    Asha had no claims. Her husband was an alcoholic, an itinerant construction worker, a man thoroughgoing only in his lack of ambition. As she’d raised their