Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction account of the lives of residents of a slum in Mumbai called Annawadi, which sat adjacent to the Mumbai International Airport. Katherine Boo, a U.S. journalist married to an Indian, spent four years learning the stories of Annawadi residents through reading public documents, conducting interviews, and observing people’s day-to-day lives. She tells the stories of real people—their names are unchanged—and how a globalized world affected them: Despite India experiencing a new era of wealth, opportunity, and increasing development, many people still struggled to survive day to day, even when working harder than ever.
Though governments can create policy to nurture the potential of their people, they sometimes just reinforce corruption instead, and people adapt to the system. In Annawadi, the poor tried to exploit one another to get ahead, and police and government officials exploited the poor, leaving the poor with little power and few resources. Nevertheless, many still hoped they could get ahead if they simply worked hard enough.
Annawadi, a half-acre slum, sprang up in 1991 during repairs to a runway of the Mumbai airport. The workers came from the state of Tamil Nadu and decided to stay in hopes they could get additional construction jobs. The land was swampy, and they worked to pack dry dirt into muddy areas to make it livable.
By 2008, Annawadi had 3,000 inhabitants. The slum had a sewage lagoon filled with garbage and pollutants. Airport construction workers also dumped waste there in the middle of the night. Some people living in the slum made so little money that they had to supplement their diet by catching rats and frogs living near the lagoon, or eating the grass that grew at its edges. People suffered air-pollution-related ailments, like asthma, as well as tuberculosis and other diseases.
A large concrete wall stood between the slum and main drive for the international terminal of the airport. On the wall, cheerful advertisements hawked luxury items to the overcity, or upper classes. One advertised Italian tiles with the slogan, “Beautiful Forever,” repeated over and over. Thus, the slum was located “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”
Most people did work making cheap goods, like garlands for airport tourists or decorations for people’s car mirrors. Because globalization was generating new wealth in India, many people no longer felt limited by caste or religious affiliation and aspired to better jobs or living situations. However, full-time work and the stability it affords was increasingly hard to find.
As India modernized and became sensitive to the poor image created by the poverty of slums, there was periodically interest in razing Annawadi, but this had yet to come to fruition—a few huts were razed in 2001 and 2004, but most of the slum remained in place.
Abdul Hakim Husain was a teenager who belonged to one of the few Muslim families in Annawadi. From a young age, Abdul helped his family earn a living by buying recyclable materials and garbage from trash pickers and selling it to recyclers. Being adjacent to the airport meant trash was abundant, whether from the luxury hotels surrounding the airport or tossed along the road to the international terminal. The variety and volume of trash coming from the airport, hotels, and construction projects reflected a booming global economy.
The Husains were looked down on for being Muslim. Most of the slum’s residents were Hindu, and tensions between Hindus and Muslims span centuries. Even the family’s modest success as garbage sellers drew suspicion from their neighbors in the slum. Muslims often had trouble getting decent jobs, such as those of hotel workers, in Mumbai.
Abdul’s mother, Zehrunisa, had many obligations to her family and her neighbors. Her husband, Karam, had made a payment on land where he hoped to build a home in a Muslim community just outside of Mumbai. He saw the move as a chance to give his family a comfortable living without frequent exposure to luxury goods they couldn’t afford, like the fancy cars and clothes seen near the slum. But Zehrunisa wanted to continue living in Annawadi, having found some freedoms she wouldn’t likely have in a predominantly Muslim community. For example, she could more readily confront her husband about things that upset her, something that might be frowned upon by more conservative Muslims who didn’t view it as a woman’s place to do so. She negotiated with her husband to make their hut in Annawadi livable instead of continuing to invest in the land in Mumbai.
Abdul purchased garbage from garbage pickers who lived in the slum, keeping it in a storage shed near his family’s hut. Two garbage pickers he worked with, Sunil and Kalu, embodied the plight facing young boys, especially trash pickers, in the slum.
Sunil lost his mother early in his life, and his father had taken him to an orphanage. Sunil became a trash picker when he was kicked out of the orphanage at age 11 because the nuns didn’t want to care for older children. He returned to Annawadi and learned to work hard to provide for himself, selling anything he could. Trash picking was grueling work, and Sunil worried that the work had stunted his growth and he’d end up a small man like his father.
Oftentimes, work involved climbing in and out of dumpsters. Risks included getting gangrene, maggot-riddled wounds, and lice.
Kalu was known for two things in the slum—working in a diamond factory and scavenging aluminum and other scrap metal, a lucrative prospect. Oftentimes, the industrial facilities that produced these materials had guards or tall fences with barbed wire. Despite these barriers, Kalu could make multiple trips over barbed wire fences in a single night.
Sometimes, police told trash pickers where they could find trash in exchange for a cut of some of their earnings from the materials. In one instance, Kalu and Sunil worked together to take iron rods from a nearby industrial facility. It required expertly navigating the airport grounds, swimming through a polluted river, and going back the same way carrying the heavy pieces of metal, all in the middle of the night. They then sold these to Abdul.
In Annawadi, the Husains’ Muslim community consisted of a man who owned a brothel and the family who lived next door. The mother of the family next door was named Fatima, but Abdul and others called her One Leg because she was born with a leg that tapered below the knee. People made fun of her for the amount of makeup and perfume she wore and her many extramarital lovers.
As a child, Fatima’s family had kept her at home and didn’t send her to school because of her disability. As an adult, she looked for affection where she could find it, but she was also known for her temper, beating her children or hitting neighbors with one of her metal crutches. Neighbors thought her rage was animalistic, but she disagreed—she was just as human as anyone else, yet because of her disability, she was treated as subhuman.
One powerful figure in the local community was Asha. In Asha’s childhood, the women in her family went hungry when there wasn’t enough food to go around. She wanted to amass enough money and power to avoid economic hardship, be a slumlord, and eventually, live outside the slum and reach the middle class. A “slumlord” was the person who ran the slum at the direction of the authorities and politicians. It wasn’t an official position, but everyone knew the role and its influence.
Asha found herself on the path to this role after falling on hard times. Her husband was an alcoholic and was often too drunk to work, affecting the family’s economic security. In her twenties, Asha turned to sleeping with powerful figures, like police officers and politicians, to support her family. The money she brought in helped put her daughter, Manju, through college. (Shortform note: The author also implies that Asha’s extramarital affairs ingratiated her with these figures, helping herself gain political and social power.)
Asha aspired to reach the middle class by broadening her network of connections through her political party, Shiv Sena—which promoted ethnic cleansing and distrusted Muslims, making the Husains suspicious of Asha’s work—and by working to make locals support the party. One way she did this was by helping people solve their problems, which in turn could make them sympathetic to her party. She also staged last-minute events, like protests and rallies, to show support for Shiv Sena politicians.
Asha wasn’t averse to exploiting the people around her for her own gain. In the long term, her goal was to sow discord that she could then help resolve for payment, building her family’s wealth so they could one day afford to live outside of the slum. She also hoped to gain political power by being elected a Corporator and overseeing a political ward, or voting district.
Asha’s political work reflected part of a larger effort on the part of the Indian government to address issues in India like poverty and women’s empowerment. However, most of these problems, as well as big ones like corruption and exploitation, continued to go unaddressed. For example, when the government initiated a group in which women pooled their money to give each other loans in times of need, Asha devised a system where women would pool their money and give it to women outside of the collective at a high interest rate. But when the foreign press needed a tangible example of India’s progress, the government would often send them to Asha to show her projects.
Though Asha was supposed to be a teacher at an elementary school, she had her daughter, Manju, do the teaching instead so she could tend to her political obligations.
Thanks to her mother’s efforts, Manju was the only slum resident attending college. In addition to her college studies, she spent most of her time caring for her family home—gathering water, cooking, cleaning, and more. She also spent two hours per day teaching. The school itself was Annawadi’s only school, taught out of Asha and Manju’s home. It was funded through the Indian government with help from a Catholic charity. Many schools in Mumbai were funded by unscrupulous charities that worked to line the pockets of the wealthy rather than serve school children. But the charity funding Manju’s school was better than most.
Asha thought Manju should only teach on days that someone from the government visited to check in on the school, but Manju wanted to be a teacher when she finished college, and she took pride in her work. Covering all of her responsibilities while completing her studies left Manju only four hours of sleep most nights.
One fateful week, Abdul’s family began renovations Zehrunisa wanted for their home. In the construction process, they upset Fatima, their next-door neighbor. How Fatima chose to retaliate ultimately led to her death and drastically disrupted the life of the Husain family.
Zehrunisa and Karam planned to make the family hut more liveable. Zehrunisa wanted to install Italian tiles like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever poster, as well as a new shelf near her cooking area.
The renovation work involved many noisy tasks. To prepare the hut for the ceramic tiles Zehrunisa wanted, some family members were working to break up the stone floor and level it. Abdul was working to install a cooking surface, but to do so, he needed to cut into the wall that separated their hut from Fatima’s, the one-legged neighbor. Fatima periodically called out from her hut to complain about how loud the work was.
As Abdul was trying to install the cooking surface, he accidentally bumped the brick wall the Husains’ hut shared with Fatima, knocking mortar dust into a pot of rice she was cooking.
Fatima was upset and went outside to confront the Husains about the work. Zehrunisa met her outside and they began shoving each other. Fatima said that they needed to stop doing the work on the wall or Zehrunisa’s family would pay for it, but Zehrunisa contended they had built the shared wall and had a right to do work on their own home.
Fatima went to the police to file a complaint, but they largely dismissed the incident as too minor a squabble for them to deal with. Zehrunisa went to the station later to tell her side of the story and ended up with police officers asking her for bribes.
Meanwhile, while Zehrunisa was at the police station, Kehkashan, her eldest daughter, confronted Fatima outside her hut. She was frustrated with Fatima for complaining to the police, which had led to her mother being harassed for money. Kehkashan threatened to tear Fatima’s other leg off. Fatima retorted by calling Kehkashan a whore, which brought Karam out of the Husains’ hut. He told Fatima that they planned to finish the work and would try to avoid each other after that. But a little while later, he grew angry that Zehrunisa was still being held at the police station and stormed over to Fatima’s hut, threatening to have Abdul beat her. Abdul wanted no part of it. Kehkashan intervened and calmed her father down.
Fatima was mentally unstable, and she wanted a way to get back at the Husains for their threats and the renovations. She barricaded herself in her house, poured kerosene on herself, and lit herself on fire. Some of her neighbors had to break down her door to rescue her. From her hospital bed, Fatima told police that Abdul, Karam, and Kehkashan had burned her.
Meanwhile, the police knew that Fatima had set herself on fire from having talked to her 8-year-old daughter who witnessed it firsthand. They sent a government worker to take an official account of Fatima’s story. In India, it’s a serious crime to commit suicide. Therefore, the government worker framed Fatima’s account by saying she had been driven to do this by the Husains.
Despite knowing that the Husains didn’t do it, the police, the government worker, and Asha saw the incident as an opportunity to extract money from the Husains by convincing them to pay to make the charges go away. Fatima soon died of her injuries.
Karam was arrested for burning Fatima, and Abdul surrendered to the police after a night of hiding in his trash pile. While in police custody, Karam and Abdul faced frequent beatings from police. Their detention was not entered in police records, and they were kept in a room for unofficial police business. It had a small hole in the wall where visitors could talk to those inside and offer small gifts, like cigarettes. Zehrunisa visited regularly to update Abdul and Karam on the status of Fatima and the case.
Zehrunisa had already paid some money when she originally visited the police station to argue their case, but the police wanted even more in exchange for making the case go away. Meanwhile, Asha and the government worker who took Fatima’s official statement were also asking for money to make the case go away. Abdul realized the jail was being run like a business where innocence could be bought for the right price.
Kehkashan was sent to a women’s jail, Karam to the Arthur Road jail, and Abdul to a juvenile detention facility. In India, without paying for jail bonds, the accused could be held for years before facing trial. Zehrunisa had trouble providing collateral to pay for jail bonds to get her three family members out.
At first, Abdul was going to be sent to the same adult jail as his father, but Zehrunisa paid a bribe to a local school to falsify a school record for Abdul, showing that he was 16. She didn’t know his age because families that were struggling to survive didn’t often keep those records.
Eventually, a judge ruled that Abdul wasn’t a flight risk and could live at home until his trial as long as he promised to check in with the jail three days per week.
Zehrunisa told Abdul that his trash business had collapsed in his absence. Abdul decided to restart his business, but he felt determined to walk a more virtuous path. This meant not buying stolen materials from the scavengers and being okay with the income he’d earn from running his business three fewer days per week to meet the jail’s check-in requirement.
Annawadi’s residents attempted to make a living, secure marriages for their children, and find opportunities to climb the social ladder. Their motivation to do so sometimes stemmed from trying to escape worse circumstances in economically depressed rural areas. But sometimes, they couldn’t overcome their challenges and suffered violent deaths or suicide.
Asha took Manju on a trip to her home region of Vidarbha, an agricultural area, to look for a husband for her daughter. Asha hoped to lift her family further out of poverty by marrying Manju to a decently wealthy family. While visiting Vidarbha, they found a soldier who was interested in marrying Manju; he met with Asha and Manju to discuss it.Though Asha had liked the man, and he was somewhat wealthy, her husband objected to the marriage because he believed army men tended to be heavy drinkers.
Manju hoped to marry someone who wouldn’t take her away from her life in Mumbai. When she and Asha returned to Annawadi, they spent some time trying to improve their appearances and build their social networks. Asha hoped this would expand Manju’s marriage prospects and prepare them to fit into high-class society.
Annawadi saw a number of deaths and suicides each year. Along Airport Road, it was common for trash pickers to get hit by cars. Passersby from the slum were often too busy with their own affairs to call the authorities for help, or they feared the authorities.
The local police, for their part, felt increasing pressure from the government to maintain a safe environment around the airport to bolster its image. Officially, only two murders were recorded in the area around the airport, from slums to hotels, over a two-year period. However, deaths were likely undercounted. The deaths of slum residents were largely regarded as a nuisance rather than a problem to fix.
Kalu, one of the young trash pickers Abdul worked with, had come to Annawadi from another slum after his mother’s death. He’d become known for scavenging high-quality recyclables from the airport grounds, but he ran into trouble with the police for doing so—in the eyes of the law, he was trespassing on airport grounds and stealing the goods. The police made a deal with Kalu: He could continue scavenging if he acted as an informant on drug dealers operating around the airport.
Kalu agreed but lived in a constant state of stress. He feared both the police and the powerful drug dealers he ratted on. After leaving Annawadi and trying unsuccessfully to work in his family’s pipe fitting business, Kalu returned to Annawadi. But he was soon found dead on Airport Road. The police recovered the body and concluded that Kalu had died of tuberculosis, but not before some boys from Annawadi had looked at the body. They could see he had severe injuries and said he’d been murdered.
After Kalu’s death, the police rounded up five trash pickers living without shelter in Annawadi, held them, and beat them. To prevent more people from ending up dead along Airport Road—and tarnishing the airport’s image—they gave the trash pickers an ultimatum: Either stop picking trash along Airport Road and at the airport, or face being charged with murdering Kalu. The police didn’t tell the boys that they had already attributed Kalu’s death to tuberculosis in their official report.
By 2008, the great recession had begun in the U.S. and started to affect the livelihoods of Annawadi residents in numerous ways. The court began the trial of Kehkashan and Karam, but it was a long process.
The U.S. recession affected the local economy of Annawadi in complex ways, including reducing jobs and scrap metal prices. At first, the trash pickers thought things would pick up with the start of the tourist season, but after a series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai’s hotels, train stations, and taxis, they realized tourists would be too afraid to come, reducing the waste stream. Many slum residents had to start eating rats and frogs again, unable to afford enough food.
Karam and Kehkashan’s case was put on a fast track—their trial began after they had spent months in jail rather than years. If convicted, they faced 10 years in prison. Abdul would face a separate trial with separate charges.
Though the fast-track system shortened the waiting time for a trial, judges often heard dozens of trials at the same time, holding short hearings for each case each week. So the trials themselves still took months to finish.
Zehrunisa found a lawyer to argue Karam and Kehkashan’s case. Karam hoped they would be exonerated. However, he was concerned that the prosecution was planning to call many witnesses who hadn’t observed Fatima’s burning or the words Karam and Kehkeshan said to Fatima.
The government worker who’d taken Fatima’s statement in the hospital tried multiple times over the course of the trial to convince the Husains to pay her to help resolve the case. The first time, she threatened to embellish the details of the case, and the second time, she said that Fatima’s husband was willing to drop the case in exchange for about $4,000. However, because the case was being brought by the state, it couldn’t be called off for any amount of money. She hoped that the Husains wouldn’t realize this, but they saw through her scheme and refused once again to pay her off.
The Husains finally were found not guilty of burning Fatima. Abdul continued to check in at the juvenile prison, and his family feared that his case might drag on forever.
Abdul had resolved to live a more virtuous life. If most people were like water, he wanted to be like ice—made of the same substance, but elevated above others by how he lived. But as time dragged on, and his trial wasn’t scheduled, he became more disillusioned. He told Allah that he felt as though the ice inside him was melting, and he was becoming water, just like everyone else, because of how the world worked: No matter how much he tried to do the right thing and get ahead, he couldn’t.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers recounts the lives of residents of a slum in Mumbai called Annawadi, which sat adjacent to the Mumbai International Airport..
Katherine Boo, a U.S. journalist married to an Indian, spent four years learning the stories of Annawadi residents through reading public documents, conducting interviews, and observing people’s day-to-day lives. She tells the stories of real people—their names are unchanged—and how a globalized world affected them: Despite India experiencing a new era of wealth, opportunity, and increasing development, many people still struggled to survive day-to-day, even when working harder than ever.
In 1991, India began a period of “economic liberalization,” which led 100 million people out of poverty over time. And yet, Annawadi was founded the same year and persisted. Though governments can create policy to nurture the potential of their people, they sometimes just reinforce corruption instead, and people adapt to the system. The poor tried to exploit one another to get ahead, and police and government officials exploited the poor, leaving the poor with little power and few resources. Nevertheless, many still hoped they could get ahead if they simply worked hard enough.
Part 1 introduces Annawadi, its residents, and their daily struggles.
Annawadi, a half-acre slum, sprang up in 1991 during repairs to a runway of the Mumbai airport. The workers came from the state of Tamil Nadu and decided to stay in hopes they could get additional construction jobs. “Anna” means “older brother” in Tamil, and Annawadi means “land of the Annas.” The land was swampy, and they worked to pack dry dirt into muddy areas to make it livable. The first huts were made of bamboo poles and empty cement sacks.
By 2008, Annawadi had 3,000 inhabitants. Residents lived in one of three areas:
The slum’s sewage lagoon was filled with garbage and pollutants. Airport construction workers also dumped waste there in the middle of the night and one time, something in the lake dyed the bellies of animals that slept near its shores blue. Some people living in the slum made so little money that they had to supplement their diet by catching rats and frogs living near the lagoon, or eating the grass that grew at its edges.
People suffered air-pollution-related ailments, like asthma, as well as tuberculosis and other diseases.
A large concrete wall stood between the slum and main drive to the international terminal of the airport. On the wall, cheerful advertisements hawked luxury items to the “overcity,” or upper classes. One advertised Italian tiles, with the slogan, “Beautiful Forever,” repeated over and over for the length of the wall. Thus, the slum was located “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”
Despite the slum’s proximity to the airport, only six of Annawadi’s residents held permanent jobs there. One young boy, Rahul, had gotten temp work as a server at one of the hotels next to the airport thanks to his mother Asha’s efforts. As a server in this hotel, he got close to the affluent clientele and their over-the-top parties. He told the other slum dwellers stories of the parties, as well as strict company policies for servers, like not looking directly at the guests. One time, he got into trouble for demonstrating some dance moves at the request of the guests.
Most people did work making cheap goods, like garlands for airport tourists or hanging decorations for people’s car mirrors. Many people no longer felt limited by caste or religious affiliation, and they aspired to better jobs or living situations.
As India modernized and became sensitive to the image presented by the poverty of slums, there was periodically interest in razing Annawadi, but this had yet to come to fruition.
Abdul Hakim Husain was a teenager who belonged to one of the few Muslim families in Annawadi. From a young age, Abdul helped his family earn a living by buying recyclable materials and garbage from trash pickers to sell to recyclers. Being adjacent to the airport meant trash was abundant, whether from the luxury hotels surrounding the airport or in the form of food containers littering the road to the international terminal. The variety of trash coming from the airport and hotels reflected a booming global economy. In addition, preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics had boosted the price of scrap metal worldwide, making Abdul’s job suddenly more lucrative. He could earn $11 a day taking materials to a recycling facility.
His father, Karam, had taught Abdul the trade of trash buying—for instance, how to bite and smell plastic to identify what kind it was and how much it was worth. But Karam suffered from tuberculosis and couldn’t work any longer.
The Husains were looked down on for being Muslim. Muslims often had trouble getting decent jobs in Mumbai, such as being hired as hotel workers. Even the family’s modest success as garbage sellers drew some suspicion from their neighbors in the slum. Inspired by Hitler, one local political party, Shiv Sena, valued ethnic cleansing and periodically incited riots against Muslims in Mumbai.
Abdul mostly preferred to keep to himself and not talk—he believed that the less he knew about the neighbors, and the less they knew about him, the better.
Abdul’s mother,, Zehrunisa, had many obligations to her family and her neighbors. Her husband, Karam, made a payment on land outside of Mumbai where he hoped they could build a more permanent dwelling and where they’d be part of a larger Muslim community. Karam saw the move as a chance to give his family a comfortable living without frequent exposure to luxury goods they couldn’t afford, like fancy cars and clothes seen near the slum.
Zehrunisa had doubts about Karam’s dream of moving because:
So she negotiated with her husband to make their hut in Annawadi more livable instead of continuing to invest in the land in Mumbai.
Abdul bought garbage from garbage pickers who lived in the slum, and he kept it in a storage shed near his family’s hut. Two garbage pickers he worked with, Sunil and Kalu, embodied the plight facing young boys, especially trash pickers, in the slum: doing hard work for little gain.
Sunil lost his mother early in his life, and his father had taken him to an orphanage. There, Sunil developed the ability to understand people’s motives. For example, he understood that the nuns running the orphanage would use certain language to persuade foreign tourists visiting the slum to donate goods or money—for instance, they talked about working with Mother Teresa, or about how the children were AIDS orphans—and he understood why the orphanage would accept goods or toys from the visitors, only to turn them around and sell them for money.
Sunil became a trash picker when he was kicked out of the orphanage at 11 years old because the nuns didn’t want to care for older children. He returned to Annawadi and learned to work hard to provide for himself, selling anything he could. Trash picking was grueling work, and Sunil worried he had stopped growing and would end up a small man like his father.
Often, his work involved climbing in and out of dumpsters. Risks included getting gangrene, maggot-riddled wounds, and lice. For energy, Sunil sometimes took puffs of tossed cigarettes. Other kids huffed discarded, partially full bottles of the Indian brand of Wite-Out. Eventually, they’d develop swollen bellies and remained severely underweight.
Kalu was known for two things in the slum—working in a diamond factory and scavenging aluminum and other scrap metal, a lucrative prospect. (The owners of the diamond factory claimed to have a detection system to ensure that employees didn’t steal from the company, but the other boys in the slum didn’t believe it. They insisted Kalu should steal some, even if he had to hide them in his butt.) Often, the industrial facilities that discarded scrap metal would guard the areas or have tall fences with barbed wire. Despite these barriers, Kalu could tolerate making multiple trips over barbed wire fences in a single night.
Sometimes, police would tell trash pickers where they could find trash in exchange for a cut of the earnings from the materials. In one instance, the police told Kalu about an industrial facility near the airport without barbed wire fences where he could scavenge. Kalu visited around 11 p.m. one night and found some iron rods, but he was chased off by security and had to leave them behind. He was convinced that the pieces would be taken by another scavenger if he didn’t get back soon, but he needed some sleep first. Sunil agreed to help him by waking him up at around 3 a.m. and accompanying him to the site. Getting there required expertly navigating the airport grounds, swimming through a black, polluted river, and returning the same way carrying the heavy pieces of metal—all in the middle of the night. They then sold these to Abdul.
Fatima was the mother of the family next door to the Husains. Abdul and others called her One Leg because she was born with one of her legs tapered below the knee. People made fun of her for the amount of makeup and perfume she wore and for her many extramarital lovers.
As a child, Fatima’s family had kept her at home and didn’t send her to school because of her disability. As an adult, she looked for affection where she could find it, maintaining a revolving door for lovers each day while her daughters attended school and her husband was at work. She was also known for her temper, beating her children or hitting neighbors with one of her metal crutches. Neighbors thought her rage was animalistic, but Fatima disagreed—she was just as human as anyone else, yet because of her disability, she was treated as subhuman.
One of Fatima’s young children, a two-year-old girl, caught tuberculosis, and Fatima was terrified she would get it too. Shortly after her daughter’s tuberculosis diagnosis, the child drowned in a bucket. Fatima claimed it was an accident, saying she’d been at the public toilet at the time. Zehrunisa wanted to believe it had been an accident, but since their families shared a wall, she knew that Fatima had been home at the time. Also, the hut was very small, so it was unlikely Fatima didn’t know the girl was in trouble.
The police came to investigate, but they quickly ruled it an accident. Young girls died in the slums all the time. Many parents were extremely wary of illness or injury in their children, fearful that treatment would impoverish them even further. Sickly children of both sexes were often killed. And the phenomenon wasn’t limited to lower-classes—wealthy parents might end a pregnancy of a girl once they found out the sex via sonogram, but slum-dwellers didn’t have access to this technology.
In Annawadi, the Husains’ Muslim community consisted of a man who owned a brothel and Fatima’s family. Though Zehrunisa and Fatima were friends, they clashed frequently, too. On the one hand, Zehrunisa believed that the Muslim families in Annawadi needed to support one another’s religious practices, celebrating holidays together, like Eid. On the other, she disliked how much Fatima beat her children, and she often broke up fights between Fatima and Fatima’s husband.
One powerful figure in the local community was Asha. In Asha’s childhood, the women in her family went hungry when there wasn’t enough food to go around. She wanted to amass enough money and power to avoid economic hardship, become a slumlord, and eventually, live outside the slum and reach the middle class. A “slumlord” was the person who ran the slum at the direction of authorities and politicians. It wasn’t an official position, but everyone understood the rolee.
Asha found herself on the path to this role after falling on hard times. Her husband was an alcoholic and was often too drunk to work, affecting the family’s economic security. In her twenties, Asha turned to sleeping with powerful figures, like police officers and politicians, to support her family. The money she brought in helped put her daughter, Manju, through college. (Shortform note: The author also implies that Asha’s extramarital affairs ingratiated her with these figures, helping herself gain political or social power.)
Asha aspired to reach the middle class by broadening her network of connections through her political party, Shiv Sena—which promoted ethnic cleansing and distrusted Muslims, making the Husains suspicious of Asha’s work—and by working to make locals support the party. One way she did this was by helping people solve their problems, which in turn could make them sympathetic to her party. For example, she held visitation hours in her hut to help people resolve disputes or seek assistance.
Once, an acquaintance of Asha’s, Mr. Kamble, approached her about a business loan. Specifically, he wanted Asha to give him money from a government-backed loan program for small entrepreneurs even though this had nothing to do with how he’d use the money—he was out of work and needed to pay for heart surgery. At the time, the Indian government was trying to promote a story of development by lending money to small businesses, but it wasn’t scrupulous about who got the money or what they used it for. The money was often used for other purposes in exchange for a cut for the officials who handled it.
Though Asha had helped Kamble get a job in the past, she refused his request for a loan, hoping to get a bigger cut later as he grew more desperate. She told him to go to a temple and pray that he would get the money he needed for his heart valve. However, he eventually died without the money for surgery. Asha also staged last-minute events, like protests and rallies, to show support for Shiv Sena politicians.
Asha wasn’t averse to exploiting the people around her for her own gain. In the long term, her goal was to sow discord that she could then help resolve for payment, building her family’s wealth so they could one day afford to live outside of the slum. She also hoped to gain political power by being elected a Corporator and overseeing a political ward, or voting district. Though Asha also was supposed to be a teacher at an elementary school, she had her daughter, Manju, do the teaching instead so she could tend to her political obligations.
Asha’s political work reflected part of a larger effort to address issues in India, like poverty and women’s empowerment. However, most of these problems, as well as big ones like corruption and exploitation, continued to go unaddressed. For example, when the government initiated a group in which women pooled their money to give each other loans in times of need, Asha devised a system where women would pool money and give it to women outside of the collective at a high interest rate. But when the foreign press needed a tangible example of India’s progress on women’s economic security, the government would often send them to Asha to showcase her projects.
When journalists visited, Asha often introduced them to Manju, saying that her daughter was going to be one of the slum’s first college graduates and wouldn’t have to depend on a man for her living, which pleased the visitors.
In another instance, Asha helped to cover up fraud by the Corporator of Ward 76, the political district she lived and worked in. Certain elections in India were required to have only female candidates or only people from a certain caste. To be able to run in a low-caste-only election, the Corporator had faked his caste certificate and ancestry, and won. When his opponent challenged him in court, the Corporator asked Asha to organize a prayer vigil at a local temple to drum up support for his work. The Corporator didn’t show up as promised, but when he called at 1 a.m. to say he wouldn’t be able to make it, he could hear over the phone that a large crowd had gathered and was pleased that he still had the support of the local people.
In college, Manju studied English literature, but her school was not very prestigious, so the bulk of her literature homework consisted of memorizing the plots of books and their themes. Her professor tested her on these, and she’d be tested on a state exam as well. She considered herself good at memorization, or “by-hearting,” as she called it.
Manju spent two hours a day teaching grade school in Annawadi. The school was Annawadi’s only school, taught out of Asha and Manju’s home. It was funded through the Indian government with help from a Catholic charity. Many schools in Mumbai were funded by unscrupulous charities that lined the pockets of the wealthy rather than serving school children. But the charity funding Manju’s school was better than most.
Manju often used her two hours of school teaching each day as a study tool: She’d teach her students about the plots of the books she was reading for college in order to memorize them.
Asha thought Manju should only teach on days that someone from the government visited to check in on the school, but Manju rejected the idea because she took pride in her work, and she wanted to be a teacher when she finished college.
In addition to her college studies, Manju spent most of her time caring for her family home—gathering water, cooking, cleaning, and more. Covering all of her responsibilities while completing her studies left her only four hours of sleep most nights. People in the slum thought that Manju was exceptionally kind given her demanding schedule, her beauty, and her mother’s network of connections. Manju disapproved of her mother being involved in scandals around the slum, but she tried her best to keep to her misgivings to herself.
Consider the effects of globalization, and global tourism specifically, on the poorest members of society.
Abdul, Sunil, and Kalu depended on income from the waste generated by wealthy visitors to the airport and surrounding area, like luxury hotels. What are some other ways that globalization in general or tourism in particular might impact the world’s poor?
If you’ve visited another country, how have your actions impacted the local population? (For example, did you stay at a locally-owned inn or an international chain hotel? Did you eat at local restaurants and support other local businesses?)
What can you do in the future to minimize your impact on local communities during your travels?
Abdul’s family soon began work on the renovations Zehrunisa wanted for their home. In the construction process, they upset Fatima, their next-door neighbor. How Fatima chose to retaliate ultimately drastically disrupted the life of the Husain family.
To make their hut more liveable, Zehrunisa and Karam planned to install Italian tiles like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever poster, a new shelf near her cooking area, and a small window to let out the cooking smoke.
Despite the constant threat of the authorities coming to raze the slum, no one thought there was anything wrong with the family making renovations to their hut. They knew that whenever the razing happened, the government planned to relocate families who had lived in the slum since 2000 to apartments, and they figured that families with more established huts stood a better chance of getting accepted into this program.
Before beginning the work, the family moved out trash and recyclables they were storing in their house, as well as a television they had bought on a payment plan and some other goods. Some of the children guarded the piles while the other children did the work.
Abdul worried that his family’s renovation would make their Hindu neighbors resentful that his Muslim family earned more than they did. He generally tried not to attract attention to himself. Indeed, seeing the piles of things outside, some of Annawadi’s residents began to realize that the family was wealthier than other families in the slum.
The renovation work involved many noisy tasks. To prepare the hut for the ceramic tiles Zehrunisa wanted, some family members were working to break up the stone floor and level it. Abdul was working to install a cooking surface, but to do so, he needed to cut into the wall that separated their hut from that of Fatima, the one-legged neighbor. Fatima periodically called out from her hut to complain about how loud the work was. She had complained the last three times the Husains had done work on their hut. Each time Fatima called out complaining, Zehrunisa would patiently call back, explaining the work they were doing and that it’d be noisy.
As Abdul was trying to install the cooking surface, he accidentally bumped the wall, knocking mortar dust into a pot of rice Fatima was cooking. Fatima was upset and went outside to confront the Husains. Zehrunisa met her outside and they began shoving each other. People gathered to watch as the women hurled insults at each other. Fatima demanded they stop doing the work on the wall or Zehrunisa’s family would pay for bothering her, but Zehrunisa contended the Husains had built the shared wall and had a right to do work on their own home. She also said that if they had waited for Fatima and her family to build a wall, both of their families would still be seeing each other naked. Abdul broke up the argument and took his mother by the neck back into the Husains’ hut.
Fatima went to the police to file a complaint, saying Zehrunisa had beaten her, but the police largely dismissed the incident as too minor a squabble for them to deal with. Zehrunisa went to the station later to tell her side of the story, and the police officers asked for bribes—technically, the Husains didn’t have a business license for their trash operation, but the police let them keep working in exchange for periodic bribes. However, Zehrunisa was several months behind on payments. So, Fatima was sent home and Zehrunisa stayed to deal with the police.
Asha, the aspiring slumlord, felt obligated to try to resolve the dispute between the two women. If she didn’t help, her reputation as a mediator would be questioned and the Corporator might replace her with someone more capable of managing people’s affairs, and she’d no longer be able to garner support for her political party.. Plus, not being involved in others’ affairs meant not earning a cut of the money people paid to resolve problems.
Asha showed up at the police station and suggested that Zehrunisa pay her 1,000 rupees, some of which she’d give to Fatima to quiet her complaints about the hut renovation. Zehrunisa refused, saying she’d work it out with Fatima’s husband, whom she got along much better with. Just as Asha distrusted the Husains for being Muslim, Zehrunisa distrusted Asha for being anti-Muslim.
In Asha’s opinion, not settling the dispute was unwise because by not paying some money to Fatima now, Zehrunisa would exacerbate Fatima’s discontent and make her do something even more desperate.
Meanwhile, while Zehrunisa was at the police station, Kehkashan, her eldest daughter, decided to confront Fatima outside her hut. She was frustrated with Fatima for complaining to the police, which had led to her mother getting harassed for money. Normally, Kehkashan helped resolve fights, she didn’t start them. But now, she threatened to tear Fatima’s other leg off. Fatima retorted that Kehkashan had prostituted herself. (In fact, Kehkashan had recently moved back to her family’s hut when her husband refused to be intimate with her and had affairs.)
Hearing the accusation against his daughter, Karam came out of the Husains’ hut. Kehkashan was more concerned that Zehrunisa was still being held at the police station. Karam sent his son, Mirchi, to check on her. Then, he told Fatima they planned to finish the renovations and would try to avoid each other after that.
Karam retreated into his hut. At that point, after days of work, they had made a lot of progress. Abdul had finished installing the cooking shelf and was picking up pieces of brick that had fallen down. The floor was mostly leveled and cement had been laid. But there was still a lot of disruption: Karam still hadn’t bought the tiles that Zehrunisa wanted, the shouting between the families had scared the younger children, and the family that was supposed to protect the Husains’ television—the brothel owner’s family—had accidentally broken it.
With so much in disarray, Karam finally lost his temper and stormed over to Fatima’s hut. Since Fatima had lied about Zehrunisa beating her, Karam wanted to show her what a real beating felt like, threatening to have Abdul beat her. Though he usually obeyed his father, Abdul didn’t want to hit a disabled woman. Kehkashan intervened and calmed her father down, but as she led him away, he told Fatima that their family should pay the Husains for half of what it cost them to build the shared wall in the first place. Fatima retorted that the Husains would need the money for their funerals because she would get back at them.
Fatima was mentally unstable, and she wanted a way to get back at the Husains for their threats and the renovations. She barricaded herself in her house, loud music playing. When her 8-year-old daughter, Noori, came home from school and couldn’t get inside, she called for assistance to see inside. Fatima’s neighbor and friend, Cynthia, propped Noori up so she could see through a hole near the roof. Noori watched as Fatima doused herself with kerosene, and lit herself on fire. Some of her neighbors had to break down her door to save her. When they got inside, they saw that the flames were mostly out because Fatima had used a water container to put them out, but she was in terrible pain. One neighbor thought that perhaps Fatima had only wanted to burn herself a little bit and instead had let the flames get out of control. Fatima said she had done it because of the Husains.
Fatima was taken to Cooper’s Hospital, which had a reputation for patients dying in their care. Doctors were discouraged from touching patients and the hospital didn’t provide food. Patients’ families had to pay for their own medicine and fill prescriptions at pharmacies outside of the hospital. A burn cream that Fatima needed cost so much money that her husband couldn’t afford to also buy bottled water for her to stay hydrated.
From her hospital bed, Fatima told police that Abdul, Karam, and Kehkashan had burned her.
While Fatima was in the hospital, her friend Cynthia, who also had a grudge against the Husains, visited her. Cynthia’s family’s trash picking business had suffered when that of the Husains became successful, and Cynthia had previously suggested Fatima retaliate.
Asha also visited Fatima in the hospital. She wanted Fatima to rescind her accusation against the Husains. In exchange, the Husains would pay for Fatima to get better treatment at a private hospital. Fatima thought Asha only wanted her to do this so she could take a cut of the money, and she refused.
Meanwhile, the police knew Fatima had set herself on fire from having talked to Noori, the daughter who witnessed it. However, they hoped to use the accusations against the Husains to extract money from them. They sent a government worker—who was also interested in extracting money from the Husains—to reframe Fatima’s story. In India, it’s a serious crime to commit suicide, so they sought to make it look as though Fatima had been driven to burn herself by the Husains. The government worker reported Kehkashan and Karam’s verbal threats against Fatima, and she contended that Abdul had beaten Fatima, which led Fatima to burn herself.
Fatima soon died of her burns. To avoid blame, the hospital said the cause of death was an infection resulting from burns over 95 percent of her body rather than the true figure, 35 percent. Zehrunisa and Kehkashan helped prepare Fatima’s body for burial because it’s traditional for Muslim women to prepare other women for burial. Despite the incident, their families were friends and tried to practice their faith together.
The night Fatima went to the hospital, Zehrunisa knew that the police would come looking for the accused family members. She wanted Abdul’s father to go to the station in place of his children, and she encouraged Abdul to flee. Abdul couldn’t think of anywhere to go except his trash storage room. He hid there for the night as the police came to his family’s hut next door and arrested Karam. Eventually, he decided he’d rather turn himself in than hide in fear and leave his father to be beaten by the police. Plus, he knew he and his father weren’t guilty of the crime, and he wanted to be exonerated.
While in police custody, Karam and Abdul faced frequent beatings. When police beat Karam, they taunted him for being Muslim; when they beat Abdul, they tried to get him to confess to beating Fatima. Their detention wasn’t entered in police records, and they were kept in a room for unofficial police business. It had a small hole in the wall through which visitors could talk to those inside and offer small gifts, like cigarettes. Zehrunisa visited regularly to update Abdul and Karam on the status of Fatima and the case.
Zehrunisa had already paid some money to the police when she’d gone to the station earlier in the week to argue their case, but the police wanted more in exchange for making the case go away. Meanwhile, the government worker who took Fatima’s official statement and Asha were also asking for money to make the case go away. Abdul realized that the jail was being run like a business where innocence could be bought for the right price.
Eventually, Asha called the police station and insisted that the Husains hadn’t set Fatima on fire. During the call, Abdul could hear the officer on the phone telling Asha that Abdul and his father weren’t being tortured. After the call, the officer announced that they hadn’t committed the crime and Abdul and his father weren’t beaten again.
Karam thought that Asha likely did this as a show of her power, figuring he and Abdul would tell Zehrunisa about it and she’d accept Asha’s help. Asha would then receive a cut of the money paid to rid the family of the charges and help Fatima’s husband. They still refused to accept this kind of “help” from anyone.
Kehkashan was sent to a women’s jail, Karam to the Arthur Road jail, and Abdul to a juvenile detention facility. In India, those who couldn’t pay for jail bonds could be held for years before facing trial. Zehrunisa had trouble providing collateral to pay for jail bonds to get her three family members out. Most of the things of value her husband owned were in his name only. She sold the back room of their hut, and she considered selling more, like the garbage storeroom. Zehrunisa also visited numerous relatives in the city to ask for money for bail, but few were willing to support her. She even tried approaching the family of a woman she hoped would be Abdul’s fiancée, but they were also unsympathetic, and the marriage would likely be called off due to the accusations against Abdul.
At first, Abdul was to be sent to the same adult jail as his father, but Zehrunisa paid a bribe to a local school to falsify a school record for Abdul, showing that he was 16. She didn’t know his age because families that were struggling to survive didn’t often have those records.
In Abdul’s juvenile jail, most of the kids were Muslim. Muslims were generally overrepresented in India’s criminal detention system. Conditions at the jail were poor. The kids got to exercise for an hour in the morning and were supposed to receive educational instruction the rest of the day, but instead were usually sent back to their cells.
One day, however, a teacher gave a special presentation. He talked about how some of the children in the jail had done bad things and would continue on this negative path their whole lives. But he presented an alternative: If the boys chose to walk a more virtuous path and reform themselves, they would have better lives, and justice would come to them in time.
Prior to this speech, Abdul wanted desperately to confess to hurting Fatima, even though he was innocent, because most of the boys at the jail thought that confessing to a crime would allow you to go home. But upon hearing this teacher’s presentation, he resolved to take a virtuous path and not relent, which meant sticking to the truth even if he couldn’t get out of jail sooner and his family’s finances suffered while he couldn’t work.
A judge ruled that Abdul wasn’t a flight risk and could live at home until his trial as long as he promised to check in with the jail three days per week.
Zehrunisa filled in Abdul on her struggle to raise money to get them out of jail. Karam, Abdul’s father, was not allowed medicine for his tuberculosis in the prison, and his health was failing. Kehkashan, Abdul’s sister, seemed to be in good spirits because her jail had relatively good conditions. Zehrunisa didn’t know when any of their trials would be, but she’d now secured a lawyer to argue their case.
She also told Abdul that his trash business had collapsed in his absence. His brother Mirchi had tried to run the business, but most of the scavengers ended up selling their goods to another trash collector instead. Abdul decided to restart his business, but he felt determined to walk a virtuous path as he’d learned at the jail. This meant not buying stolen materials from the scavengers and being okay with the income he’d earn from running his business three fewer days per week to meet the jail’s check-in requirement.
Consider the competition and layers of exploitation affecting the Husains and Fatima.
Despite Zehrunisa’s efforts to connect in faith with Fatima’s family, the Husains couldn’t overcome Fatima’s rage at their home renovation project. How did envy or competitiveness shape the families’ relationship in that situation?
Is there anything you think the Husains should have done differently to smooth over the situation with Fatima?
Asha, the police, and the government worker all wanted money from the Husains to make Fatima’s case go away. As India continues to develop, what are one or two reasons you think this type of corruption remains common?
Annawadi’s residents attempted to make a living, secure marriages for their children, and find opportunities to climb the social ladder. Their motivation to do so sometimes stemmed from trying to escape worse circumstances in economically depressed rural areas. But sometimes, they couldn’t overcome their challenges and suffered violent deaths or suicide.
In the rural area of Vidarbha, where Asha had grown up, drought was becoming more common, which was a major problem for farmers. Crops failed and farmers turned to loan officers to get funds to buy new seeds, taking on huge debts that they struggled to pay off. With no hope of ever paying off their debts, thousands of farmers committed suicide every year.
To address rural suicides, the government was working to implement some reforms. For example, they worked to compensate the families of farmers who had a family member commit suicide and tried to establish subsidized income for farmers.
But many people turned to cities like Mumbai for work. An estimated 500,000 people from rural India came to Mumbai each year. However, they weren’t always successful. One of Manju’s cousins came to Annawadi to find work, but after a month of no success, returned to Vidarbha.
Asha took Manju on a trip to Vidarbha to look for a husband for her daughter. Growing up there, Asha had been thought of as a strong worker, able to do hard farm work even when food was scarce. Her relatives could see from her appearance that she was in good health and had made a decent life for herself in Annawadi.
Asha saw Manju’s marriage as a chance to lift her family further out of poverty by marrying her to a decently wealthy family. While visiting Vidarbha, they found a soldier who was interested in marrying Manju, and he met with Asha and Manju to discuss it.
Though Asha had liked the man, and he was somewhat wealthy, her husband objected to the marriage because he believed army men tended to be heavy drinkers. This was despite the fact that he himself, though not in the army, was a heavy drinker.
Manju hoped to marry someone who wouldn’t take her away from her life in Mumbai. When she and Asha returned to Annawadi, they spent some time trying to improve their appearances and building their social networks. Asha hoped that this would expand Manju’s marriage prospects and prepare them to fit into high-class society.
Their tactics included changing their appearance, including wearing jeans and saris outside of the house rather than house dresses. Manju also trained to become an insurance broker. Manju and Asha thought that these activities would help them network with people in higher classes and bring in more money to the family.
Manju had continued to teach elementary school for two hours each day, but Asha finally insisted she scale back her hours. Even though Manju wanted to be a teacher after finishing college, her mother thought that teaching took time she could be using to widen her social circles.
Manju started teaching only every two or three days. In the meantime, another school opened in Annawadi and some of her students started going there. The school, run by a nonprofit, stayed open just long enough to take pictures showing the students learning so they could get money before closing.
With the extra time gained from spending less time teaching, Manju trained to provide disaster relief after floods and terror attacks. Terrorist bombings had happened in other major Indian cities, and many considered Mumbai a likely target due to its financial sector. During the training, Manju and a college boy took a liking to one another. It was her first romance, but he broke it off soon after, saying that they couldn’t be together because Manju wasn’t part of the middle class like he was.
Annawadi saw a number of deaths and suicides each year. Along Airport Road, it was common for trash pickers to get hit by cars. Passersby from the slum were often too busy with their own affairs to call the authorities for help, or they feared the authorities.
For example, Sunil, a scavenger who had sold trash to Abdul, came across an injured man along the road one day but was too afraid to go to the police for help because he’d heard of Abdul’s torture when he’d been in police custody over Fatima’s burning. The victim passed away later in the day and his body was picked up after someone called the police. There wasn’t any attempt to search for his family, and the morgue pathologist concluded he’d died of tuberculosis even though there was no autopsy. Even the handling of such deaths was driven by money: One of the police officers helping with the case had an arrangement with a local university to provide cadavers to their human anatomy lab, and he was in a hurry to deliver the body.
Additional bodies began showing up along the Airport Road. Most of the dead were from Annawadi. People in Annawadi started to worry that Fatima’s death had left a curse on the slum and wondered anew if the government would go forward with plans to raze it. The local police, for their part, felt increasing pressure from the government to maintain a safe environment around the airport. Officially, only two murders were recorded in the area around the airport, from slums to hotels, over a two-year period. However, deaths were likely undercounted. The deaths of slum residents were largely regarded as a nuisance rather than a problem to fix.
Kalu, one of the young trash pickers Abdul worked with, had come to Annawadi from another slum after his mother’s death. He’d felt like his father and brother didn’t understand him, and he wanted to make a living for himself as a trash picker.
He’d become known for scavenging high-quality recyclables from the airport grounds, but he ran into trouble with the police for doing so—in the eyes of the law, he was trespassing on airport grounds and stealing the goods. The police made a deal with Kalu: He could continue scavenging if he acted as an informant on drug dealers operating around the airport.
Kalu agreed but lived in a constant state of stress. He feared both the police and the powerful drug dealers he ratted on. While hanging out with friends, he liked acting out the plots of movies and kept discussing one about a man who feels so trapped that he drinks liquor to kill himself before being rescued by the film’s heroine.
Because of the stress, Kalu decided to return to his father and brother to try his hand at their line of work—pipe fitting. He’d learned the trade when he was small and knew they were taking on a project that would provide work for him to do. But he didn’t end up staying long. He soon returned to Annawadi in hopes of participating in a festival for his chosen god, Ganpati. Overall, he felt as though he didn’t have a home.
One day, after picking trash and selling it to Abdul, he disappeared and his body was found the next day on the side of Airport Road, like many before him. The police recovered the body and concluded that Kalu had died of tuberculosis, but not before some boys from Annawadi had looked at the body. They could see he’d received severe injuries, and they said he’d been murdered. Moreover, tuberculosis wasn’t something that young, active garbage pickers tended to die of—it tcaused a slow deterioration before death.
After Kalu’s death, the police rounded up five trash pickers living without shelter in Annawadi, held them, and beat them. To prevent more deaths near the airport, they gave the boys an ultimatum: Either stop picking trash along Airport Road and at the airport or face being charged with murdering Kalu. The police didn’t tell the boys that they had already attributed Kalu’s death to tuberculosis in their official report.
Sanjay was one of the trash pickers taken into custody by the police after Kalu’s death. He had witnessed a group of people beating Kalu near the section of the airport where he usually picked trash on the night he died. It was possible Kalu had gotten caught by the airport authorities, or that the drug dealers he informed on had caught up with him.
After being beaten by the police and having his livelihood threatened, Sanjay feared the police might torture him again, or Kalu’s murderers would hurt him for having witnessed their crime. He picked one last batch of trash to sell to Abdul so that he could afford to travel to the slum where his mother and sister lived.
He arrived at his family home and spent the evening giving advice to his sister, with whom he was close, before his mother came home from her job in a middle-class home. His sister listened for a while, but then returned to preparing dinner while Sanjay appeared to take a nap.
When his mother arrived home, she talked to Sanjay briefly as he sang one of his favorite sad songs. She went to the bathroom, and when she came out, she and her daughter found Sanjay convulsing on the floor. He had eaten rat poison.
They got him to the hospital—the same one Fatima went to—but he only survived for two hours. The doctors gave his mother prescriptions to fill, but she didn’t have time before he succumbed to the poison. The police wrote in their records that Sanjay was a heroin addict who had committed suicide because he lacked money to buy more of the drug.
Manju, Asha’s daughter, had a 15-year-old friend named Meena, who was considered to be the first girl born in Annawadi. They would often visit the public toilet together to commiserate about the pressures and hardship they faced as girls. Meena faced regular beatings from her father and older brother. Despite threats of violence, Meena often voiced her discontent to her family, which then resulted in more beatings.
Meena’s family planned to marry her off to a boy in a rural village. From watching Indian soap operas, Meena could see that there were now opportunities for Indian women to lead more independent lives, but she couldn’t figure out how to build that kind of life for herself. She thought Manju might have more opportunities if she graduated college, but Manju hadn’t graduated yet and Meena didn’t know other women who had. She felt as though she couldn’t decide anything herself and anticipated she’d feel even more restricted in marriage.
One day, Manju found Meena sitting on her front step, which was usually not tolerated by her family. Meena said she had taken rat poison. When Manju tried to ask Meena’s mother for help, her mother thought that Meena was lying about taking the poison so she could avoid being beaten by her brother for the third time that day.
Manju tried to find help for Meena but she needed to be discreet—shouting for help would advertise that Meena had tried to kill herself and might hurt her marriage prospects. Manju got help from some nearby women, who fed Meena salt water to induce vomiting. When that didn’t work, they tried soapy water. Meena vomited and said she felt much better. When her brother arrived home, he heard she had taken rat poison and beat her for it.
A few hours later, Meena was in pain from the poison—the induced vomiting hadn’t cleared it from her body. Her father took her to Cooper Hospital. The police asked Meena if anyone had pressured her into taking poison, but she said it was her own idea. The hospital asked for payment from her family for a special medicine, but it wasn’t sufficient and she died within a few days.
The women who had tried to help Meena recognized that she felt trapped—she was tired of bending to her parents’ will. But Meena’s family saw her friendship with Manju as the cause of her death: Manju had corrupted Meena with her efforts to dress differently and climb the social ladder.
By 2008, the great recession had begun in the U.S. and started to affect the livelihoods of Annawadi residents in numerous ways. Meanwhile, the court began the trial of Kehkashan and Karam, but it was a long process.
The U.S. recession affected the local economy of Annawadi in complex ways. As the U.S. stock market collapsed, and other markets lost value, it meant there was less money from foreign investors being channeled into development projects in India. This resulted in fewer construction jobs available at the airport as well as in related businesses like hotels and parking garages.
The price of scrap metal fell, too. This meant that trash pickers couldn’t earn as much for collecting the same kinds of materials. At first, the trash pickers thought things would pick up with the start of the tourist season. In November, Indians from abroad visited for the Hindu festival Diwali, people from the U.S. and Europe visited during December, and Chinese and Japanese tourists visited through January, producing more trash to collect and sort.
But around the same time that Annawadians started to feel the effects of the recession, terrorists began carrying out attacks around Mumbai. They targeted places that served tourists, such as hotels, train stations, and taxis. The slum dwellers realized the tourist season they were hoping for wasn’t going to materialize because people wouldn’t want to travel to a city besieged by terrorism. Many slum residents, unable to afford enough food, had to eat rats and frogs again.
To continue to earn a living while the economy suffered, Sunil joined a group of boys who stole metals from construction sites around the airport. The group searched for nickel, electroplate, and aluminum because these were the most profitable metals. Almost everything else had fallen in price.
Once, Sunil was caught searching for metal and was beaten by a constable. He worried about being murdered like Kalu if he weren’t careful. One place he frequented for metals was an under-construction parking garage. He liked watching the people of higher classes coming to and from the airport from the roof of the garage. Though he used to think that he might surpass his current socioeconomic status and join a different class of people in Mumbai, he wasn’t so sure now.
Occasionally, he and Abdul talked about their quality of life. Both boys agreed that even if they had a bad life, there was still value in being alive. Abdul learned this when Zehrunisa beat him once: He realized that even if she continued to beat him every day, he would still have a life.
Sunil thought that if he, like Kalu, were to die, it wouldn’t matter to people in the higher classes in Mumbai. However, he thought that valuing his own life counted for something, even if others didn’t value it.
The terrorist attacks had demonstrated that people in higher classes were just as vulnerable as anyone else to violence. For example, during the attacks, police officers didn’t know how to use their weapons to stop an attack at a train station. In another instance, officers received calls for help from the maternity ward of a local hospital that was being attacked, but they chose to stay at their station. These incidents motivated people in higher classes to seek reform through new leadership. Parliamentary elections were coming up and a surge of people in the higher classes started registering to vote.
Political involvement was a departure from how the upper classes usually reacted to adversity: using their wealth to solve problems rather than fighting for fundamental change. For example, if they disliked the quality of the drinking water, they could pay for a filter rather than demanding water policy changes.
Traditionally, people in lower classes were more likely to be registered to vote because it was one of their only ways to wield power, but they faced obstacles registering to vote. Ahead of the parliamentary elections, some slum dwellers and people from minority groups found that even when they submitted paperwork, election officials wouldn’t process it. Despite attempting to register for seven years, the Husains still hadn’t been granted permission to vote.
For a while, it looked like all of Asha’s scheming had amounted to little. She had many hustles, but she still hadn’t succeeded in bringing in enough money to get her family out of the slum. However, her luck changed when some government officials approached her about overseeing funding for a new network of public schools.
The government had received funding, including some from foreign investors, to provide elementary school education to all eligible children in Mumbai. But it was mostly a facade so the program organizer could divert most of the money to himself and people who would help him. He wanted to funnel money through a nonprofit that could then disperse it to him and his accomplices. He approached Asha because someone had established a nonprofit for her a number of years ago for a government project that never came to fruition. Nevertheless, it was still a viable nonprofit he could use for his scheme.
The group created documents showing that Asha’s nonprofit had overseen 24 kindergartens for poor students for the past three years. This was enough to get approval for dispersing funds for the new school program to her nonprofit. Her job, then, was simply to receive money into the organization’s bank account, then write and hand-deliver checks to the people the project manager specified.
There was one small hurdle: The checks required two signatures. Asha approached the woman she’d named as secretary to the nonprofit, but the woman was too fearful they would get caught to sign the checks. Asha fired her and made Manju the secretary of the nonprofit so she could provide the second signature. The officials told Asha she wouldn’t make much money for herself the first year, but she would make more money later.
In Asha’s opinion, working in the corrupt overcity was easier than trying to survive in the slums. The trick was believing that you wouldn’t get caught and that what you did wasn’t that objectionable overall.
When parliamentary elections were held, fewer people from higher classes turned out to vote than was expected. As a result, most of the same people were reelected, hopes for government reforms were put on hold, and plans to raze the slums of Mumbai moved forward.
The government wanted to raze all of Mumbai’s slums and to relocate residents to modest apartments if slum dwellers could prove that they had lived in the slum since 1995 or 2000, depending on the slum.
Though the apartments would only be 269 square feet, they would have running water. This was such an attractive commodity that investors wanted to cash in. If they could “prove” they were the owner of a hut in a slum and had lived there long enough, they could get one of these apartments for free. Investors started connecting with people in the slums whose huts they could buy, and they had papers forged saying they’d lived there the appropriate amount of time.
Asha helped arrange one such deal. She convinced a young woman with three children in Annawadi to sell her hut, only to have the woman change her mind, feeling tricked and fearful of losing her shelter. She tried to file a police report, but the police were loyal to Asha. Soon after, the person who bought the hut sent a group of drunk men to forcibly remove the family. They dragged the woman out by her hair and dumped kerosene on her last bag of rice as her children cried. Onlookers thought that Asha had lost her way and began to resent her dealings in the slum. They had always suspected Asha to be money-motivated, but now it appeared she’d stop at nothing. Unfortunately for Asha, she didn’t even get the commission she’d been promised for helping with this deal.
Officials planned to raze the slum in phases over several years, so residents were hopeful that they wouldn’t be kicked out immediately, buying them time to fight for benefits under the relocation program. In the first phase, the Beautiful Forevers wall came down and the sewage lake was filled in to prepare the ground for something new. Bulldozers turned up old garbage that had landed in the lake, like shoes and even a cooking pot. Annawadi residents had several ideas for what might go on the new site: a cricket pitch, a school, a hospital, or more airport-related infrastructure.
Karam and Kehkashan’s case was put on a fast track—their trial began after spending months in jail rather than years. If convicted, they faced 10 years in prison. Abdul would face a separate trial with separate charges.
Though the fast-track system shortened the time spent waiting for trial, judges often heard dozens of trials at the same time, holding short hearings for each case each week. So the trials themselves still took months to finish.
Karam hoped for exoneration. However, he was concerned that the prosecution was planning to call witnesses who hadn’t observed Fatima’s burning or the words Karam and Kehkeshan said to Fatima.
The first few witnesses troubled them. Someone who worked in the morgue of the hospital where Fatima was treated testified that she’d been burned over 95 percent of her body, as was stated on the falsified medical records. At the next hearing, a police officer said that the Husains’ maltreatment led Fatima to suicide.
Meanwhile, outside of the courthouse one day, the government official who had taken Fatima’s statement at the hospital tried to pressure Karam into paying her off, saying that the case wouldn’t go in the Husains’ favor if she didn’t. She said witnesses might embellish details of the fight between the Husains and Fatima, and she herself might do the same to Fatima’s account if she were called to the stand. She said that Karam, Kehkashan, and Abdul would end up in jail. But Karam pointed out that they had already been in jail while awaiting the trial. He said their lawyer would help the judge see their side and refused to pay, opting to let the justice system run its course.
The witnesses the following week offered some hope that the trial would work out in their favor. One of the witnesses was a girl who lived in Annawadi and testified that she hadn’t actually witnessed the fight. She also said Fatima had been known in Annawadi for starting fights. Another witness testified that he was angry at the police for calling him as a witness to the case. Though the police had recorded his statement after Fatima’s burning, he too hadn’t actually witnessed the fight or the incident and was unhappy at having to miss work to testify.
Fatima’s husband hoped that the Husains would be found guilty of the charges against them. When Fatima passed away, he’d had to give up his two young girls to a local orphanage because he couldn’t risk leaving them at home during the day while he worked—young girls left alone were vulnerable to sexual assault from strangers. He felt that, indirectly, the Husains had stolen his chance to provide a stable life for his daughters.
When Fatima’s husband testified, he embellished the account of Fatima’s fight with the Husains, saying that in addition to calling her names, they had beaten her with a stone. He hoped this would lend evidence to convict the Husains.
Then, several additional factors made the Husains unsure they’d prevail:
The government official who took Fatima’s statement in the hospital tried for a third time to convince the Husains they should pay her to help resolve the case. This time, she said Fatima’s husband was willing to drop the case in exchange for about $4,000. However, because the case was being brought by the state, it couldn’t be called off for any amount of money. She hoped the Husains wouldn’t realize this, but they saw through her scheme and refused once again to pay her off.
Kehkashan and Karam began their new trial with the new judge, who liked to crack jokes and didn’t seem to take the proceedings very seriously. During closing arguments, the judge looked at Kehkashan and quipped that he didn’t even know for sure who he was looking at because she was wearing a burqa, despite her having done so every day in court. Finally, after months of trial, the judge said they were ready to issue the verdict, but first, they’d take a 90-minute break.
After the break, but before the verdict was read, Kehkashan and Karam were put on the witness stand for the first time. The only question they were asked was what their occupations were. Kehkashan said she was a housewife because she didn’t want to go into detail about her recent separation from her husband. Karam said he worked in plastics because he thought this sounded more reputable than working with garbage. The judge told Karam that Fatima was dead because of him, but Karam replied adamantly that she had burned herself. The judge found them not guilty of the crime, saying that they hadn’t driven Fatima to suicide.
While Abdul was in juvenile jail, Zehrunisa had sold his garbage shed to help cover the family’s expenses. Since his release, Abdul had rented a hut in a different part of town to run his business. But he struggled to make money there because the trash pickers in that area already had preferred buyers. He decided to give up this hut, and he drove his family’s van around the state offering to transport recyclables to the appropriate facilities for a fee.
He still had to check in at the jail three days per week to prove he hadn’t fled. Traveling to the jail required taking a whole day, so he only worked four days per week and couldn’t earn as much income as he used to.
Zehrunisa tried to get some clarity on when he would stand trial. When she inquired at the juvenile court about the case, she was told the trial would begin within one to three months. After 15 months went by, Zehrunisa and Abdul were convinced that he was being condemned to the limbo of awaiting trial forever.
Despite Abdul’s inability to work a full schedule, his family hoped they would qualify for one of the apartments that would be provided to slum dwellers as part of the razing plans. Additionally, his other siblings were helping support the household by working temporary jobs.
After the special visit from the teacher to the boys’ prison, Abdul had resolved to live a more virtuous life. If most people were like water, he wanted to be like ice—made of the same substance, but elevated above others by how he lived. But as time dragged on, and his trial wasn’t scheduled, he became more disillusioned. He told Allah that he felt as though the ice inside him was melting, and he was becoming water, just like everyone else because of how the world worked: No matter how much he tried to do the right thing and get ahead, he couldn’t.
Contemplate some of the book's themes.
In the last part of the book, Annawadians deal with the effects of a global recession, indicated by a lack of jobs and a declining price of scrap metal. How does economic instability show up where you live? How is it similar or different from that of Annawadians?
This book provides a snapshot of the lives of different slum residents, many of them with varying challenges. Who do you think had the best life? Why?