Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Author:Katherine Boo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780679643951
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

In July, when Asha and her family stepped off the train after a thirteen-hour journey north to the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, their village relatives inspected their faces, finding evidence of how good life was in the Mumbai slums. “You’re all fairer than you were when you were little,” noted a cousin of Manju, Rahul, and Ganesh. “Smooth-type. Chikna. You were very black before, and shy.”

To examine Asha properly, the older women had to crane their necks, since their bodies were bent from decades of agricultural labor. Asha’s great-grandmother walked on all fours. Looking at the ancient woman, Asha stood mast-straight. She felt like a giantess, coming home.

In Annawadi, she wept buckets when village movies played on the Marathi-language channels. Even the corniest of the flood-and-famine dramas swept her back to her own early years, working Vidarbha’s difficult earth. In her occasional recountings to her children, she kept the tone absurdist: a manic teenaged version of Mother India, dragging the plow after the oxen had died. The women of her village recalled the Asha of that era with respect. She’d been distinguished by her ability to work like a donkey even when she hadn’t eaten for days.

“She was one-bone thin, half starving, when we were working the orange groves,” one of her relatives whispered to the others. “You wouldn’t know it now. She’s a double-bone, and the way she talks—you’d think she’d never trod on dirt.”

Asha was glad to be the subject of admiring chatter, and to be away from the troubles of Annawadi. She had come home to market her beautiful daughter, and her own relative prosperity, among the people of her farming caste, the Kunbis. Her husband Mahadeo would play sober; she would play deferential wife; Manju would play herself; and marriage offers would by all rights roll in, despite the nominal occasion of the visit.

This occasion was a stripped-down family wedding: no music, no dancing, no jalebis. The groom, one of Mahadeo’s nephews, was still in mourning for his elder brother, who had died of AIDS shortly after infecting his wife. The disease was rampant in Vidarbha, and vigorously denied. If word got out that it had claimed one of Manju’s relatives, it might diminish her value as a bride. But people in the village weren’t terribly interested in the young man’s death, or in the widow hidden away for the duration of the festivities, or even in Asha’s stories of the city. The farmers’ eyes kept turning to the sky.

The break in the rains, as it was called in Annawadi, had a different name in the countryside: drought. Little rain had fallen in June, and millions of cotton seedlings planted the previous month had died. The villagers had paid a steep price for their seeds: genetically modified ones called “hybrids,” theoretically designed for Vidarbha’s erratic climate. Now more seeds would have to be sown, and new loans arranged to pay for them.

Some Kunbis said that July was the month when the gods slept. Asha’s relatives hoped the gods had changed their schedules this year, and were also awake nights, worrying.

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