The Invisibles

An extract from Katherine Boo’s book on life in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum where people negotiate the price of freedom

Fatima’s hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she’d put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of Kali had gotten carried away and done the whole face. There was no mirror in Burn Ward Number 10, Cooper Hospital, the large hospital serving the poor of Mumbai’s western suburbs, but she didn’t need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her.

Leaving Annawadi, her spindly husband carrying her on his back, she’d started to be treated as a mattering person. “What have I done to myself!” she had cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. “But it is done now, and I will make them pay!”

No autorickshaw driver had wanted to transport a woman in such a state as she, given the potential damage to seat covers. But three young men had intervened, getting her to the hospital by threatening a driver with his life.

And here at Cooper, where fluorescent lights buzzed like horseflies, she continued to feel like a person who counted. Though the small burn ward stank of fetid gauze, it was a fine place compared to the general wards, where many patients lay on the floor. She was sharing a room with only one other woman, whose husband swore he hadn’t lit the fateful match. She had her first foam mattress, now sopping with urine. She had a plastic tube in her nostrils, attached to nothing. She had an IV bag with a used syringe sticking out of it, since the nurse said it was a waste to use a fresh syringe every time. She had a rusty metal contraption over her torso, to keep the stained sheet from sticking to her skin. But of all the new experiences Fatima was having in the burn ward, the most unexpected was the stream of respectable female visitors from Annawadi.

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

Zehrunisa came, too; Fatima caught a glimpse of her one morning, cowering just outside the room. Then four other neighbors appeared, led by Asha. Fatima felt honored that Asha had come. At Annawadi, the Shiv Sena woman looked right through her. Now, proffering sweet lime juice and coconut water, Asha whispered into Fatima’s blackened ear.

She reminded Fatima that what had happened between her and the Husains had been seen by hundreds of people on the maidan, and that Fatima ought not to lie about having been beaten or set on fire. “What’s the point of having such ghamand, such ego?” Asha wanted to know. “Your skin is burned, you’ve done this stupid thing, and still your heart is full of vengeance?”

Asha was trying to broker a truce that would avoid a police case. If Fatima would admit that the Husains hadn’t attacked her, Zehrunisa would pay for a bed in a private hospital and settle some money on Fatima’s daughters. Fatima understood that Asha intended to take a commission from Zehrunisa for this settlement. She was burned, not mental. But it was too late to tell the truth. She’s already made her accusations to the police.

On arrival at Cooper, Fatima had said that Karam, Abdul, and Kehkashan had set her on fire—the account that propelled officers into the Husains’ hut after midnight to arrest Karam as Abdul hid in his garbage. But by the next morning, the Sahar Police had learned that Fatima’s statement was false. Her eight-year-old daughter, Noori, had been especially clear in her account: that she’d watched through a hole in the family hut as her mother set herself on fire.

If a charge against the Husains was going to stick, and money from the family extracted, a more plausible victim statement was required. In order to help Fatima make such a statement, the police had dispatched a pretty, plump government official to Cooper—a woman with gold-rimmed designer eyeglasses who had left Fatima’s bedside shortly before Asha arrived.

Poornima Paikrao, a special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra, was commissioned to take the hospital-bed statements of victims. Gently, she helped Fatima construct a new account of the events that led to her burning. Even when Fatima had admitted that she couldn’t read over what the officer had written, nor sign her own name at the bottom, the woman in the gold-rimmed glasses had remained respectful. A thumbprint would be fine.

As the special executive officer understood, inciting a person to attempt suicide is a serious offense; the British had written strict anti-suicide provisions into the Indian Penal Code in response to the practice of sati.

In Fatima’s new account, she admitted to burning herself, then carefully apportioned the blame for this self-immolation. She accurately reported Kehkashan’s curse at sundown about twisting off her other leg. She accurately reported Karam’s threat about beating her, and his demand that her husband pay for half the wall that divided their huts. She didn’t mention her fight with Zehrunisa, who had the best possible alibi, having been in the police station when Fatima burned. Instead, Fatima put the weight of her accusation on Abdul.

Abdul Husain had threatened and throttled her, she said in her statement. Abdul Husain had beaten her up.

How could you bring down a family you envied if you failed to name the boy in that family who did most of the work?

“As my left leg is handicapped, I could not retaliate at them. In anger, I put the kerosene lying in my house on myself, and set myself on fire,” her statement concluded.

Special Executive Officer Poornima Paikrao added to her account, ‘Record made under clear light of tubelight,’ and departed the hospital room to begin her real work. With this improved witness statement, and several other witness statements she hoped to influence at Annawadi, she thought she could make a handsome profit from the Husains…

The first time the officer with the fish lips brought down the leather strap, Abdul screamed before it landed—a howl that had built in him since early morning, when he had raced to the police station to surrender.

Running through the airport, he had hoped he might be able to explain what had happened the previous evening with Fatima, or at least offer up his own body to protect his father from violence. Maybe, bent over a wooden table, he was taking blows that would otherwise have landed on his father. He wasn’t sure. The only clear thing was that the officers were not listening. They didn’t want a story of hot tempers and a crappy brick wall. They seemed to want Abdul to confess to pouring kerosene on a disabled woman and lighting a match.

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

Later in the beating—how much later, he couldn’t say—he was pulled back into sentience by the sound of his mother’s voice. She seemed to be just outside what the officers called the reception room of the station. “Don’t hurt him,” she was begging at considerable volume. “Do this peacefully! Show kindness!”

Abdul didn’t want his mother to hear him scream. He tried to gather his self-discipline. No point looking at his handcuffs. No point looking at the fat-lipped officer or those sharp creases in his regulation khaki pants. He closed his eyes and tried to recall some key words from the last time he had prayed.

His efforts did not help him maintain his silence. His screaming, then his sobbing, rang out onto the road. But afterward, watching the shiny brown shoes move away, he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t uttered a sound. Although his mother’s wails had become deafening as he was being beaten, that in itself was not conclusive. Given his mother’s tendencies, she’d probably been wailing all day.

The good thing was that her distress was now coming from farther away. Maybe the officers had dragged her off for being so loud. The airport management had improved the grounds of the old bungalow that housed the police station—fronted it with pink flowers and tropical plants, their leaves as shiny as the new police jeeps parked nearby. Abdul hoped his mother was retreating fast past this strip of garden. He wanted to think of her at home.

The large cell in which he was being kept held seven other prisoners, including his father, who had taken his own beating in front of Abdul. The place was nothing like the sparse jail cells in movies Abdul had seen in the Saki Naka video shed. Rather, it contained metal chairs, a large, handsome wooden table with a laminated top, and a row of new steel cabinets—the nicest cabinets Abdul had ever seen. Godrej, painted bronze and sky blue and smoke blue. Two cabinets had shiny mirrors embedded in their doors. It was like being in a cabinet showroom, except for the tension and the screaming.

The Sahar Police had a more typical holding pen elsewhere in the station. The room where Abdul and his father were kept was what repeat inhabitants called the ‘unofficial cell’—a large office where police paperwork was supposed to get done. As a matter of official record, the Husains had not been arrested, were not in custody. What happened in this office was off the books. The room’s best feature, those being held agreed, was a small window through which friends or relatives could relay cigarettes and consolations.

Abdul kept waiting for Sunil or Kalu the garbage thief or some other boy to look in, ask if he was okay. He imagined his answer. Not okay. He imagined reassuring replies. No one but his mother came to see him, though. By the third day, he had stopped expecting that anyone else would.

“Why did you do such a thing to a cripple?” The officers asked him the same question again and again.

Abdul had his pathetic answer. “Sir, I am such a weakling I would have told you, after so many slaps, but I haven’t done it. We only all threw insults at each other.”

He had his other pathetic answer: “Please, go to Annawadi and ask. So many people were there. I didn’t touch her. Why would I fight with a woman? A one-legged woman? Ask anyone, have I teased a girl? I don’t fight. I don’t talk to anyone. My brother Mirchi is the only guy I tease. Even earlier I never hit him—my own little brother, who I knew I could hit.”

He feared the police weren’t going to Annawadi to ask, though. This inspired his resigned answer: “She has set herself on fire in a fit of rage. She has taken a small quarrel with my mother and stretched the thing like rubber. But what is the use? Now that she has done that, said that, you will listen to her because she is burned. You aren’t going to listen to me.”

The officers asked his father more interesting questions, like, “Why did you give birth to so many children, Mussulman? You are not going to be able to feed and educate them now. You’ll be in jail for so many years that your wife won’t remember your face.”

“I’d rather be beaten than see them beat you,” Abdul said to his father, who said the same back to him when they were handcuffed together on the floor one sleepless night. The salutary effect of the oxygen Karam had received two weeks earlier at the private hospital had been negated.

As they lay on the tiles, Karam attempted to convince his son that the police didn’t really believe they’d tried to murder Fatima. By now, he whispered, the officers would have at least some sense of what had actually happened, given the hundreds of witnesses. But the specifics of what had or had not been done to a disabled woman were not the officers’ animating concern. The concern, he told his son, was the profit that might be made from the tragedy. “So you’ve made big bucks there at Annawadi,” one officer kept saying to Karam.

The idea was to get terrified prisoners to pay everything they had, and everything they could secure from a moneylender, to stop a false criminal charge from being recorded. Beatings, though outlawed in the human rights code, were practical, as they increased the price that detainees would pay for their release.

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

Abdul wasn’t sure how much money his family had left after fixing the house and paying his father’s hospital bill. But he thought that whatever remained should be paid, in order to be innocent. He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

“But what if Fatima dies tomorrow,” Karam said. Abdul knew his father was talking to himself, not asking for advice. If they paid now, and Fatima died, their savings would be gone, and the police might still register a criminal case against them. Then how would they afford a lawyer? His father’s voice changed every time he said this bankrupting word, lawyer. Another man being held unofficially had been on trial before, and warned that if they used one of the city’s public defenders, they’d get sent away forever.

As the days in detention went on, Abdul and his father stopped talking, which Abdul felt was just as well. What did he have to say, anyway? That if his parents had been as paranoid and alert as he was, they would have kept their mouths shut with the crazy One Leg? It was better to pretend that he and his father were too tired for talk, having answered all the questions of the lead investigator, Sub-inspector Shankar Yeram, whose lips Abdul had by now decided looked like more like a monkey’s than a fish’s.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a haggard Zehrunisa appeared at the cell window to explain the compounding price of their freedom. Asha was saying it would cost fifty thousand rupees to make the police case go away. Not that she’d take the money herself, of course. She would pay the police and placate Fatima’s husband with a more modest sum.

Zehrunisa had felt grateful to Asha in the first days after the burning. Despite her political antipathy toward Muslims and migrants, Asha had worked hard on behalf of the Husains, and for free. In addition to asking Fatima to retract her false statement, she’d accompanied Zehrunisa to the police station in order to impress upon the officers that Fatima had set herself on fire. This attempted intervention had gone badly. An officer had shouted, “What? Do you women think you are the police? Go away! We will do our own investigation!” For all Asha’s power in Annawadi, it was inconsistent beyond the slum’s boundaries.

At the cell window, Zehrunisa told her husband, “The point is, for a few days Asha helped for free, but now she says I’m sitting on money and I have to open the purse strings. I would, to get you both out of here, but I’m not sure that paying her will do it.”

Zehrunisa had already paid Sub-inspector Thokale, the man who’d asked her to settle her ‘account’ with him while she was in the station after her own fight with Fatima. After the burning, he’d told her he could help ensure that the investigation was ‘fair’ and that her husband and son wouldn’t be badly hurt during interrogations. “I told him I’d pay anything for that, and I think he feels terrible for us, really,” she told her husband. “He knows it is a frame-up. He could have taken so much more money than he did.”

The special executive officer who took Fatima’s statement in the hospital also wanted money. She’d visited Zehrunisa to report that that statement, and the statements of other Annawadi witnesses, were under her control. She was as gentle with Zehrunisa as she’d been with Fatima, saying, palms open, “What do you want me to do? Good statements or bad statements? I am working for the government, so what I say will decide the matter. It is in your hands, and you will have to decide very soon.”

Zehrunisa told her husband, “She’s like Asha. She says that whatever we pay won’t be for herself—that she would give the money to Fatima’s husband. But I’ve already told him directly that I’ll help his girls and get Fatima into a private hospital—pay for everything, bed, medicine, food. I’m scared to pay this witness woman. What if she steals the money from the husband, and Fatima stays there at Cooper?”

“What does the husband say when you ask about the private hospital?”

“Not a word. He’s upset and can’t take a decision. It’s crazy. Does he want her to die, so he can get a new wife? Cooper is going to kill her, and then everything we have—”

There was a rhyme that Zehrunisa had heard Mirchi sing: “People who go to Cooper, they go upar.” They go above, to heaven. If Fatima went upar, Zehrunisa’s husband, son, and daughter would face a decade or more in prison.

Karam agreed that his wife should ignore the special executive officer and keep pressing Fatima’s husband about a private hospital. “I will,” she said, starting to cry. “But now you see what will happen. This government woman will be angry and get the investigators to take the statements of the people who want us to be fucked. If it were our own village, with our own people, we might hope the witnesses would care for us and tell the truth. But we are so alone in this city.”

A light rain began to fall, and hearing it on the station roof one night, Abdul remembered an action movie he and Kalu had seen. Zinda. Alive. The hero had been imprisoned for years, not knowing why and going mad in his not-knowing.

Kalu had liked the part at the end when the guy escaped, discovered why he’d been imprisoned, and hammered to death all responsible parties, despite the knife sticking out of his back. In the part Abdul remembered now, the man was still trapped in his cell, but after years of chipping away at a brick wall that was apparently sturdier than the one between the Husains and Fatima, he had managed to make a small hole. The prisoner stuck his hand through, cherishing the rain on his skin.

At home, Abdul had never given his future much thought, beyond vague fantasies about living in Vasai and more concrete, health-related worries. Were his lungs going bad, like his father’s? Did his right shoulder hunch forward? That tended to happen after a decade of squatting over scrap.

Having accepted a life of sorting early on, he considered himself a separate species from Mirchi or that most-everything girl, Manju, or the other young people at Annawadi who believed they might become something different. Abdul had been aiming for a future like the past, but with more money. The rage of a neighbor with less money had played no part in his calculations.

He didn’t know if his mother was right about an earlier, peaceful age in which poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their forehead, and in turn treated one another more kindly. He just knew that she didn’t really long for companionable misery. She’d known abjectness, loathed its recollection, and raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she’d made him understand that he had to rise. They’d lost a lot in the 2005 floods, but many other Annawadians had, too. He felt his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.

Which day was this? How long had he been here? He was being beaten and phones were ringing in a room next door, which Abdul had concluded was some kind of control room, because of the radio squawks. The officers all spoke in Marathi, which he made the effort to follow. Trying to figure out what the officers were saying gave him something to do besides worrying the obvious problem of being innocent and beaten in a jail cell.

The officers had been going after his hands, the body part on which his livelihood depended. Small hands, with the prominent veins, orange rust stains, and healed cuts that were standard in his profession, they had been seriously injured only once—a bicycle spoke that went deep.

His mind broke a little. The phone conversations in the other room faded out. Only later, when the voices reestablished themselves, did he realize that one officer was speaking about him.

“The ones who attacked the cripple… Not the father, the boy… But no one’s beating anyone, Asha… No, nothing like that.”

Annawadi’s Asha was on the phone. Abdul was terrified then. She was probably calling to make the beatings worse, so that his mother would change her mind about paying her off.

Suddenly Sub-inspector Thokale was standing in the unofficial cell. “Asha says this boy didn’t set anyone on fire, doesn’t cause any trouble in Annawadi, so there’s no point in hitting him,” he told his colleagues with the straps. Abdul was let up from the table, and neither he nor his father was beaten again. Abdul’s shackles came off, too.

Abdul tried to make sense of this reprieve. Asha’s son Rahul was Mirchi’s best friend. Maybe Rahul had convinced his mother to protect Abdul. Or maybe Asha had noticed Abdul over the years, sorting his trash on the maidan—seen he was a hardworking kid, a quiet loser who didn’t deserve to be brutalized.

Abdul’s father had a better guess. The call was probably a show conducted for father and son, who could be counted on to report it to Zehrunisa. Asha and Thokale often worked together. Now Thokale was demonstrating his power to ensure that Abdul and his father would not be severely injured in police custody—what he’d assured Zehrunisa in exchange for money. For Asha, the show would prove to the Husains that she did have influence at Sahar Police Station, and increase the likelihood that she would get a payoff, too.

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

At sundown, four days after the burning, a Muslim fakir came to Annawadi with a peacock-feather broom to offer blessings and drive away evil spirits. Fakirs rarely came to Annawadi because the slum contained so few Muslims, the constituency most likely to pay for their extraworldly services. Abdul’s sister Kehkashan jumped up when she saw the old man. Her mother, fearing what might happen to a beautiful young woman in the police station, had pleaded with Sub-inspector Thokale to keep her out of custody as long as possible, but Kehkashan had now been ordered to turn herself in. She felt desperate for a fakir’s blessing.

Taking a ten-rupee note from her bra, she closed her eyes as the fakir touched the top of her head with the broom. She was relieved he didn’t beat her with the broom, as some fakirs did when they performed the jhaad-phoonk. She hoped it was because he sensed no diabolical spirits hovering over her, and not just that he had adopted some modern, client-pleasing technique. As Kehkashan sat still, the better to allow his blessing to seep through her body, the fakir moved on to Fatima’s door.

Fatima’s husband stormed out of the hut, wild-eyed. “Are you without hands? Are you without legs? You have come to me to beg? In the name of God! Go earn your living, go get a job!”

The fakir looked at the sky, fingered the golden zari threads in the pocket of his kurta, and backed away.

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

“What has happened to that man?” the fakir wanted to know.

“His wife burned herself,” Kehkashan said in a low voice.

“So when did she die?”

“No! No!” Kehkashan cried out. “Pray that she lives, else we will be in a grave situation.”

Fatima’s daughter Noori leaned against Kehkashan. The girl had been clinging to Kehkashan ever since she’d seen her mother burning. “I am playing a boy today,” Noori said. “Talking like a boy too.”

“Like my sister Tabu,” Kehkashan replied, distracted. “She only wants to wear boy clothes or she’ll cry.” Kehkashan was resolved not to cry herself. “Get the rice so I can clean it,” she said to Mirchi, rising and brushing herself off. “And whose turn is it at the tap?”

Her youngest brother, Lallu, was now old enough to curse like his mother: “Give dinner to me fast or I will put your eyes out!” Her youngest sister was having a come-apart, having not received her rightful share of a packet of Parle-G biscuits.

When the fakir completed his ministries and departed Annawadi, the scene through the door of the Husain hut was little different from those unfolding behind the other doors he passed.

As night dropped its hood over the slum, dinners were being scrabbled together, abuses were being hurled, tears were getting kissed away. The next morning, Fatima came home in a white metal box.

An infection had killed her. A doctor adjusted the record in the name of hospital deniability. Burns that covered 35 percent of Fatima’s body upon admission to Cooper became 95 percent at her death—a certain fatality, an unsalvageable case. ‘Greenish yellowish sloughs formation all over burn injuries with foul smell,’ read the postmortem. ‘Brain congested, lungs congested. Heart pale.’ Fatima’s file was tied up in red string and sent to the records room of the morgue, where feral dogs slept among the towering stacks of folders on the floor, and birdsong came through the window. A flock of spotted doves had colonized a palm tree outside, the croo-croo-croo of one bird overlapping the call of another.

Fatima had gotten small again, dying—took up less than half of the box. All of Annawadi came outside, as it had when she burned, but this time the onlookers kept their distance. The slum grew quiet, and quieter still when Zehrunisa and Kehkashan emerged from their hut, heads covered, to wash the corpse.

Only other Muslim women could perform this crucial ritual, the washing away of Fatima’s sins. No matter what, Zehrunisa always said, Muslims had to join up for festivals and sufferings. It was the tradition to tell Fatima she was dead now and going to be buried, so the Husain women murmured the words while dipping cotton rags into a vessel of camphor oil and water. Lifting a sheet of white muslin, they began to clean Fatima’s body. They moved up the length of her long leg, then the half leg, working slowly toward the shiny black face. “Close the mouth,” someone said. “Flies are getting in.”

When Fatima was clean and sinless, Kehkashan closed the box and covered the bier with the Husains’ best cotton quilt, the one with tiny blue checks. Fatima would now be taken to a Muslim burial ground in a slum a mile away, and Kehkashan would go to jail. A charge would be filed, likely based on Fatima’s second statement—that an attack by the Husains, and particularly Abdul, had prompted her self-immolation. At the police station, an officer had told Zehrunisa she’d have to pay another five thousand rupees to see the chargesheet.

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

Only men could go to the Muslim burial ground. Mirchi stood beside Fatima’s husband, who held one of the bier’s four poles. It was rush hour as the camphor-scented metal box moved out onto Airport Road.

The procession of dolorous slumdwellers seemed even smaller against the outsized enthusiasms of the airport city. Giant billboards announced the launch of an Indian version of People magazine. Chauffeur-driven black sedans rolled out of the Hyatt—attendees of a pharmaceutical convention, taking a break to check out the town. At another hotel, Americans representing Universal theme parks were feeling optimistic about their plan for entering the Indian market. “The percentage of rich people is small in India, but look at the absolute numbers. Enough of them that we can make this work. Don’t talk to me about Disney—we’re the best brand. Spider-Man, Revenge of the Mummy, and now we’re seeing good results out of Harry Potter. I know, people say I should go to Disney World, check out the rival, but I can’t do it. I’m too competitive—not going to give the opposition a dime—”

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

Fatima went into the same earth that held her drowned two-year-old daughter. In a matter of days, her two other daughters were entrusted to Sister Paulette.

Fatima’s husband loved his daughters, and grieved as he sent them off. But he worked fourteen hours a day sorting garbage, and local drunks sometimes despoiled little girls left home alone in Annawadi.

About The Author

Katherine Boo