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Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo, and the usual belly-down splay of alcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small, unspookable boy from Nepal. He was sitting, arms around knees, in a spangly blue haze by the sewage lake—the reflected neon signage of a luxury hotel across the water.
the type that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through people-choked slumlanes.
It was a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the overcity, from which wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums.
Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.
Abdul’s motor skills had developed around his labor.
Most days, that prospect weighed on him like a sentence. Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt like a hope.
as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.
She wanted to be respected and reckoned attractive. Annawadians considered such desires inappropriate for a cripple.
Like most people in the slum, and in the world, for that matter, he believed his own dreams properly aligned to his capacities.
Later, Abdul would recall the officers’ words penetrating the storeroom wall with a fever-dream slowness. So his sister Kehkashan was being accused, too. For this, he wished the One Leg dead. Then he wished he hadn’t wished it. If the One Leg died, his family would be even more screwed.
Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days;
The brick belief was something he wanted to harbor, not to test.
It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
Abdul would do his duty, and almost, almost gladly. Hiding was what guilty people did; being innocent, he wanted the fact stamped on his forehead. So what else to do but submit himself to the stamping authorities—to the law, to justice, concepts in which his limited history had given him no cause to believe? He would try to believe in them now.
His general approach toward his neighbors was this: “The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves.”
so less off-kilter looked like straight.
The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding.
Rahul, who had a patriotic streak, had peed in the Indian one, an open drain in the floor.
But Rahul’s accounts had special value, since he didn’t lie, or at least not more than one sentence out of twenty.
Abdul didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was as if he’d spent weeks privately working over some little idea.
Listening to Bollywood love songs, he could only conclude that his own heart had been made too small.
They’d had to pay, since spreading educational opportunity was not among the Indian government’s strong suits.
In this reformation, thirty-nine-year-old Asha Waghekar perceived an opportunity. Robert had lost his taste for power just as she was discovering her own. Let others thread the marigolds. Let others sort the trash. For the overcity people who wished to exploit Annawadi, and the undercity people who wished to survive it, she wanted to be the woman-to-see.
thoroughgoing only in his lack of ambition.
Tell me, bastard. Shall I strip naked and dance for you now?” No other woman, then or since, had spoken to the slumlord that way. Asha had developed her sharp tongue
Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn’t blame his dissatisfaction on someone else?
Your concerns are so unimportant to me that I haven’t bothered to dress.
Mr. Kamble limped away, Asha felt confident that he’d come back to her before he would go to any temple. A dying man should pay a lot to live.
Asha grasped many of her own contradictions, among them that you could be proud of having spared your offspring hardship while also resenting them for having been spared. When food was short in Asha’s childhood,
Abdul was repeating the reassurances of his father, Karam, who sought to keep his children incurious about aspects of Indian life beyond their control.
Having a sense of how the world operated, beyond its pretenses, seemed to him an armoring thing.
How nuns weren’t as different from regular people as nuns were commonly said to be. His sister
But by then, the habit of not asking anyone for anything had become a part of who he was.
He no longer tried to explain his private enthusiasms, and figured Sunil would learn his own aloneness, in time.
Abdul seemed relieved at this choice, though Sunil could never read all of what that old man of a boy was thinking.
And there was enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.
“Soon,” Asha promised. The packed temple grew ripe with sweat. Slum dwellings, temples included, sucked in the heat of the city and held it, but in the first hour the misery went unexpressed. The next hour, the temple was teeming with sighs.
He would give her that smile that could not be read but as an insult.
Six eunuchs lived in Annawadi and wore hardship on their makeup-smeared faces. Some of them had come into the temple behind the young one.
She had spent her teenaged years turning herself into a model of proper and gentle deportment—deportment she thought her own mother lacked.
Manju wasn’t too interested in money. She hungered for virtue, a desire that was partly a fear. When studying, she sometimes fingered the scar on her neck from a night, years ago, when she’d stolen money from her mother to buy chocolates. Asha had responded with an axe. But Manju’s desire to be good was also rebellion—a way of chastising a mother who was said to have acquired the television set and other advantages by behaving badly.
As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.
The garbage boy didn’t speak to anyone, as far as she could tell.
Abdul, who considered Manju the most-everything girl in Annawadi, could only wonder at the small boy’s sense of superiority. One of Abdul’s own arrogances, in these weeks before the One Leg burned and everything changed, was that he could predict the fates of other people, especially scavengers. But Sunil’s future was hard to make out. Although contempt was a force that changed a person, being a waste-picker hadn’t yet infected Sunil’s mind, if he still thought memorizing “A Is for Apple” might make some difference in his life.
She was damaged, and acknowledged it freely. She was illiterate—acknowledged that, too.
had been daily punishment, watching her siblings run off to school and return to suck up their parents’ affection.
She had no interest in playing the shuffling, grateful role that the charitable types expected of the disabled.
“It’s easy to break a single bamboo stick, but when you bundle the sticks, you can’t even bend them,” she told her children. “It’s the same with family and with the people of our faith. Despite the petty differences, Muslims have to join up in big sufferings, and for Eid.”
“I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don’t feel it, and I myself don’t know why,” he fretted. “These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away—they cut their arms with a blade, they put a cigarette butt out in their hand, they won’t sleep, they won’t eat, they’ll sing—they must have different hearts than mine.”
Karam had heard that this Obama was secretly a Muslim, and was rooting for him.
