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It was only mostly hopeless.
His mother seemed fine with his decision. He hoped she’d actually been listening. She seemed half absent in her exhaustion, and definitely hadn’t been listening later, when he asked if his suffering might be rewarded with an iPod.
“Yes, good and improved now,” Zehrunisa agreed. “But can thieves really change? If they can, I haven’t seen it.”
Another raging One Leg.
The following morning, Kalu lay outside Air India’s red-and-white gates: a shirtless corpse with a grown-out Salman Khan haircut, crumpled behind a flowering hedge.
Now, in an instant, something sealed inside him had split open. He couldn’t remember the mechanics of breathing, and began to speak in a clipped, frantic tone.
Sunil turned and walked home, past the immense pilings of the elevated expressway being constructed in the middle of Airport Road, past a line of signs GVK had planted that said WE CARE WE CARE WE CARE, past the long wall advertising floor tiles that stay beautiful forever.
To Annawadi boys, Kalu had been a star. To the authorities of the overcity, he was a nuisance case to be dispensed with.
Patil, who ran the Sahar station, liked to put it. But perhaps there was a trick to this success rate: not detecting the murders of inconsequential people.
Active, fence-climbing boys don’t suddenly drop dead of tuberculosis; one thing Annawadians know as well as pathologists is that TB deaths are torturously slow. But the evidence of Kalu’s body was swiftly turned to ash in a pyre at the Parsiwada Crematorium on Airport Road, the false cause of death duly noted in an official register that had been burned through the middle by a resting cigarette. Then photos of the boy’s corpse, taken in accordance with police regulations, vanished from the files at the Sahar station.
Sanjay took his sister’s hand, and as they sat knee-to-knee on the floor, told her of seeing a group of men swarm Kalu all at once. “They killed my friend,” he kept repeating. “Just threw him off.” Like he was garbage.
won’t,” he promised. When his mother returned, his sister was hysterical and he was convulsing on the floor. Pulling Sanjay up, thinking that he was having a seizure, his mother caught a chemical reek on his breath. His sister retrieved a white plastic bottle from the corner of the room. She’d seen him toying with it earlier, assumed it contained soap for blowing bubbles—Sanjay was crazy for soap bubbles. But the empty plastic bottle was rat poison.
Trying to make sense of the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay, Sunil and Abdul grew closer. Not quite friends—rather, an unnameable, not-entirely-willing category of relationship in which two boys felt themselves bound to two boys who were dead.
Road boys blamed other road boys. “Mahmoud—my full doubt is on him.” “Karan probably did it then ran away.” A corrosive, free-floating distrust worked its way down the slumlanes. Fatima’s ghost may or may not have been involved.
“How do I sleep without knowing?” she asked her daughter. “The whole world is in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.”
“Your boy died with fear in his heart.”
The soil outside the red-and-white Air India gates was good and loamy. Gradually, with the ministrations of the airport gardening crew, a boy-sized break in the flowers filled in. One afternoon, Sunil crouched there, studying the skin of the earth. He could find no trace of damage.
There had been no clinching event, no slum-boss coronation.
She let herself gain ten pounds, which softened the lines beneath her eyes—a last trace of her years in the fields.
On the rare occasion that Manju met her eye, she would bring up Asha’s least favorite subject, the One Leg.
What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.
In Meena’s opinion, any mother who financed her daughter’s college education, rarely slapped her, and hadn’t arranged her marriage at age fifteen could be forgiven for other failings.
Manju winced. She didn’t want her mother’s behavior to be more in-the-air than it already was. “My heart must be black, then,” she replied, deflecting. “The flowers in my hair die in two hours.”
By-hearting the psychology notes her teacher provided, Manju realized she needed to block out a second painful subject: Vijay, the middle-class hero of the Civil Defense Corps, who had once gripped her hand. “In my next birth, you can be my wife,” he had recently told her. “Not this time.”
She looked like one of those girls who made exciting things happen.
The political response to this hardship—deejays and colored lights—was a time-honored tradition in Mumbai.
Meena had once taken pride in having been the first girl born in Annawadi. But as she prepared to leave Mumbai, it troubled her that domestic labor in the slum was all she had learned of her city. Nothing a girl cleaned in Annawadi stayed clean. Why did people see it as a failure of the girl? Why did her mother scream at her when, like everyone else, she lost two hours of her morning standing in line for water at a dribbling tap?
wildness. This new India of feisty, convention-defying women wasn’t a place Meena knew how to get to.
He washed his own dinner plate—an astonishment to Meena and Manju, since he could have ordered his sister to do it for him. The boy was not the problem; the problem was an arranged marriage at age fifteen.
To both Meena and Manju, marrying into a village family was like time-traveling backward.
“Don’t worry,” Rahul told the girls. “The One Leg didn’t take her crutches with her when she died, so her ghost won’t be able to run and catch you.”
Meena started to feel skittish at the toilet; the serpent curse and Fatima’s ghost struck her as a risky convergence. Still, she lingered, couldn’t not linger. The minutes in the night stench with Manju were the closest she had ever come to freedom.
“Will come before dinner!” she called out to Meena, who was waving from the doorway of her hut. Manju didn’t intend to be caught with unfinished laundry on a week when dancing privileges could be taken away.
Four hours later, clothes on the line and the final round of Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes completed, Manju walked over to Meena’s. Her friend was sitting in her doorway, looking out at the tidy maidan. This was odd. Meena’s parents didn’t let her sit on the stoop—said it gave a girl a loose reputation.
Feeling a little aggrieved at Meena’s failure to entertain her, Manju rose to return to her work. “Wait,” said Meena, holding out her hand. In her palm was an empty tube of rat poison. Meena
Manju thought of cartoon dragons, exhaling fire and smoke. Later, she kept thinking she saw smoke coming out of Meena’s mouth and nose—as if the girl had set herself on fire from the inside.
This was one decision about her life she got to make. It wasn’t a choice easily shared with a best friend.
Feminine discretion had averted a scene, perhaps saved a wedding.
As she and Asha left to pick up the idol, Meena’s elder brother arrived home, learned that his sister had consumed rat poison, and beat her for it. Meena wept and went to sleep. Just before midnight, she started to cry again. Eventually her father realized that this was not sad crying.
In a certain morning light, Manju could see the name MEENA traced faintly in a broken piece of cement just outside the toilet. “Only in that light,” she said, “and even then, it’s barely there.” Another, lesser Meena lived in Annawadi, and a man who loved that Meena had once carved her name on the inside of his forearm. Manju thought he’d probably written MEENA in the wet cement, too. It stood to reason. But she preferred to believe that Meena’s own finger had made the letters, and that the first girl born in Annawadi had left some mark of herself on the place.
The newspapers Sunil collected said that a lot of Americans were now living in their cars or in tents under bridges.
Far more interesting to young slumdwellers was the fact that Ambani’s helicopters would land on the roof.
He looked like a college kid, except for the automatic weapon.
The bombs in his second-favorite video game, Bomberman, were black and round with long sizzle-fuses. Circus music played when they exploded.
Here in Annawadi, every home looked a little like the family who had made it. But even when besieged, this south Mumbai seemed to him majestically coherent—“like a single mind made the whole place.”
At four stories, it was the highest roof he’d ever been on, but what made it exhilarating was the vista of open space, a rarity in the city.
For Sunil, seeing the people from above made him feel close to them. He felt free to watch them in a way he couldn’t when he was on the ground. There, if he stared, they would see him staring.
Once, he had believed he was smart and might become something—not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.
Too many Annawadi females wanted to die,
“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?”
