Gautam Nagar is one of thirty-odd slums,
comprising ninety thousand families, on land owned by the Airports Authority of
India, in Mumbai. It is ten minutes by foot to the international terminal and
is ringed by five of the city’s smartest hotels. The hotels charge two hundred
to a thousand dollars a night and are enclosed by high walls and barbed-wire
fences, so their interactions with Gautam Nagar are primarily airborne. Music
from weddings and poolside parties drifts over. Ash from cow-dung and wood
fires drifts back. And every evening at precisely six-thirty a Hyatt sign
lights up red and white, its glow not quite reaching the dirty screens of two
video-game consoles in a tin-roof shed.
Anna, an elderly Tamil
resident of Gautam Nagar who wears his loincloths very short, opened the game
parlor last year. He quickly regretted the endeavor. Profits have slipped owing
to the global recession, and, like businessmen the world over, he is now
repositioning: converting the front of the game room into a stall for hot fried
snacks. Food hygiene is more difficult at Anna’s than it is at the Hyatt, since
the air of Gautam Nagar is clotted with grit from a nearby concrete plant. So
he covers his skillet with a sign, retrieved from a trash pile, that reads
“Hotel InterContinental the Grand.”
The uncertain future of
the games in this evolving establishment concerns Sunil, a thirteen-year-old
boy who works at the airport. He supports their survival as reliably as he is
able: one rupee nightly in exchange for thirty minutes of Metal Slug 3. At dusk
on January 22nd, as a parade of Mumbai women visited the hotel spas to get
manicured, exfoliated, and blown out for that night’s Indian première of
“Slumdog Millionaire,” Sunil was deriving a poor return on his one-rupee
entertainment outlay. He was having his ass handed to him by a being even worse
than the zombies and giant mutant crabs on his screen: a twelve-year-old
gloater. “You’re dead now,” Sunil’s rival cried, banging the joystick, making
the bombed-out virtual city shake. “Everyone, come and see!” Sunil attempted to
rally his Metal Slug man, firing a rocket-propelled grenade at an abandoned
tank that provided cover for his enemy, as boys pressed in to watch him fail.
He didn’t take the
crowd’s interest personally. Boys always crammed into Anna’s. One reason was
Anna himself: bald on top with snarls of silver hair on the rest of his body,
something the children found consistently funny. More compelling, though, were
the amenities: the games, two light bulbs, and a short metal bench. Sunil’s
home, in one of the many sumpy lanes behind the shop, lacked lights, water, and
a place to sit, and every evening was enveloped in a stink so much worse than
all the usual stinks at Gautam Nagar that people doubled over when they inhaled
it. The cause was a truckload of rotting hotel food, dumped daily outside his
home, which sustained three hundred feral pigs. He would have paid more than
one rupee to breathe elsewhere.
Two older boys
commandeered the second machine—sophisticates, with rusty bullet casings shoved
into holes in their earlobes. This fashion caused infections, but was believed
to be the American style.
“To kill me, you will
have to do something bigger than this!”
“Take your rocket
inside!”
“No, no—then they will
throw that bomb.”
“Bombs? All my bombs are
gone—”
“Lost. Lost.”
The sophisticates
weren’t as loud as the gloater, but as they played they hogged the bench. Out
of principle, Sunil rose to yank it back. This put him further behind in the
scoring, but, mentally, he had already deserted the mission: a dwindling
interest that had less to do with bench hogs or the gloater than with his
changing relationship to Metal Slug 3. Reverberations of the crisis in the
American economy had recently driven him from work he liked—collecting garbage
and selling it to recyclers—into work he didn’t like. He had become a metal
thief at the international airport, and now that he faced real daily dangers,
without arms or armor, the rush of pretend dangers on video screens had
diminished. He regretted not spending his rupee on Bomberman, the game selected
by two younger boys who had taken his spot on the bench. The Bombermen had
round heads and looked like toys, and circus music played when you exploded.
Worldly Indians like to call Mumbai, the
financial capital, their country’s New York City. That would make the airport
area, in the suburbs, its Queens. Mumbai’s Queens, though, has more glamour.
Around the hotels, stands of sleek office buildings are multiplying rapidly;
one of them is named simply More. Gautam Nagar is named after the
eight-year-old son of a scavenger who succumbed to pneumonia after one of the
periodic slum demolitions. The community consists of approximately a thousand
human residents; seventeen water buffalo; goats, dogs, and pigs; and two white
horses striped to look like zebras—the handiwork of a once fearsome slumlord,
now gone batty. The primary industry here is the gathering of airport garbage
for recycling—work made a little less miserable by expanded global markets and
India’s surging G.D.P. Over the past five years, there were enough water
bottles, earbuds, Diet Coke cans, used tampon applicators, batteries, and
copies of Indian Vogue to lift the majority of families over
the World Bank’s poverty line, which is currently twenty-two rupees a day
in India’s cities.
Jobs at the hotels would
have lifted residents far higher, but management wanted people who spoke
English, not just Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Nepali, or any of the six or eight
other languages spoken in the airport slums. Everyone knew that management also
wanted people who were light-skinned; many Gautam Nagar residents are dark from
work in the sun. Still, recycling had, over time, turned most of the slum’s
tarp roofs into tin ones, under which some families had laid down ceramic-tile
floors. But last fall, when bank lending slowed worldwide, construction
projects stalled, and the demand for recycled materials plummeted, Gautam
Nagar’s link to the global markets started pushing it backward.
“The banks in America
went in a loss, then the big people went in a loss, then the scrap market in
the slum areas came down, too” was how Anna, who read the Tamil-language
newspapers, had explained the crisis to the residents. A kilo of empty water
bottles, once worth twenty-five rupees, was now worth ten. This was how the
crisis was understood.
Sunil had entered the
garbage business when he was seven or so, after his mother died of
tuberculosis. His father did roadwork when it was available, then drank his
wages. Sunil’s sister, Sunita, was two years younger; when he was small, he’d
lost her for a week, but he had been careful not to misplace her after that.
He’d shared with her the money he made roaming the airport roads with a sack,
retrieving and examining the stuff that other people tossed away. An older boy,
odd and constantly blinking, had been his preferred companion, and Sunil even
now viewed the dustbins in the cargo area with a proprietary eye, as they had
been the boys’ most profitable target.
Sunil still did not feel
much like a thief. When he took a bath in an abandoned pit at the concrete-mixing
plant, he pushed away the algae to inspect his reflection. The change in his
profession didn’t yet show on his face: same big mouth, wide nose, problem
torso. He was too small all over. Even Sunita was taller now, though he bested
her in hair. While both of them got bitten by rats, and the rat bites sometimes
turned into head boils, she’d recently become a baldie like Anna, because her
boils had erupted with worms.
A genial
sixteen-year-old neighbor, himself possessed of a worm-bald sister, had walked
Sunil through his change in profession. Rather than waiting for stuff to get
used up and tossed out a window, a profit-minded individual could get involved
earlier in the consumption process. The older boy even offered the use of his
bicycle, free, for the first burglary, if Sunil would sell to him what he
obtained. “Bring me jhol” was what that boy had said: goods
procured by indi-rect means. And so Sunil, once a lawful scavenger, became one
of the new economy’s micro-saboteurs.
It was 8 p.m.,
and outside the game parlor the water buffalo were nosing for food through
mounds of devalued garbage, excreting the consequences of bad choices in vivid
green streams. The owner of the buffalo sold their milk to families in
neighborhoods with more disposable income, so Sunil didn’t really consider the
beasts part of the community. Sunil had two jobs to show for his day, which had
started around midnight, when he crept into a four-story airport parking garage
that was a month short of completion.
Outside, the building
was blue and silver steel. Inside was a series of vast concrete plains. By now,
Sunil knew the best way in: past rows of bright-red-and-yellow barricades; past
bulldozers and a generator, hooded at night; past a security checkpoint where
guards were scouring car trunks with flashlights; past a bitter-almond tree
whose leaves had reddened, which meant the nuts had turned sweet; and past two
U-shaped bunkers. The bunkers were made of cement bags, piled high, and he’d
first seen them in November, after terrorists came by boat from Pakistan to
kill a lot of people in another part of the city, a place that also seemed to
be crammed with hotels. The gunmen had been on the television at Anna’s house,
which sat two sheds from the game parlor, and Sunil had seen them through a
window.
The ceilings of the
garage were low. All the lights were off, including some blue ones that looked
like spiders. During the day, sparrows skittered around the garage, but
sparrows didn’t skitter at night, so he wasn’t sure which animals were making
sounds. Not rats, he decided; he had never encountered them here before. Guards
he had often encountered, but tonight he couldn’t hear where they were. He
moved carefully to a stairwell, which, instead of exterior walls, had steel slats
with spaces in between them. The slats let in the white light from the newly
renovated terminal, where families were still waving to departing passengers.
The light increased the risk of his being seen by one of the guards, but it was
essential to making an appraisal.
Lately, Sunil had been
searching for German silver—a term spoken reverently in Gautam Nagar, and
always in English, for some reason. In the slum, it meant aluminum,
electroplate, nickel, and an alloy sometimes used to make forks and knives. The
price for German silver had recently dropped from a hundred rupees a kilo
to sixty, but the price for everything else had fallen further.
Sunil worked his way up
the stairwell. On each landing a small hole had been drilled in the concrete,
and he supposed that a water pipe would eventually run through it. For now, the
hole allowed him to ascertain whether guards were slinking up the stairwell
behind him, before he turned to examine each slice of concrete expanse.
Third tier: two strips
of aluminum. He darted out to grab them. This wasn’t a score that would be fun
to recount back at Anna’s. The strips were just lying on the floor, and he was
surprised that some other thief hadn’t already taken them. He thought they
might have been parts of a window frame, although the garage didn’t have
windows. The practical function of items he stole was often a mystery to him.
It didn’t matter to his work, but he still wondered.
Next, he ascended to the
roof, where the only German silver he’d ever found was in a bright-red cabinet
marked “Fire Hose Box”—a flimsy holder for a fire extinguisher, worth little.
The roof was also the place where he was most likely to encounter watchmen.
Nepali watchmen scared him most, because they were sort of Chinese, like Bruce
Lee. Still, on every visit he tried to get up there. At four stories, it was
the highest roof he’d ever been on. The open space was a rarity in his city of
something like sixteen million people.
The roof had two kinds
of space, really. One kind was what a boy got when he stood exactly in the
middle and knew that even if his arms were ten times longer he’d touch nothing
if he spun around. But that kind of space would be gone when the garage was
open and filled with cars. The space that would last was the kind he leaned
into, over the guardrails. He liked the red-tailed Air India planes flying out,
and the municipal water tower with its red and white squares. He liked seeing
the glow of the Hyatt sign, and trying to guess which of the dark patches
underneath was Gautam Nagar. But what he liked seeing most were the people
moving in and out of the terminal. Other boys who visited the roof liked the
moving people, too, because they looked small. Sunil had a different
perspective. Seeing the moving people from up high made him feel close to them.
He felt free to study how they did things in a way he couldn’t when he was on
the ground. There, if he stared, they would see him staring.
Enough roof: he had to
take his German back to Gautam Nagar. Before the terrorist thing, he would have
dropped the strips off the roof onto a mound of sand used to make concrete, and
then run down to pick them up. He liked the way the sand felt under his bare
feet. With the increased security, however, he couldn’t risk the clatter of the
metal if he missed the sandpile. Instead, he carried his aluminum strips down
the stairs, and then, before leaving the building, slid them down his pants,
through the legs of his underwear. German against the skin didn’t feel good,
but whenever he’d tried to carry it outside his underwear it slipped around.
He limped, stiff-legged,
past the security checkpoint and the municipal police station, then home for a
few hours’ sleep in the back of a trash truck. Rising early, he sold the
aluminum to Anna, who had a scrap business on top of his other enterprises.
Anna opened a purse in the folds of his too short lungi to give Sunil eight
rupees: twenty for the silver, minus twelve rupees for three bread-and-potato
concoctions called vada pav from the fryer. Chinese
chicken-chili rice, Sunil’s favorite meal, cost twenty-five rupees; he’d had it
once several months ago, after an eighty-rupee copper heist—faucet valves from
the airport fire brigade. He was still new to his work then and had thought
chicken-chili rice might be a regular option.
After lunch, he and a
younger friend visited a sewer they called a river, where at midday it was
cooler than elsewhere. Then he set out again, to separate tire locks from the
wheels of autorickshaws that had ended up on the wrong side of the airport
parking police.
One of the area’s many tangles of cranes and
scaffolding sits two hundred metres from the game parlor, and promises
something that prosperous Mumbaikars eagerly await: an elevated expressway to
the airport. The current airport road is one of the purgatories where new India
collides with old India and makes new India late: roads of missed flights, lost
deals in London or Dubai, and dreams dying behind the jam of new cars and
incompetent drivers and the fleet of bicycle delivery boys peeling off from the
chicken shop, each carrying three hundred eggs. In another year, there would be
a smooth ride over this chaos to the international-departures terminal, for
those who could afford to fly away.
Sunil’s road was as
cratered as one in a Vidarbha village. It was after 9 p.m. now, and other thieves
were walking down it, lugging goods. The residents who still collected
garbage—mostly women, mostly Matang, one of the traditionally untouchable
castes—were carrying gunnysacks marked “UPS.” Many of the women had
started work at five that morning, with short breaks to cook food, wash dishes,
shake grit out of sheets, fill water vessels from an oversubscribed tap, and
rear their children. The Matangs kept apart from the thieves, but both groups
were in a rush to trade what they’d gathered for cash, either from Anna or from
one of the two other scrap dealers standing in front of scales nearby.
Twenty-five rupees to a Matang woman in a red sari, forty to her friend, another forty to a thief, who had worked fewer hours. Sunil had secured two tire locks on the second run, but tonight, as on most nights, he was delaying his trade. He had stowed his pieces under the table where Anna cooked. All over the world, according to Anna’s newspapers, businesses possessing large quantities of metal were also forestalling their reckonings—“holding a long position” was the term—in the hope that the recession would end, governments and businesses would start building things again, and the price of scrap would rally. Prices never rallied over a few evening hours at Anna’s, so Sunil wasn’t sure why he liked to procrastinate before setting his goods on the scale.
There were lots of things he did without really knowing the reason. He thought it would be useful to have someone to help him make his arguments—which of the Hindu saints and gods was the best, for instance. This was something about which other kids had strong feelings:
“Your fat Ganpati can’t move fast enough to save you from me now, asshole!”
“Ha! My Shiv will open his third eye and destroy you!”
Sunil was too unsure of the respective merits of the various gods to decide upon a favorite. Still, from what he had observed in Gautam Nagar, the fact that a boy knew about the gods didn’t mean that the gods would look after the boy.
A new shift of players entered Anna’s shed: cashed-out workers, mostly thieves, unwinding before sleep. The Matang women never sat down to play, Sunil had noticed. He sat behind the gamers on a black plastic jug, watching his tire locks while stretching his legs, which were stiff and mapped with cuts from German silver. The next time he had fifteen rupees to spend on nonessentials, he wanted to get his ear pierced. He didn’t want one of the rusty bullet casings the older boys wore. He wanted something shiny. He had his eye on a silver-colored skull on offer from a vender at the local train station. He would be able to buy it this weekend if he executed a certain burglary he’d been postponing. This act of procrastination wasn’t a mystery to him. He was scared.
When Sunil told new boys he met at the parlor, “I work at the airport daily,” “daily” was the word he emphasized. It was 9:30 p.m. now, and his father, who worked only occasionally, had just reeled past the shop. Sunil went outside but didn’t call to him. One of his friends, also a thief, was lounging on a bag of Matang garbage. The boy was tripping sloppy on Erase-X, the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out, which office people tended to toss prematurely. Mix the dried bits with three drops of water, put a gob on a rag, stuff the rag into your nostrils, and you had a cheap high more exhilarating than that of the heroin for sale in one of Gautam Nagar’s bigger huts. Sunil had tried Erase-X once. Afterward, he couldn’t remember much, not even the feeling of being high, which was a disappointment.
The hour of Erase-X was also the hour for reviewing the day’s events, and the talk now was of a Tamil woman whose husband had sold the family hut in the course of a four-day binge. While Sunil was prying tire locks from the wheels of autorickshaws, the woman had tried to hang herself from a ceiling fan. Someone cut her down. She was fine. This was dull gossip for a day at Gautam Nagar, and the boys didn’t dwell on it. Instead, they returned to Anna’s, compared the goods found that day, and gauged which boy had displayed the most daring.
A lot of boys lied about what they stole. Sunil understood the impulse. School, not stealing, was what he lied about. He lied about school all the time.
“Which class are you?” asked a boy he didn’t know. New boys were always turning up at Anna’s—fresh arrivals from poor states in the north.
“Class five,” Sunil replied.
A boy wearing the blue pin-striped uniform issued by the government school turned away from his joystick, confused: “But how can you be in five when I am in five?”
“No, not the school near here. A school in Chakala. Well, right now I don’t go to class, but I will go later. I will go only to take the big exams at the end of the year . . .”
At the start of the school year, last July, Sunil had registered for classes at the local government school, as did most boys and girls in the slum. The central and state governments were expanding access to education, though teaching positions at the schools were still doled out locally as political rewards, often to the grossly unqualified. That first week, Sunil and the other children had staggered home with central-government incentives: book bags, umbrellas for the monsoon, pencil boxes. Many students then went back to work, after selling the school supplies to Anna. They needed rupees more than pencil boxes.
In Gautam Nagar, there was a single boy who could reasonably pass as a scholar. His name was Prakash, and though he didn’t talk to many people, people talked about him. He’d attended a private English-language high school, then earned a bachelor’s degree, and was now cramming for a board exam that might secure him a scholarship to management school. “He went from zero to hero”—that was the line in the Hindi films about slum boys who triumphed, and Prakash went after scholarships by telling his story in this Hindi-film way. But Prakash’s father had gone to college, too, had studied science, before being injured in one of the train accidents that kill, on average, four thousand Mumbaikars a year. The father, now a curbside samosa vender, had just hobbled past Anna’s on his remaining foot. It had been a poor selling day—“Economic slowdown,” he had explained—but he wasn’t the sort to treat anxiety with a plastic bag of slum-brewed liquor on his way home. Compared with other management-school aspirants, Prakash was wildly disadvantaged. Relative to other boys in Gautam Nagar, he was privileged.
Sunil had been privileged, too. After his mother died, the Handmaids of the Blessed Trinity, a Catholic charity funded by international donors, had taken him and his sister to a private school for poor and orphaned children outside the city. He remembered a geography book with pull-out maps, and Sister Paulette’s promise: “She would put us through class ten and make us big, so that we can get married.” This sequence remained his private code: the steps required for a decent adult life. But after a while he and Sunita had been returned to Gautam Nagar. He had played too much, he thought, or studied too little. Now he called the nun Sister Paulette-Toilet, quietly, when her chauffeured van came through the airport slums. He figured she was scouting for children more promising than he.
Zubbu, the daughter of a man who ran the local brothel, was also being scouted by outsiders. She stopped to wave to Sunil on her way home from Koran class: another baldie, but pretty. Instead of going to school, she kept house and cared for her younger brother, who was ugly and liked to make lizards smoke cigarettes before setting them on fire and breaking their skulls with a stone. Zubbu’s parents favored the brother, however. He looked just like his father, while Zubbu was conceived during one of her father’s prison stints. All month, Zubbu’s parents had been trying to sell her, and Sunil would miss seeing her around. He had found her nicer, though, when she had long hair.
By 10 p.m., the beautified people were arriving at a white-lit multi-plex in the center of the city for the Indian première of “Slumdog Millionaire”—an event coinciding with the early-morning announcement of the Oscar nominations in Los Angeles. Sunil happened to know this part of Mumbai, as it contained the cat-infested t.b. sanatorium where his mother and neighbors had been treated before they died.
In India, “Slumdog Millionaire,” a British film whose credits included Bollywood stars, would not be universally admired. In Bihar, slumdwellers greeted the opening by threatening to burn fifty-six effigies of the director, whose movie title equated human beings with dogs. A media-mad politician in a neighborhood close to, but nicer than, Gautam Nagar pressed the dog point with a lawsuit, hoping to force the filmmakers to change the name. He thought “Slum Dash Millionaire” would be more polite. Many educated, successful Indians disliked the film, too, but not because it slighted the poor. Rather, they thought it slighted the increasing affluence and prominence of their country.
The West did seem to make a fetish of the Indian poor, even as the official poverty rate was falling: from thirty-six to twenty-seven per cent in a decade. Sunburned tourists ventured forth from five-star hotels to take eight-hundred-rupee, four-hour slum tours. Madonna took a slum tour, too, though hers was free. In every room of Mumbai’s new Four Seasons Hotel, housekeepers placed a copy of “Shantaram,” a romantic novel set in the city slums, in a bedside drawer, in lieu of a Bible. Perhaps this Western fascination had something to do with sheer numbers: India still harbors a third of the world’s poor. But Western status anxiety could not be ruled out entirely. While the great powers struggled, India, only sixty years free of colonization, continued to boom, with sufficient entrepreneurial energy and human potential to threaten the traditional global order.
Still, it wasn’t just national pride that made prosperous Indians skeptical of “Slumdog.” The film’s squalid images didn’t comport with the India they frequented. While official statistics told a story, true or not, about the dimensions of Indian poverty, it was getting harder than ever for the rich to gauge the particulars. Across the country, electrified fences, walls jagged with broken glass, security gates had gone up as inequality grew. This frenzy of fence-building was not just an Indian thing. It was as global as the crisis in garbage. And it reflected uneasiness about a time that might or might not come in which information flowed so freely that, however little the rich wished to consider the details of the poor, the poor might fully consider the details of the rich. Not the fantasy contours of wealth long available on the television and on the billboards but the precise thing happening next door. The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.
The marvel was that the city didn’t already look like a real-life version of the mad, insurrectionist Metal Slug 3, given that the poor far outnumbered the rich. This was the marvel of many great twenty-first-century cities, including New York and Washington, whose levels of inequality now match those of Abidjan and Nairobi. Maybe they should have looked like Metal Slug 3. Instead, ingenious social constructions—democracy, charity, subtle and blatant articulations of caste, hope, electrified fences—were keeping things more or less in order. Boys like Sunil had their part to play, too.
As the local newspapers gorged on “Slumdog,” a fresh statistic appeared on the inside pages: Mumbai had more reported burglaries than any other metropolitan area in the country, with the greatest concentration in Sunil’s area, the western suburbs. Perhaps these thefts were one of the city’s secret safety valves: small leaks that kept the whole contraption from exploding. To the private corporation now running the airport, or to the government running the country, the total value of the loss wasn’t just a rounding error. It was a bargain. The occasional bit of German silver kept the boys of Gautam Nagar in vada pav. It kept one of the world’s great, unjust cities in relative peace.
The prospective theft that unnerved Sunil was at a place he called the Taj, but his Taj was not the luxury hotel that suffered casualties in the November terrorist attack. His Taj was a plain low-rise building, partly owned by the famous hotel company, on the airport grounds. Behind high stone walls and concertina wire, the company made meals to be served on flights. Shortly before the terrorists came, Sunil had seen orange scaffolding rising up inside the compound—a sign of construction and of metal on the ground. A few weeks later, he and three friends began to explore the possibilities. Though the concertina wire was impossible to clear, they found a hole behind some brush at the base of one of the walls. The wall edged a gravel lane that was pitch-black at night, and the other boys tripped on stones when darting down it. Sunil rarely stumbled, as he’d been using the lane for years. At its end was the sewer he called a river. When he was little, the water had seemed to him like swimming-pool water. Now it reeked, and he was puzzled that the fish still tasted sweet.
All month, from the sewer-bank place, he’d been staring at the brush that hid the hole, and not deciding anything much. Because he ran so much faster than most policemen, and climbed well, he’d been held at the station only four times. Those times were bad enough. They would be worse now, because of the terrorists. Everything was worse: new dogs, new contingents of guards, new guns. But the other boys didn’t seem to register the difference in climate. They just looked at him expectantly. He had somehow become the boy who had to say, “Go in, get that.”
A boy named Deepak had been his go-in-get-that person. Deepak’s decisions could be poor because of Erase-X, but he was four years older than Sunil and genuinely daring. Then he died of German-silver fever. Security guards in one of the compounds had gouged out his eyes, put a sickle in his asshole. Sunil didn’t like to think about what had happened to Deepak after they put the sickle in: how they ripped a cut, like a smile. The children of Gautam Nagar saw his body after it was tossed back over the wall. The police had no record of the murder.
At the game parlor, no one mentioned Deepak after dark. Invoking the name of any dead person after sunset increased the likelihood that his ghost would come back and haunt you. That was one thing about which everyone in Gautam Nagar—Hindu, Muslim, from the north, from the south—agreed.
Sunil stood up: it was cash-in time. Abdul, a twenty-year-old Muslim scrap dealer, was standing with a friend just outside Anna’s. Sunil used to sell his soda cans to Abdul, before he learned from other Hindus about the invisible magnets Muslims put on their scales. Abdul looked funny now, twisting his neck back and forth just like the horses across the road that had been painted to look like zebras. He and they were probably flinging back and forth the same malarial mosquitoes.
“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?” Abdul asked his friend, who had been practicing his English by studying an advertisement for mango-flavored candies. Sunil liked to listen to Abdul, despite the invisible magnets. “Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this?” Abdul said. “I wonder what kind of life is that—I go through tensions just to see the kind of life they’re living. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once my mother was beating me for something, and that idea just came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now—you beating me—is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.’ And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, ‘Don’t confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.’ ”
Abdul’s friend bolted, leaving the candy advertisement in Abdul’s care, and Sunil wandered in the opposite direction. It was nearly 10:30 p.m. Anna was inside his house, playing with his two young grandchildren while watching the climax of a Tamil soap opera. Sunil decided to watch, too, through the window, not turning even when the Tamil woman who had just tried to hang herself passed so close she nearly touched him, crying. Sunil didn’t speak Tamil, but he had seen enough of the soap opera to know that the pretty woman on the screen, also crying, had three sisters and one brother she didn’t know about. The soap-opera woman was now in a courtroom, her testimony about to convict the brother she didn’t know for a grave crime involving a computer disk—roll credits. To be continued. Now Anna was free to preside over the scale.
Sunil knew nothing of the movie that ends with an airport-slum boy finding money, love, and fame. However, he might have recognized one of that movie’s conceits: that deprivation may give a child a certain intelligence. The other conceit—that a child’s specific miserable experiences might be the things to spring him from his deprivation—was the lie. It was the movie version of the electrified fence. The women who had been manicured and exfoliated and blown out would linger at the première past 1 a.m., then head to the after party at the JW Marriott. They could relax, not just because the film about the slum boy had a happy ending but because the boy’s suffering had been part of the solution.
Sunil trusted Anna more than he trusted other people. But after unloading his goods onto one side of the scale he picked up each of the five-kilo black weights Anna used and held them for a moment, to verify their substance. When satisfied, he laid the weights gently in the other cradle and watched as the needle registered its verdict: fifty rupees. Fifty plus the twenty he’d made earlier. Over the poverty line, for this one day.
Sunil could buy the soap he needed for a bath in the pit, but not the earring with the skull, which he had hoped would make him feel older. But he would get it after the Taj. When he got to his hut, he discovered that his father was still wandering and had taken the only candle. This made him feel younger. At home, unlike at the airport, he was still afraid of the dark.
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