8. The Master
âNow it poured, a stinging rain. On the high grounds of the liquid city, rich people spoke
of the romance of monsoon: the languorous sex, retail therapy, and hot jalebis that eased July into August. At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick
water buffalo nosed for food through mounds of wet, devalued garbage, shitting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stamped the mud from their feet and said, âMy stomach is on fire, my chest.
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The Journey to the Interior
âKalasinga explained to him the mysteries of the engine, and Yusuf grasped something of this but was happier watching him magically coax the tangle of pipes and bolts into life. He heard about India, where Kalasinga had not been for many years, and South Africa, where he had lived as a child. Itâs a madhouse in South. All kinds of cruel fantasies have come true there. Let me tell you something about those Afrikander bastards, though. Theyâre crazy. I donât just mean wild and cruel, I mean round the loop. Hot sun has turned their Dutch brain to soup.
The Journey to the Interior
âKalasinga explained to him the mysteries of the engine, and Yusuf grasped something of this but was happier watching him magically coax the tangle of pipes and bolts into life. He heard about India, where Kalasinga had not been for many years, and South Africa, where he had lived as a child. Itâs a madhouse in South. All kinds of cruel fantasies have come true there. Let me tell you something about those Afrikander bastards, though. Theyâre crazy. I donât just mean wild and cruel, I mean round the loop. Hot sun has turned their Dutch brain to soup.
11. Proper Sleep
âSanjay rolled over to face the wall, refusing the salt water his mother prepared to force him to vomit. He lived for two hours after reaching the public hospital. After midnight, returning home to Dharavi ancient with grief, his mother tossed into the gutter the prescriptions the doctor had written for Sanjay. There had been no time to go out to the road and fill them.
The police inquiry into her sonâs death was closed as swiftly as the inquiry into Kaluâs death had been.
13. Something Shining
âThe deranged scavenger who talked to the luxury hotels stopped accusing the Hyatt of plotting to kill him. Instead, he pleaded to its nonreflective blue-glass front, âI do so much work, Hyatt, and earn so little. Will you not take care of me?ââ (Boo, âBehind the Beautiful Foreversâ,
15. Ice
Mumbaiâs wealthy were also hopeful in the months after the terrorist attacks. Many
had begun to engage in politics for the first time, intent on bringing about government reform. Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private
security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.
The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.
Ten young men had terrorised one of the worldâs biggest cities for three days â a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with the government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didnât know how to use their weapons, and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital â a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. By the time the commandos arrived in south Mumbai, the killings were all but over.
Parliamentary elections would be held at the end of April, and middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, were registering to vote in record numbers. Affluent, educated candidates were coming forward with platforms of radical change: accountability, transparency, e-governance. While independent India had been founded by high-born, well-educated men, by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had.
17. A School, a Hospital, a Cricket Field
âIn mid-May, the election results came in. The reform-minded elites had not turned out to vote, after all. Most of the incumbent parliamentarians were reelected, they returned the prime minister to office, and the radical improvements in governance promised before the voting were quietly shelved. A few weeks later, the bulldozers of the airport authority began to move across the periphery of Annawadi.
The Beautiful Forever wall came down, and in two days, the sewage lake that had brought dengue fever and malaria to the slum was filled in, its expanse leveled in preparation for some new development.