Chapter 12: Changing Tides: A Girl at Dea

“For days my mother’s fragrance lingered on the landing that ran between my parents room and mine. There were no windows there, just a bulb overhead, but it is the one part of the house where I remember there being light.

PART TWO: the business of burning

6. The Hole She Called a Window

“No onlooker asked, Why fix a house where the airport authority might demolish it? Almost

everyone here improved his hut when he was able, in pursuit not just of better hygiene and protection from the monsoon but of protection from the airport authority. If the bulldozers came to flatten the slum, a decent hut was seen as a kind of insurance. The state of Maharashtra had promised to relocate those families who had squatted at the airport since 2000 to tiny apartments in high-rises. To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family’s tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.

7. The Come-Apart

“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.

8. The Master

“Now 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, “My stomach is on fire, my chest.

11. Proper Sleep

“Sanjay 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 son’s death was closed as swiftly as the inquiry into Kalu’s death had been.