In the daylight he looked out of the window, searching the countryside and noting its changes. On their right distant hills were rising again, looking lush and dark. The air above the hills was thick and opaque, secreting a promise. On the parched plain through which the train was labouring, the light was clear. As the sun rose the air became gritty with dust. The scorched and dry plain was still covered with patches of dead grass which the rains would transform into lush savannahs. Clumps of gnarled thorn trees dotted the plain, which was darkened by scattered outcrops of black rock. Waves of heat and vapour rose from the burning earth, filling Yusuf’s mouth and making him heave fire breath. At one station, where they stopped for a long time, a solitary jacaranda tree was in bloom. Mauve and purple petals lay on the ground like an iridescent rug. Beside the tree was a two-roomed railway store. On its doors hung enormous rusty padlocks and its whitewashed walls were spattered with laterite mud.

In the daylight he looked out of the window, searching the countryside and noting its changes. On their right distant hills were rising again, looking lush and dark. The air above the hills was thick and opaque, secreting a promise. On the parched plain through which the train was labouring, the light was clear. As the sun rose the air became gritty with dust. The scorched and dry plain was still covered with patches of dead grass which the rains would transform into lush savannahs. Clumps of gnarled thorn trees dotted the plain, which was darkened by scattered outcrops of black rock. Waves of heat and vapour rose from the burning earth, filling Yusuf’s mouth and making him heave fire breath. At one station, where they stopped for a long time, a solitary jacaranda tree was in bloom. Mauve and purple petals lay on the ground like an iridescent rug. Beside the tree was a two-roomed railway store. On its doors hung enormous rusty padlocks and its whitewashed walls were spattered with laterite mud.

Still, when foreign journalists came to Mumbai to see whether self-help groups were empowering women, government officials sometimes took them to Asha. Her job was to gather random female neighbors to smile demurely while the officials went on about how their collective had lifted them from poverty. Manju would then be paraded in as Asha delivered the clinching line: “And now my girl will be a college graduate, not dependent on any man.” The foreign women always got emotional when she said this.

“The big people think that because we are poor we don’t understand much,” she said to her children. Asha understood plenty. She was a chit in a national game of make- believe, in which many of India’s old problems — poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor — were being aggressively addressed. Meanwhile the other old problems, corruption and exploitation of the weak by the less weak, continued with minimal interference.

In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

16. Black and White

“Triumphant, Asha felt confirmed in a suspicion she’d developed in her years of multi-directional, marginally profitable enterprise. Becoming a success in the great,

rigged market of the overcity required less effort and intelligence than getting by, day to day, in the slums. The crucial things were luck and the ability to sustain two convictions: that what you were doing wasn’t all that wrong, in the scheme of things, and that you weren’t all that likely to get caught.

“Of course it’s corrupt,” Asha told the deferential new secretary of the nonprofit.

“But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people did all the papers — when the big people say that it’s right?

17. A School, a Hospital, a Cricket Field

“In 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.