Free Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

if it were a gold brick he’d found in the gutter, and seemed surprised when other scavengers took no interest. Abdul recognized this tendency to get punchy about discoveries to which other people were indifferent. He no longer tried to explain his private enthusiasms, and figured Sunil would learn his own aloneness, in time.
    As for Sunil, he couldn’t help noting that the stoned thieves were having more fun than sober, drudgy Abdul. When spring came, they amassed raucously at Annawadi’s first entertainment center, a shack on the road with two hulking red video-game consoles inside.
    The game parlor was a loss leader for an old Tamil man who had begun competing with Abdul for the scavengers’ goods. The Tamil was nearly as clever as Asha. He lent the scavengers the one rupee it cost to play Bomberman or Metal Slug 3. He lent them bars of soap and money for food. To the thieves, he lent tools for cutting concertina wire or wedging off hubcaps. Indebted, the scavengers and thieves had to sell their goods to him.
    The Husains considered this unfair competition, and one night, seeking revenge, Mirchi broke into the game shed and cleaned out the consoles’ coin boxes. When the Tamil discovered the culprit, he laughed. The game-shed profits were negligible against his larger return from stolen goods.
    To Sunil, one road boy stood apart from the others: an antic fifteen-year-old named Kalu, who was the closest thing Abdul had to a friend. Kalu mocked the game-parlor man for wearing his lungis too short, and disputed his contention that Muslims like Abdul were cheats with magnets hidden under their scales. Kalu’s specialty as a thief was airport recycling bins, which often contained aluminum scrap. Though the bins were in compounds secured by barbed-wire fences, his tolerance for pain was a thing of legend. Thanks to Eraz-ex, which was also the local balm for concertina-wire wounds, he could make three round-trips over the fences in a night. After selling his metal to Abdul, he sometimes slipped Sunil a few rupees for food.
    Like Sunil, Kalu had lost his mother when he was young, and he’d been working since age ten. One of his jobs had been polishing diamonds in a heavily guarded local factory, contemplation of which drove the other boys batshit.
    “Why didn’t you put a diamond in your ear?”
    “Or ten diamonds up your asshole!”
    They weren’t convinced by Kalu’s description of the diamond-detecting machines he’d had to pass through at the end of each day.
    What Sunil loved about Kalu were his inspired enactments of movies he’d seen, for the benefit of kids who’d never been to a theater. With a high-pitched approximation of Bengali, Kalu would become the possessed woman in the Bollywood thriller Bhool Bhulaiya . With a guttural approximation of Chinese, he’d be Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon . He refused to do King Kong anymore, despite popular requests. Becoming Deepika in Om Shanti Om pleased him more. “Arre kya item hai!” he’d say, sashaying. “Only she can pull off those old-style outfits!”
    Kalu himself was plain, if you broke the face down to features: small eyes, flat nose, pointy chin, dark skin. When other road boys gave him his nickname— Kalu , meaning “black boy”—they hadn’t meant it as a compliment. But he had status, not just for the pain tolerance but for his ability to manufacture fun. When bored with mimicking film stars, he’d act out the leading freaks of Annawadi, including the lipsticky One Leg who walked with her butt stuck out and who was lately screwing a heroin-addicted road boy when her husband went to work. That a road boy was getting sex, even with a defective like the One Leg, was immense.
    Sunil often eavesdropped on Kalu’s conversations after dark, and in this way learned that policemen sometimes advised the road boys about nearby warehouses and construction sites where they might steal building materials. The cops then took a share of the proceeds. One