Free Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo Page A

midnight, Sunil overheard Kalu, uncharacteristically serious, tell Abdul about a thieving expedition he’d botched near the airport.
    A police officer had turned him on to an industrial site with metal lying on the ground and no barbed-wire fences—a place Kalu called“the workshops.” He went at 11 P.M . and found some pieces of iron, but a security guard had come after him. Ditching the metal in high weeds, he’d run back home.
    “If I don’t get the iron before morning, another boy will find it,” Kalu told Abdul. “But I’m too tired to go back now.”
    “So ask one of these boys out here to wake you later,” Abdul suggested.
    The other boys were high, though, and anyway had a loose sense of time.
    “I could wake you,” Sunil offered. The rats in his hut left him sleepless.
    “Good,” said Kalu. “Come at three A.M. , and if you don’t, I’ll be finished.”
    Kalu said finished lightly, the way he said most things, but Sunil took it hard. He lay down on the maidan, a few feet from Abdul, and tracked the time by the movement of the moon. At his best guess of 3 A.M. , he found Kalu curled up asleep in the backseat of an autorickshaw. Rising, the fifteen-year-old wiped his lips and said, “The boy who was going to go with me is too stoned. Will you come?”
    Sunil was startled, then honored.
    “Are you afraid of water?” Kalu asked.
    “I can swim. I swim at Naupada.”
    “Do you have a bedsheet?”
    A bedsheet was one thing Sunil had. He ran to fetch it, then followed Kalu out onto Airport Road. As the boys crossed the street, Sunil wrapped the sheet around himself. He felt shivery, though this was not a cool night. Kalu turned and laughed. “You’ll scare people like that! They’ll think you’re a walking ghost!” Reluctantly, Sunil gobbed his sheet under his arm as they gained the road leading up to the international terminal.
    Cars were still coming out of the airport. Arrivals from Europeand America, Kalu said; he’d learned the flight schedules and the names of many world cities while loading luggage. He said the best tippers were Saudis, Americans, and Germans, in that order.
    Past a glittery DEPARTURES sign and some security barricades that read HAPPY JOURNEY , the boys sprinted down a half-paved road used by construction vehicles, then veered onto a narrower, pitch-dark lane. Sunil could navigate it blind. After some high fences behind which airplane meals got made was an open-air toilet where he’d often found empty water bottles. The boys skipped quickly over this wasteland. Now they were standing at the edge of a wide gully that took runoff from the Mithi River. Sunil came here from time to time to catch mangoor fish to sell back at the slum. When he was young, the water had been blue—“like swimming-pool water,” he said. It had since turned black and reeking, but the fish still tasted sweet.
    Across the gully to his right were towering security fences, protecting floodlit hangars. Jets were rolling in for the night. The far left side of the gully, where Kalu said they were going, was dim and still. Sunil could make out one spindly Ashoka tree, and behind it, indistinct, several large, shedlike buildings. Kalu jumped into the fetid water and paddled toward them. Sunil swam too, then waded when he saw Kalu wading. The current in the trench was gentle, the monsoon being nine months past. Still, Sunil’s stomach felt liquid as he scrambled up the opposite bank.
    What Kalu called “the workshops” was a large new industrial estate. Smelting. Plasticizers. Lubricants. A concern called Gold-I-Am Jewels Unlimited. Bluish lights in front of a few of the warehouses illuminated the figures of uniformed guards, whose shadows seemed thirty feet long.
    Sunil wanted to dive back into the water. But Kalu had planned a circuitous route to the weeds where he’d hidden the iron. “The guards won’t see,” he said. “It will be easy.” Which was how it turnedout. The iron in the weeds