Free Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo Page B

looked like barbells to Sunil, and felt like barbells when lifted. This posed the sole dilemma of the night: How much weight could the two boys manage, swimming? Making their bedsheets into slings, they decided to carry three irons apiece.
    They staggered away with their loads, and fifteen minutes later they were back in Annawadi, sopping. When Abdul woke at dawn, he bought the iron for 380 rupees, and Sunil got a cut of one-third. What the police officers got, Sunil couldn’t say. Kalu seemed quietly satisfied with his profit. For Sunil, it was the first disposable income of his life.
    To Pinky Talkie Town, then. Kalu led the way to the movie theater, where Sunil was mesmerized by the carpet and the clean. The noon film was an American one, its lead actor a man named Will Smith who, on the screen, seemed to be the lone human survivor of a plague in New York City. A she-dog had also survived this plague, and became the hero’s friend. The dog was yellow with a large spot like a saddle on her back, and the man spoke to her as if she could understand everything. Then, near the end, the man strangled her.
    Sunil figured the hero had a motive for murdering his only friend. In addition to the plague, there had been a ghost and an explosion, and while these events no doubt contributed to the hero’s decision, Sunil couldn’t work out the chain of logic. When he emerged from the dark theater into the sunblast of a spring afternoon, he felt sickened by the betrayal of the she-dog. He partially recovered after eating until his belly was full.
    A few weeks later, Kalu asked for his help again, and as Sunil considered other thieves devouring plates of chicken-chili rice, he began to weigh this potential career path against the waste-picking that led to maggots, boils, and orange eyes. But for now, he thought, he’d stick with his dumpsters and his ledge.
    Abdul seemed relieved at this choice, though Sunil could neverread all of what that old man of a boy was thinking. Kalu didn’t press him either, which was good, because Sunil wasn’t sure that his reasoning would make sense to anyone else. It had something to do with the fact that, on the most profitable day of his life, he’d failed to reach the state of exhilaration that other boys called “the full enjoy.” The strangled she-dog had been only part of it. He sometimes said of being a scavenger, “I don’t like myself, doing this work. It’s like being an insult.” He thought he might like himself even less, being a thief. Moreover, Kalu’s dealings with the Sahar Police made him uneasy.
    Later, Sunil would come to understand the extent of the power that Mumbai police officers had over Annawadi road boys. But now, as good as he was at divining motives, he could only conclude that the workings behind Kalu’s night jobs were beyond a twelve-year-old’s ability to grasp.

The plot of this novel, Mrs. Dalloway , made no sense whatsoever to Manju. Doing her college reading, Asha’s daughter felt so sluggish that she feared she’d caught dengue fever or malaria again—hazards of living thirty feet from a buzzing sewage lake. No, she decided. It was simply the weather: Only spring and already the sun was scorching, a knifing white force that made the eyes ache and sent Annawadi water buffalo prematurely into heat. Manju thought her mother looked wan, too, but this was possibly because Corporator Subhash Sawant—the man Asha hoped would make her slum boss—had been accused in court of electoral fraud.
    When Manju first asked about the rumor, Asha had shrugged it off. Her patron had previously made two murder charges disappear. “Court cases can be managed in Mumbai,” as the Corporator put it. So why did his bulk seem to be slipping from his chest to his belly? The clamminess around his collar seemed imperfectly correlated to the weather.
    Just as the Indian government allowed only women to stand for certain elections, it reserved other elections strictly for low-caste