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“Yes, properly.” And on that basis she was chosen to help him defraud the central government’s most important effort to improve the lives of children.

Government officials prepared documents attesting that for several years her nonprofit had been running twenty-four kindergartens for poor children. The government would pay her 4.7 lakhs, or more than ten thousand dollars, for this fictitious work. More money would come later in the year for her supposed management of nine bridge schools for former child laborers. From this windfall, Asha would write checks to a long list of names that Gaikwad provided—theoretically teachers and assistants at the schools. What business was it of hers to ask who they were? Her business was to hand-deliver twenty thousand rupees in cash to Bhimrao Gaikwad, plus five thousand rupees to the community development official who had helped to fix the contract.

In the first year, Asha wouldn’t make big money after all the payoffs. But Gaikwad had assured her that there would be more money in the years ahead.

A minor hitch occurred when the first installment of government money—429,000 rupees—showed up in the bank account of the moribund nonprofit. The checks to be dispersed required a co-signer, but the neighbor whom Asha had named long ago as the nonprofit’s secretary was in a state. “Will we be rich?” the woman asked, and then, tearfully, “What if we get caught?” She resisted signing the checks, so Asha fired her and appointed a more compliant secretary. The checks went out, and the government officials got their cash.

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?”

The new secretary nodded at Asha’s analysis, but ever since she had co-signed the checks, her mouth had been slightly tight. How could she argue? Asha was her mother.

“Now you don’t have to do a real job once your studies are finished,” Asha told Manju of the empire of schools they were pretending to be running. “You’ll take it over from me. I’ll have to put your name down as the person in charge anyway, since all these schools are supposed to be run by someone with an education.”

Although Manju was troubled by this legacy, she wasn’t about to refuse the secondhand computer that soon came through the door. Meena had been the hot resister of daughterly responsibilities, not she. Asha also provided a dial-up Internet connection, which Rahul used to join Facebook, though his interest in social networking receded when his red Honda motorcycle arrived.

Manju loved her computer, as did the children she had taught in her slum school. They popped in regularly to contemplate its splendor. The children still called her “Teacher” and looked at her expectantly, unwilling to believe that their education was over. But the schools Asha and Manju were pretending to run made the income derived from a real school unnecessary.

Manju had recently memorized a plot summary of Dr. Faustus, which told of an ultimate reckoning—the moment when a “person who wanted to be the supreme person” discovered that the payment for a good life, badly acquired, had come due. Though this Christian hell was something she couldn’t quite picture, she felt that punishment might be in the offing.

One quiet evening, shortly before the day on which she graduated from college, she looked up from her keyboard, alarmed. There were two, no, five eunuchs at the door! The eunuchs were nothing like the lithe