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Now only Abdul’s trial in juvenile court—the judgment on his honor—remained. In September 2009, the clerk at the juvenile court said, “Next month it is likely to start.” In October, the word was, “Three months’ time, maybe.” A Sahar police officer whom Abdul kept running into at Dongri was at least consistent. “Admit you did those things to the One Leg! There is a solution to everything! Your case will go on forever if you don’t admit it, and if you do admit it, they will let you go today.”

As 2009 drew to a close, Zehrunisa was taking special measures to hasten Abdul’s trial and vindication. She visited a Sufi mystic on Reay Road who specialized in improving futures, relieving tensions, removing curses, and appeasing ghosts—the latter an important part of the draw for Zehrunisa, who thought Fatima’s ghost might be behind Abdul’s legal limbo. The mystic tied a red thread on Zehrunisa’s wrist and sent her to tie another red thread around a tree in a courtyard where her fellow pilgrims were spinning and chanting to drumbeats. The spirits would be friendlier now, the mystic had promised, taking the money. Still, Zehrunisa thought it couldn’t hurt to go to the mosque and do a mannat in Abdul’s name, for seven Fridays.

As 2010 progressed and Zehrunisa’s efforts bore no fruit, the special executive officer of the government of Maharashtra resurfaced to suggest that money would start a trial faster than prayer. Zehrunisa rewarded the suggestion with some of the finest curses she had ever invented.

By the end of 2010, she and Abdul had concluded that a suspended state between guilt and innocence was his permanent condition.

Abdul still looked for The Master when he went to Dongri. He wanted to tell the teacher that he had tried to be honorable in his final years as a boy, but wouldn’t be able to sustain it now that he was pretty sure he was a man. A man, if sensible, didn’t make bright distinctions between good and bad, truth and falsehood, justice and that other thing.

“For some time I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting,” was how he put it. “But now I’m just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.”

With three Husain boys earning, the family was slowly gaining again, and when Annawadi was demolished, they believed they just might get one of the rehabilitation flats: 269 square feet for a family of eleven, far from the airport and its garbage, but considerably better than pavement. Abdul grew dark only when he thought back to the start of 2008, his business thriving, the first installment made on a small plot of land outside the city. The Vasai plot had now been sold to another family, and the Husains’ deposit had not been returned.

Abdul’s father had developed an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: “It’s moving past and you think you’re going to miss it but then you say, wait, maybe I won’t miss it—I just have to run faster than I’ve ever run before. Only now we’re all tired and damaged, so how fast can we really run? You have to try to catch it, even when you know you’re not going to catch it, when maybe it’s better just to let it go—”

Abdul wanted no part of this malaise. Fortunately, he had hauling work to do. Early mornings, he would start humbling up to supervisors at sheds in large industrial slums: “Anything to take to the recyclers?” He was learning all the back roads and spiny byways of the city, since three-wheeled vehicles like his own were barred from some of Mumbai’s smooth new thoroughfares.

There were days when he spent more on gasoline, looking for work, than he earned from commissions, but there were good days, too, humping down the road, his tiny truck overloaded with trash. There was no place he wouldn’t go for money, the farther from Annawadi the better. He went over the state border to Vapi, in Gujarat. He went to Kalyan, to Thane. But mostly he stayed in Mumbai.

Driving his circuit late at night,