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By Root 718 0

he sometimes imagined not returning to his family in a slum he now thought of as “just another kind of prison”—imagined pressing forward and disappearing into some distant, perhaps better, unknown. Eventually, though, his city would jerk him back to his senses. The buses and SUVs barreling toward him, swerving. The children stepping obliviously from the roadsides into traffic, as Fatima’s daughter was always doing, as if they didn’t know the value of their lives.

“One mistake at the wheel, and it will finish me,” Abdul would complain to his mother upon the inevitable return to Annawadi. “It’s so much tension out there—the mind cannot wander. Every second you have to be alert.”

In truth, he felt powerful moving through midnight traffic, his tired eyes narrowed to pinpoints. If there was no mastering this vast, winking city, he could still master a few feet of gummy road.

Early one morning, Abdul was perched on a black garbage bag by the video shed, contemplating another fruitless trip to Dongri and the “Anything to move?” routine of the evening to follow, when Sunil nestled into the garbage bag beside him. They hadn’t seen each other in a while, with Abdul away, driving. Sunil leaned in close, as an almost-friend will sometimes do.

“Lend me two rupees for something to eat?”

Abdul reared back. “Ugh! Talking to me so close and you haven’t washed your mouth! It’s horrible. And your face. Go wash your face! I get scared just looking at you.”

“Okay, okay, I will,” Sunil said, laughing. “Just got up.”

“Early for a thief.”

“Not doing that anymore.”

Garbage prices had been inching back up, police beatings had been intensifying, and security guards at the airport had stripped him naked and shaved his head. Sunil had decided to return to scavenging. In fact, this decision to scavenge was why he was sitting with Abdul on a garbage bag on the road. The Tamil who owned the game shed was angry at the loss of Sunil’s stolen goods and wouldn’t let him sit there anymore.

The blinky boy, Sonu, had almost forgiven Sunil for becoming a thief, but not for his habit of waking after dawn. Sunil wanted to join up with Sonu again, and was working on the early rising. He was also developing a formula for not hating himself while doing work that made him loathsome to his society. Eraz-ex worked, Sunil had discovered, but not for very long.

“Always I was thinking how to try to make my life nicer, more okay, and nothing got better,” Sunil said. “So now I’m going to try to do it the other way. No thinking how to make anything better, just stopping my mind, then who knows? Maybe then something good could happen.”

Abdul swatted him. “I lose my head, listening to you,” he said. He felt old, sitting next to someone who still had ideas. When the slum got demolished, they’d probably never see each other again. Sunil wanted to start his life over somewhere outside the city, where there were trees and flowers, but Abdul thought it likelier that Sunil would end up sleeping on city pavement. These last days of Annawadi might be the best days Sunil would get.

A large, glossy leaf gusted across the road and landed at Abdul’s feet. The filth in the air had barely browned it. He reached for it, took a rusty razor blade from his pocket, sliced the leaf into tiny pieces, then blew into his palm. Green confetti settled on Sunil’s eyebrows, in his lashes, and on top of his rough-shorn head.

“So what now?” asked Sunil after a minute.

“What now? So wash your mouth and go to work! Already you’re late. What’s going to be left on the ground at this hour?”

“Okay, bye,” said Sunil, jumping up, brushing off the leaf bits, and starting to run. Abdul watched him go. Weird and decent kid—he wished the boy luck, and half an hour later Sunil would find it, on a narrow ledge high above the Mithi River.

Soon, the taxi drivers who littered this ledge with garbage would be pushed elsewhere, as the new airport fulfilled its talismanic role: becoming an elegant gateway to one of the twenty-first century’s most important world cities. But for now, eleven cans, seven empty