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Although Shiv Sena was hostile to such migrants, Asha had always been more practical than ideological, and considered no financial opportunity too small. “Why do you care if other people call us misers?” she asked her children. As they said in her village, drops of rain fill the lake.

“Be quick, I have people waiting,” Asha said into her cellphone. It was her younger sister, of whom she was jealous. Her sister’s husband was a hardworking chauffeur, and their hut in a nearby slum had a stereo system and four fluffy white dogs, just for fun. Asha’s consolation was that her sister’s daughter was plain and slow and nothing like Manju, the only college-going girl in Annawadi, who was now kneading bread dough for dinner and pretending she wasn’t eavesdropping on her mother’s conversations.

Asha’s sister had been trying to enter the fixing business, and saw an opening in the fact that a Hindu girl in her slum had run off with a Muslim boy. Asha stepped outside her house and lowered her voice. “The main thing,” she advised her sister, “is that you take money from the family of the girl, but never say it’s you who is asking for money. Tell them the police are asking for it. I have to go.”

An old friend, Raja Kamble, stiffened when Asha came back in, for his turn to speak had come. Asha and Mr. Kamble had come to Annawadi at the same time; their children had grown up together. Now Mr. Kamble was painful to look at, kneeknobs and eyesockets mainly. He was counting on Asha to save his life.

Mr. Kamble had grown up even poorer than Asha: abandoned infant; dweller on pavement; doer of hopeless jobs, among them trudging office to office trying to sell scented cloths to slip into the earpieces of telephones, on the tiniest of commissions. “A perfumed phone cloth, sa’ab? To hide the hot-season stink?” In his thirties, though, he’d had a bolt of fortune. While he was working at a train-station food kiosk, a regular customer, a maintenance worker for the city government, had come to like and pity him. In short order, the man offered Mr. Kamble his own surname, a bride, and the grail of every poor person in Mumbai: a permanent job, like his own.

That job had been to clean public toilets and falsify the time sheets of his benefactor and other sanitation workers, so that they could take other jobs while collecting their municipal pay. Mr. Kamble felt honored by this responsibility. He and his wife had three children, bricked the walls of their hut, and on one wall installed a cage for two pet pigeons. (In his pavement-dwelling years, he’d developed a fondness for birds.) Mr. Kamble had been one of Annawadi’s great successes—a man deemed worthy of titles like ji or mister—until the day he collapsed while cleaning a shitter.

His heart was bad. The sanitation department laid him off, saying that if he got a new heart valve and a doctor’s clearance, he could return. Mumbai’s public hospitals were supposed to do such operations for next to nothing, but the hospital surgeons wanted under-the-table money. Sixty thousand rupees, said the surgeon at Sion Hospital. The doctor at Cooper Hospital wanted more.

For every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge. But Mr. Kamble still had hope. For the last two months, he’d been dragging his betrayal of a body out on the streets, asking politicians, charities, and corporations to donate to his heart-valve fund. The Corporator had pledged three hundred rupees. An executive at a paint factory had pledged a thousand. After hundreds of pleas, he was still forty thousand rupees short.

Now he clenched a smile at Asha—ten square yellow teeth that appeared huge in his wasted face. “I don’t want a handout,” he said. “I want to fix my heart so I can keep working and see my children married. So could you fix one of the government loans for me?”

He had learned that Asha was a minor player in a scam involving one of the many anti-poverty schemes the central government in New Delhi had enacted in order to bring more citizens