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Abdul was repeating the reassurances of his father, Karam, who sought to keep his children incurious about aspects of Indian life beyond their control. Though Karam and Zehrunisa occasionally spoke in whispers of the city’s 1992–1993 Hindu–Muslim riots and the 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots in the bordering state of Gujarat, they raised their children on a diet of patriotic songs about India, where tolerant citizens of a thousand ethnicities, faiths, languages, and castes all got along.

Better than the entire world is our Hindustan

We are its nightingales, and it our garden abode

This song, based on verses by the great Urdu poet Iqbal, played every time Karam’s cellphone rang. “First these children have to learn to run after bread and rice,” he told his wife. “When they’re older, they can worry about the other things.”

But Sunil Sharma, a perceptive twelve-year-old scavenger, could read the frantic matchstick in Abdul’s mouth. The garbage sorter was already worried.

Sunil, a Hindu bhaiya, wondered about Abdul, who he thought worked harder than anyone else in Annawadi—“keeps his head down night and day.” Sunil was startled once when he saw the garbage sorter’s face in full sunlight. Except for the child-eyes, black as keyholes, Abdul looked to him like a broken old man.

Sunil was a seed of a boy, smaller even than Abdul, but he considered himself more sophisticated than the other scavengers. He was especially good for his age at discerning motives. It was a skill he had acquired during his on-and-off stays at the Handmaids of the Blessed Trinity orphanage.

Though Sunil was not an orphan, he understood that phrases like AIDS orphan and When I was the second-hand woman to Mother Teresa helped Sister Paulette, the nun who ran the Handmaids of the Blessed Trinity children’s home, get money from foreigners. He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate. Sunil rarely got angry when he discovered the secret reasons behind the ways people behaved. Having a sense of how the world operated, beyond its pretenses, seemed to him an armoring thing. And when Sister Paulette decided that boys over eleven years old were too much to handle and Sunil was turned out onto the street, he tried to concentrate on what he had gained in her care. He’d learned how to read in the Marathi language as well as his native Hindi, and to count to a hundred in English. How to find India on a map of the world. How to multiply, sort of. How nuns weren’t as different from regular people as nuns were commonly said to be.

His sister Sunita, two years younger, didn’t want to stay in the orphanage without him, so together they’d walked back to Annawadi, where their mother had died of TB long ago. Their father still rented a hut on Annawadi’s stenchiest lane, where the feral pigs gorged on rotten hotel food. The house was ten feet long, six feet wide, filthy, lightless, and crammed with firewood for cooking, and Sunil felt nearly as ashamed of it as he did of his father.

When the man was drunk, he smelled like a stove. When not drunk, he did road work in order to smell like a stove again, rarely setting aside money for food. Sunil alone watched out for Sunita. Once, when he was five or six, he’d lost her for a week, but he’d been careful not to misplace her after that.

Losing Sunita was one of Sunil’s few clear memories of early childhood—how upset Rahul’s mother, Asha, had become. Suddenly his ally, she’d tracked down Sunita in the south of the city, then barreled into his father’s hut to say his children were going to die, the way he was drinking. Not long after, Sunil and Sunita ran across Airport Road, each holding one of Asha’s hands, as if they were any old family. When they reached the black iron gate of the orphanage, though, Asha had dropped their hands and left.

In the years since, Sunil had come back to Annawadi frequently—whenever he’d had