Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [2]
Abdul’s mother was the haggler in the family, raining vibrant abuse upon scavengers who asked too much for their trash. For Abdul, words came stiff and slow. Where he excelled was in the sorting—the crucial, exacting process of categorizing the purchased waste into one of sixty kinds of paper, plastic, metal, and the like, in order to sell it.
Of course he would be fast. He’d been sorting since he was about six years old, because tuberculosis and garbage work had wrecked his father’s lungs. Abdul’s motor skills had developed around his labor.
“You didn’t have the mind for school, anyway,” his father had recently observed. Abdul wasn’t sure he’d had enough schooling to make a judgment either way. In the early years, he’d sat in a classroom where nothing much happened. Then there had been only work. Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned his snot black. Work more boring than dirty. Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life. Most days, that prospect weighed on him like a sentence. Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt like a hope.
The smell of the one leg’s burning was fainter in the shed, given the competing stink of trash and the fear-sweat that befouled Abdul’s clothing. He stripped, hiding his pants and shirt behind a brittle stack of newspapers near the door.
His best idea was to climb to the top of his eight-foot tangle of garbage, then burrow in against the back wall, as far as possible from the door. He was agile, and in daylight could scale this keenly balanced mound in fifteen seconds. But a misstep in the dark would cause a landslide of bottles and cans, which would broadcast his whereabouts widely, since the walls between huts were thin and shared.
To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day. Moving left, Abdul felt around the blackness for a mass of blue polyurethane bags. Dirt magnets, those bags. He hated sorting them. But he recalled tossing the bundled bags onto a pile of soggy cardboard—the stuff of a silent climb.
He found the bags and flattened boxes by the side wall, the one that divided his shed from his home. Hoisting himself up, he waited. The cardboard compressed, the rats made rearrangements, but nothing metal clattered to the floor. Now he could use the side wall for balance as he considered his next step.
Someone was shuffling on the other side of the wall. His father, most likely. He’d be out of his nightclothes now, wearing the polyester shirt that hung loose on his shoulders, probably studying a palmful of tobacco. The man had been playing with his tobacco all evening, fingering it into circles, triangles, circles again. It was what he did when he didn’t know what he was doing.
A few more steps, some unhelpful clanking, and Abdul had gained the back wall. He lay down. Now he regretted not having his pants. Mosquitoes. The edges of torn clamshell packaging, slicing into the backs of his thighs.
The burn-smell lingering in the air was bitter, more kerosene and melted sandal than flesh. Had Abdul happened across it in one of the slumlanes, he wouldn’t have doubled over. It was orange blossoms compared with the rotting hotel food dumped nightly at Annawadi, which sustained three hundred shit-caked pigs. The problem in his stomach came from knowing what, and who, the smell was.
Abdul had known the One Leg since the day, eight years back, that his family had arrived in Annawadi. He’d had no choice but to know her, since only a sheet had divided her shack from his own. Even then, her smell had troubled him. Despite her poverty, she perfumed herself somehow. Abdul’s mother, who smelled of breast milk and fried onions, disapproved.
In the sheet days, as now, Abdul believed his mother, Zehrunisa, to be right about most things. She was tender and playful