Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [20]
In the old days, Sunil and Sunita had stood silently outside the huts of their neighbors at dinnertime. Sooner or later, some pitying woman would emerge with a plate. Sunita could still work this angle, but Sunil had now crossed an age line over which charity did not reliably extend. He looked closer to nine years old than to twelve, a fact that pained him on a masculine level, and might at least have been a practical help. But no one felt sorry for him anymore.
He minded being unpitiable only at mealtime. At the orphanage, when rich white women visited, Sunil had refused to beg for rupees. Instead he’d harbored the idea that one of the women might single him out, reward his dignified restraint. For years, he had waited for this discriminating visitor to meet his eye; he planned to introduce himself as “Sunny,” a name a foreigner might like. Eventually, he’d come to realize the improbability of his hope, and his general indistinction in the mass of need. But by then, the habit of not asking anyone for anything had become a part of who he was.
In his first weeks back home, scavenging skills rusty, he took the sandals from the feet of his sleeping father and sold them to Abdul for food. He had consumed five vada pav by the time his father woke to thrash him. Another day, he’d sold his father’s cooking pot. His own sandals he’d exchanged for rice, after which there was little left to sell. The hunger cramps could be treated by hits off discarded cigarettes. Lying down also helped. But nothing soothed his apprehension that the hunger was stunting his growth.
Sunil had inherited his father’s full lips, wide-set eyes, and the pelt of hair that swooshed up from his forehead. (One distinction of his father was that his hair looked good even when his head was in a ditch.) But Sunil feared he’d also inherited his father’s puniness.
A year earlier, at the orphanage, he’d stopped growing. He’d tried to believe that his body was just pausing, gathering strength in advance of some strenuous enlargement. But Sunita had since grown taller than he.
To jumpstart his system, he saw he’d have to become a better scavenger. This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.
Sunil had his own guess: the deranged guy who talked to the hotels and believed the Hyatt was trying to kill him. “I think his guarantee is over,” he told Abdul. But Abdul said it would be a Tamil guy whose eyes had gone from yellow to orange, and Abdul turned out to be right.
Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter’s end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack was empty on this first leg of his daily route, so it could be tucked under his arm or worn over his shoulders like a superhero cape. When Sister Paulette passed by in her chauffeured white van, it could be draped over his head. Sister Paulette-Toilet was how he thought of her now. He imagined her riding down Airport Road looking for children more promising than he.
On this road in the early morning, well-dressed young women hustled from the bus stop to their jobs inside the hotels, carrying handbags as big as household shrines. He hated meeting those purses on a crowded sidewalk. They could knock a kid