Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [24]
Petty thieves slept on the rut-road, too. Their main targets were construction sites around the airport, where builders were sometimes careless with screws, rods, and nails. Before the airport was privatized, many of the thieves had worked there, carrying travelers’ luggage to cars in exchange for tips. But as part of the makeover that had made the grounds of the international terminal nearly as lush as those of the luxury hotels, the ragtag loaders had been banished, along with the mothers who held up babies and begged for milk money, and the children hawking pocket gods.
The luggage-loaders-turned-thieves made a bit more money than waste-pickers like Sunil, and spent most of it on chicken-chili rice from a Chinese woman’s Airport Road stall. They typically topped off their dinners with Eraz-ex, the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out. People in the office buildings threw out the bottles prematurely. Annawadi road boys knew the value of the dregs. Dilute with spit, daub onto a rag, inhale: an infusion of daring for after-midnight work.
Sniffing Eraz-ex was problematic in the long run, though. As Abdul pointed out to Sunil, the addicts were either thin as match-sticks or had big, troubling balls in their bellies.
Abdul felt vaguely protective of the undersized scavenger. The boy got excited about unusual things, like a map of the city he’d recently seen outside an airport workers’ canteen. Back at Annawadi, Sunil talked about that map as if it were a gold brick he’d found in the gutter, and seemed surprised when other scavengers took no interest. Abdul recognized this tendency to get punchy about discoveries to which other people were indifferent. He no longer tried to explain his private enthusiasms, and figured Sunil would learn his own aloneness, in time.
As for Sunil, he couldn’t help noting that the stoned thieves were having more fun than sober, drudgy Abdul. When spring came, they amassed raucously at Annawadi’s first entertainment center, a shack on the road with two hulking red video-game consoles inside.
The game parlor was a loss leader for an old Tamil man who had begun competing with Abdul for the scavengers’ goods. The Tamil was nearly as clever as Asha. He lent the scavengers the one rupee it cost to play Bomberman or Metal Slug 3. He lent them bars of soap and money for food. To the thieves, he lent tools for cutting concertina wire or wedging off hubcaps. Indebted, the scavengers and thieves had to sell their goods to him.
The Husains considered this unfair competition, and one night, seeking revenge, Mirchi broke into the game shed and cleaned out the consoles’ coin boxes. When the Tamil discovered the culprit, he laughed. The game-shed profits were negligible against his larger return from stolen goods.
To Sunil, one road boy stood apart from the others: an antic fifteen-year-old named Kalu, who was the closest thing Abdul had to a friend. Kalu mocked the game-parlor man for wearing his lungis too short, and disputed his contention that Muslims like Abdul were cheats with magnets hidden under their scales. Kalu’s specialty as a thief was airport recycling bins, which often contained aluminum scrap. Though the bins were in compounds secured by barbed-wire fences, his tolerance for pain was a thing of legend. Thanks to Eraz-ex, which was also the local balm for concertina-wire wounds, he could make three round-trips over the fences in a night. After selling his metal to Abdul, he sometimes slipped Sunil a few rupees for food.
Like Sunil, Kalu had lost his mother when he was young, and he’d been working since age ten. One of his jobs had been polishing diamonds in a heavily guarded local factory, contemplation of which drove the other boys batshit.
“Why didn’t you put a diamond in your ear?”
“Or ten diamonds up your asshole!”
They weren’t convinced by Kalu’s description of the diamond-detecting machines he’d had to pass through