Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [25]
What Sunil loved about Kalu were his inspired enactments of movies he’d seen, for the benefit of kids who’d never been to a theater. With a high-pitched approximation of Bengali, Kalu would become the possessed woman in the Bollywood thriller Bhool Bhulaiya. With a guttural approximation of Chinese, he’d be Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. He refused to do King Kong anymore, despite popular requests. Becoming Deepika in Om Shanti Om pleased him more. “Arre kya item hai!” he’d say, sashaying. “Only she can pull off those old-style outfits!”
Kalu himself was plain, if you broke the face down to features: small eyes, flat nose, pointy chin, dark skin. When other road boys gave him his nickname—Kalu, meaning “black boy”—they hadn’t meant it as a compliment. But he had status, not just for the pain tolerance but for his ability to manufacture fun. When bored with mimicking film stars, he’d act out the leading freaks of Annawadi, including the lipsticky One Leg who walked with her butt stuck out and who was lately screwing a heroin-addicted road boy when her husband went to work. That a road boy was getting sex, even with a defective like the One Leg, was immense.
Sunil often eavesdropped on Kalu’s conversations after dark, and in this way learned that policemen sometimes advised the road boys about nearby warehouses and construction sites where they might steal building materials. The cops then took a share of the proceeds. One midnight, Sunil overheard Kalu, uncharacteristically serious, tell Abdul about a thieving expedition he’d botched near the airport.
A police officer had turned him on to an industrial site with metal lying on the ground and no barbed-wire fences—a place Kalu called “the workshops.” He went at 11 P.M. and found some pieces of iron, but a security guard had come after him. Ditching the metal in high weeds, he’d run back home.
“If I don’t get the iron before morning, another boy will find it,” Kalu told Abdul. “But I’m too tired to go back now.”
“So ask one of these boys out here to wake you later,” Abdul suggested.
The other boys were high, though, and anyway had a loose sense of time.
“I could wake you,” Sunil offered. The rats in his hut left him sleepless.
“Good,” said Kalu. “Come at three A.M., and if you don’t, I’ll be finished.”
Kalu said finished lightly, the way he said most things, but Sunil took it hard. He lay down on the maidan, a few feet from Abdul, and tracked the time by the movement of the moon. At his best guess of 3 A.M., he found Kalu curled up asleep in the backseat of an autorickshaw. Rising, the fifteen-year-old wiped his lips and said, “The boy who was going to go with me is too stoned. Will you come?”
Sunil was startled, then honored.
“Are you afraid of water?” Kalu asked.
“I can swim. I swim at Naupada.”
“Do you have a bedsheet?”
A bedsheet was one thing Sunil had. He ran to fetch it, then followed Kalu out onto Airport Road. As the boys crossed the street, Sunil wrapped the sheet around himself. He felt shivery, though this was not a cool night. Kalu turned and laughed. “You’ll scare people like that! They’ll think you’re a walking ghost!” Reluctantly, Sunil gobbed his sheet under his arm as they gained the road leading up to the international terminal.
Cars were still coming out of the airport. Arrivals from Europe and America, Kalu said; he’d learned the flight schedules and the names of many world cities while loading luggage. He said the best tippers were Saudis, Americans, and Germans, in that order.
Past a glittery DEPARTURES sign and some security barricades that read HAPPY JOURNEY, the boys sprinted down a half-paved road used by construction vehicles, then veered onto a narrower, pitch-dark lane. Sunil could navigate it blind. After some high fences behind which airplane meals got made was an open-air toilet where he’d often found empty water bottles. The boys skipped quickly over this wasteland. Now they were standing at the edge of a wide gully that took runoff from the Mithi River. Sunil came here from time to time to catch mangoor