• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Mirabell seeks social advantage through marriage to the beauty, Millament.”

When Manju by-hearted, she often pictured herself in the role of the heroine, but this girl, Millament, left her cold—whining when she was rich and independent enough to be negotiating her own marriage. Manju wanted to be a teacher when she finished college, and her great fear was that, in a fit of pique, her mother would wed her to a village boy who didn’t think that a woman should work. That she’d die doing the things she was doing now: sweeping the dirt that had blown in from outside, mopping, then sweeping the new dirt that had blown in while she mopped.

“In Congreve’s drama, money is more important than love.”

This was her mother’s position, obviously. Manju’s younger brother Ganesh was at the front of the house, manning a small grocery that represented Asha’s latest entrepreneurial scheme, a failing one. To start the store, she had secured for herself one of the government loans that Mr. Kamble hoped would finance his heart valve. Asha had intended for her husband to run the store, but he’d been using the proceeds to get drunk while he worked. He was currently passed out at Ganesh’s feet.

Manju wasn’t too interested in money. She hungered for virtue, a desire that was partly a fear. When studying, she sometimes fingered the scar on her neck from a night, years ago, when she’d stolen money from her mother to buy chocolates. Asha had responded with an axe. But Manju’s desire to be good was also rebellion—a way of chastising a mother who was said to have acquired the television set and other advantages by behaving badly.

Manju’s instrument for demonstrating her decency was the school she ran out of her hut every afternoon. The school was financed by central government money, funneled through a Catholic charity, and Asha was the teacher, officially. But her mother was busy with Shiv Sena, so Manju had been running the class since she was in seventh grade, displaying a commitment her mother found annoying. Although Asha was pleased with the small stipend the school brought to the household, she thought Manju should conduct the class only on days when the supervisor came to check, the way a lot of other hut-school teachers did.

The central government called schools like Manju’s “bridge schools.” Her brief was to provide two hours of daily lessons to child laborers or girls kept home by household responsibilities, in order to get them acclimated to, and excited about, formal education. Sparking enthusiasm wasn’t hard. As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education. Several dozen parents in the slum were getting by on roti and salt in order to pay private school tuition.

In the last five years, more than one hundred schools had opened around the airport—some excellent and expensive; some fraudulent; some, like Manju’s, taught by unqualified teenagers. But all were understood to be better than the free schools like Marol Municipal, where Asha was a contract teacher. Nearly 60 percent of the state’s public school teachers hadn’t finished college, and many of the permanent teachers had paid large under-the-table sums to school officials to secure their positions. The Corporator was among the politicians who preferred to capitalize on these abysmal schools instead of reforming them. He’d opened his own private school, using a front man.

“At Marol, we play, take recess, play again, then have lunch,” was how the Nepali boy, Adarsh, described the municipal school curriculum. The free lunches were the big draw. Adarsh came to Manju’s school after his regular school day, since she was always teaching something—often, the plot summaries she was trying to memorize for college. Her students didn’t understand the plot of Mrs. Dalloway any better than Manju did, but they got that Othello was distrusted because of his dark skin.

Now one of the other students