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Abdul, who considered Manju the most-everything girl in Annawadi, could only wonder at the small boy’s sense of superiority. One of Abdul’s own arrogances, in these weeks before the One Leg burned and everything changed, was that he could predict the fates of other people, especially scavengers. But Sunil’s future was hard to make out. Although contempt was a force that changed a person, being a waste-picker hadn’t yet infected Sunil’s mind, if he still thought memorizing “A Is for Apple” might make some difference in his life.

At first, Fatima the One Leg, loved her poor, older husband in the brother-sister way. She learned other ways of love after marriage. This taste of affection was too much a revelation to be hidden. At thirty-five, more or less, she had become known in Annawadi for a sexual need as blatant as her lipstick. Had she been another sort of woman, her affairs might have been a scandal; that she was disabled made them a joke. As were her spectacular rages, which enlivened many an Annawadi evening.

Fatima had refined her verbal arsenal early, given the insults about the leg she was born with, which turned into a flipper past the knee. By thirty, she could out-curse even Zehrunisa. When a government program provided her with metal crutches, she was doubly armed. Strong in the shoulders, she brought the crutches down hard on neighbors she considered disrespectful. She threw the crutches, too, with uncanny aim. Desi liquor, some people whispered, by way of explaining her fits, though there wasn’t enough liquor in all of Annawadi to keep Fatima as mad as she was.

She was damaged, and acknowledged it freely. She was illiterate—acknowledged that, too. But when others spoke of her fury as an ignorant, animal thing, that was bukwaas, utter nonsense. Much of her outrage derived from a belated recognition that she was as human as anyone else.

Sometimes, the afternoon men left her money; most were too poor to do so. But even the poorest of them helped her grasp what her parents had taken from her—those ashamed and shaming parents who’d hidden an imperfect daughter in their hut.

It had been daily punishment, watching her siblings run off to school and return to suck up their parents’ affection. “I had such hate for myself, back then,” Fatima told Zehrunisa, whom she alternately relied on and resented. “All I heard was that I had been born wrong.” Nowadays, when her mother took the train across the city to visit, she couldn’t help but pass around a glamour photo of Fatima’s younger sister—that two-legged marvel with a sparkling jewel in her nose. “This one is a good girl,” the mother liked to say. “See how nice she looks, and fair?”

“The One Leg could say worse, be worse, the way she grew up,” Zehrunisa told Abdul, though she privately considered it self-indulgent for a grown woman to complain about her childhood. Zehrunisa could barely stand to speak of her own early years of water-and-wheat-husk soup in Pakistan, before an arranged marriage sent her across the border. Few women in Annawadi could look back on a honeyed youth. But Fatima thought wretched early years should be rounded out by a few good ones, which she had yet to have.

She had no interest in playing the shuffling, grateful role that the charitable types expected of the disabled. It was hard enough maintaining her pride in a slum where even hardy women grew exhausted running a household. In the monsoon, Fatima’s mornings sometimes started like this: one leg, two crutches, twelve-pound vessel of pump-water, mudslick, splat. Add to this young daughters whom she couldn’t chase after—needy, rambunctious creatures who laid her deficiencies bare. Only in the hours when the men came—husband at work, daughters at school—did the part of her body she had to offer feel more important than the part of it she lacked.

June, the beginning of the four-month monsoon season, made every sensible Annawadian pensive. The slum was a floodbowl, surrounded as it was by high walls