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“Just because I can’t read, you pretend to everyone that you’re the hero in this family and I am the nothing,” she’d said to him recently. “Like I would have been stuck in my mother’s womb without you to get me out! Go, act like this big-time shareef, but it is I who have been managing everything!”

Annawadi’s lack of censorious, conservative Muslims allowed her to call out her husband when necessary, just as it had allowed her to work to feed her children. Such freedoms would be painful to give up.

“In your mind, you’ve already moved to Vasai,” she told her husband, ladling out the stew and handing it over with the economy of motion people develop when living in small, overpopulated huts. “Maybe you should pack up and go. And then go to Saudi—oh, there you can really relax! But this house is where your wife and children live. Look at it. You also felt ashamed when that imam came over.”

Walls bloated and watermarked from flooding. Uneven stone floor with a hoard of recyclables in every corner, and more recyclables beneath an iron bed they’d recently purchased because Karam’s breathing improved when he slept a foot higher than the trash. But had he slept like a bat on the ceiling, there would be no escaping the smell: trash, stale cooking smoke, and the olfactory traces of eleven human beings who lacked sufficient water to get clean.

“I’d like to leave this place, too,” Zehrunisa said. “But where do your children grow up? In the ghost house?”

He looked at her, confused. All last night, all morning, she had been affection itself.

But Zehrunisa had had an idea, and sensed an auspicious moment when her husband came out of the hospital. It had nothing to do with the position of the moon and the stars. It had to do with the shortness of life and a break in the rains.

“Do you remember how anxious you were in the hospital?” she said. “Thinking, what if you were to leave this family?” He had told her, then, “I fear God is inviting me in.”

Karam nodded, frowning. “So?”

“He let you out this time.” She paused. “Do I work hard for this family? Do I ask for jewelry?”

“No,” he admitted. “You don’t ask.”

She was less and less sure she wanted to go to Vasai, less and less sure her husband would live to get there. She wanted a more hygienic home here, in the name of her children’s vitality. She wanted a shelf on which to cook without rat intrusions—a stone shelf, not some cast-off piece of plywood. She wanted a small window to vent the cooking smoke that caused the little ones to cough like their father. On the floor she wanted ceramic tiles like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever wall—tiles that could be scrubbed clean, instead of broken concrete that harbored filth in each striation. With these small improvements, she thought her children might stay as healthy as children in Annawadi could be.

Before she’d even finished making her petition, her husband had assented, setting into motion the chain of contingency that would damage two families forever. The Husains would spend some of their savings to make a decent home. The next day, typically, Karam was acting as if the renovation had been his own idea. In this instance, a happy wife let her husband’s nonsense go.

The little Husains grasped the seriousness of the house renovation when their parents kept them home from school, now back in session. For the next three days, even six-year-old hands would have assignments, the first of which was to drag everything in their hut onto the maidan. The rusty bed came out first, and Karam and Zehrunisa settled in, guarding their possessions from passersby while watching Abdul direct his sibling labor crew.

“Finally, my kitchen!” Zehrunisa said, leaning into her husband, her head scarf slipping down to her shoulders.

“Look at Atahar,” said Karam after a while. Their third son was furiously stirring cement to keep it from hardening in the day’s oppressive heat. “I despair because he has no brains—eighth grade and can’t write the number 8. But he