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“He’ll be okay,” Zehrunisa agreed. Her fifth son, Safdar, was the child she worried about. He was dreamy and impractical, like her husband. He loved frogs, and in pursuit of them sometimes swam the sewage lake. No one liked to sleep next to him after he did that.

Asha’s husband, Mahadeo, materialized at the bedside. Slight and weathered, he was monosyllabic when sober, as he’d been since Asha found a cleverer hiding place for her purse. In hopes of relieving this painful condition, he offered his construction skills to the Husains for a hundred rupees.

Abdul, who didn’t quite know what he was doing, was glad for Mahadeo’s help. Asha was the only one in that family who unnerved him. “I think she’s mad in her ambitions,” Abdul’s father had said a few nights earlier. “She wants a shining public life, wants to be some big politician, when her private life is so shameful. Does she think other people can’t hear her fight with her husband at night?” Their fights were indeed as loud as the ones between Fatima the One Leg and her husband. Asha, it was rumored, always won.

As Mahadeo and the Husain children worked, some of Manju’s students wandered over, curious. Manju would soon be calling them to class, but in the meantime they perused the Husain possessions, piled up on the maidan. Adults also came to look. Only a handful of neighbors had been inside the Husains’ hut, but to judge by the piles, the Muslim garbage people were less poor than had been assumed.

Many Annawadians recalled how much the Husains had lost in the 2005 deluge. Their youngest daughter had nearly drowned, and their clothing, rice stores, and savings of five thousand rupees had washed away. Now they had a roughly carpentered wooden cupboard for their clothing—a cupboard twice as large as Asha’s. A small television, bought on an installment plan. Two thick cotton quilts, one blue-and-white checked, one chocolate brown. Eleven stainless steel plates, five cooking pots. Fresh cardamom and cinnamon, superior to the spices most Annawadians used. A cracked mirror, a tube of Brylcreem, a big bag of medicines. The rusty bed. Most people in the slum, Asha included, slept on the floor.

“Everyone is jealous of us, fixing our house,” Kehkashan explained to an older cousin who’d just arrived from the countryside.

“So let them be jealous,” Zehrunisa exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t we live in a better room now that we are doing a little better?” Still, she decided to entrust the television to the brothelkeeper for the duration of the repair work.

No onlooker asked, Why fix a house when the airport authority might demolish it? Almost everyone here improved his hut when he was able, in pursuit not just of better hygiene and protection from the monsoon but of protection from the airport authority. If the bulldozers came to flatten the slum, a decent hut was seen as a kind of insurance. The state of Maharashtra had promised to relocate those families who had squatted at the airport since 2000 to tiny apartments in high-rises. To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family’s tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.

To Abdul, fixing the family hut seemed unwise for reasons that had nothing to do with the airport authority. To him, it was like standing on the roof bragging that a Muslim family was out-earning the Hindus. Why throw ghee on an open flame? His mother’s new tile floor would in any case get carpeted in garbage.

Had the family funds been at his disposal, he would have bought an iPod. Mirchi had told him about this iPod, and while Abdul knew little of music, he had been enchanted by the concept: a small machine that let you hear only what you wanted to hear. A machine to drown out your neighbors.

The window that would let out the cooking smoke was finished the first day, and on the second day the children turned to breaking the cracked stone floor and leveling it in preparation for tiles. “Ceramic tiles,