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Suddenly Karam stormed back to Fatima’s doorway. “Half-wit,” he shouted, “you lied and said my wife beat you, so now I’m going to make you recall what a real beating feels like!”

On second thought, he wouldn’t do the hitting himself.

“Abdul,” he called to his son. “Come and beat her!”

Abdul froze. Though he had obeyed his father all his life, he wasn’t about to hit a disabled woman. Fortunately, his older sister intervened. “Father, calm down,” she ordered. “Mother will handle this when she gets home!” Kehkashan understood where the family authority resided in a crisis.

As she led Karam home, he called over his shoulder, “One Leg, tell your husband that if this is how you treat our years of kindness, I want half of what we spent to make this wall.”

“Yes, you will need your small change for your own funeral,” Fatima replied. “I am going to hurt you all.”

Mirchi soon returned from his police-station reconnaissance: His mother, apparently unharmed, was sitting quietly with a female officer. Relieved, Kehkashan started dinner.

At this hour, cooking fires were being lit all over Annawadi, the spumes converging to form a great smoke column over the slum. In the Hyatt, people staying on the top floors would soon start calling the lobby. “A big fire is coming toward the hotel!” Or, “I think there’s been an explosion!” The complaints about the cow-dung ash settling in the hotel swimming pool would start half an hour later.

And now came one more fire, in Fatima’s hut.

Fatima’s eight-year-old daughter, Noori, had come home for dinner, but the wooden door wouldn’t open when she pushed. Inside, a love song was blasting, and she thought her mother was so busy dancing she’d forgotten the hour. Noori ran to get her mother’s friend Cynthia. Cynthia couldn’t open the door, either, so she lifted Noori up to a hole near the roof of the hut—a hole that Noori proudly called their window.

“What do you see, Noori?”

“She’s pouring kerosene on her head.”

“Don’t, Fatima,” Cynthia yelled, trying to make her voice heard over the music. Seconds later, the film song was overwhelmed by a whoosh, a small boom, and an eight-year-old screaming, “My mother! On fire!”

Kehkashan shrieked. The brothelkeeper was the first across the maidan, three boys fast behind, throwing their weight against the door until it broke. They found Fatima thrashing on the floor, smoke pouring off her skin. At her side was a yellow plastic jug of kerosene, overturned, along with a vessel of water. She had poured cooking fuel over her head, lit a match, then doused the flames with water.

“Save me!” she shouted.

The brothelkeeper tensed. Something low on Fatima’s back was still burning. He grabbed a blanket and smothered the flame, as a vast crowd formed outside the hut.

“All day these Muslim garbage people have been fighting so loudly.”

“Didn’t she think of her daughters before she did this?”

“She’s okay now,” the brothelkeeper announced, rolling away some cooking pots he’d knocked on top of her in his haste to extinguish the fire. “Alive, no problem!”

He pulled Fatima up. When he let go, she flopped back down, howling.

People took note of the upturned vessel of water.

“She’s a fool then,” said an old man. “She wanted to burn herself a little, create a drama, and instead she burned herself a lot.”

“It is because of these people that I have done this,” Fatima cried out, her voice astonishingly clear. Everyone knew which people she meant.

Kehkashan stopped sobbing long enough to issue a command to her brothers and father. “Run! Go! She said she was going to trap us. She might say we have set her on fire!”

“A police case now—they’re finished,” a neighbor said, watching the Husain boys tear past the public toilet in the general direction of the Hotel Leela, with its eight-hundred-dollar suites.

“Water!” Fatima was pleading. Her face was red and black.

“But if she dies while you give her water, the ghost will get inside you,” someone said.

“Ghosts of women are the