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A luckless teenaged girl named Priya finally brought the water. Priya, one of the poorest girls in Annawadi, sometimes helped Fatima cook and care for her children in exchange for food. She was said to have two ghosts inside her already.

“Stupid people. They say it’s bad to give water after a burn.”

This was a new voice, crisper than the others: Asha’s voice. She was standing at the back of the crowd.

People turned. “Then tell her not to drink, Asha! Stop her!”

“But how do I snatch it away?” Asha said. “If it’s her last moment, I don’t want to take a dying woman’s curse. What if she passed right then?”

Manju came out. Her mother ordered her away. Manju’s best friend, Meena, came closer. It was unspeakable, what she saw. Fatima writhing in a brown two-piece outfit with pink flowers on the front and back, most of the flowers now burned away. Where the flowers had been, strips of skin were hanging. Meena ran away to be sick, felt she’d be sick her whole life, what she’d seen.

“How will I get to the hospital?” Fatima was saying. “My husband isn’t here!”

“Someone should get an autorickshaw and take her to Cooper Hospital. All these idiots are just staring—she’s going to die before our eyes.”

“But if you take her to Cooper, the police will say you were the one to set her on fire.”

“Asha should take the One Leg to the hospital,” someone said. “She’s Shiv Sena. The police won’t fuck with her.”

Fatima’s eyes zeroed in on Asha. “Teacher,” she cried. “How can I walk and go, when I am like this?”

“I will pay for the autorickshaw,” Asha replied. “But I have people waiting for me. I am too busy to go myself.”

The other Annawadians watched as Asha strode back to her hut.

“I offered to pay for the rickshaw, but why should I have gone?” Asha told her husband later, at home. “It was a fight between these garbage people and who knows what happens when you get involved. Anyway, Zehrunisa should have taken my offer of help at the police station. She doesn’t understand the basic thing: You pay early, it costs less later on. You put money in the One Leg’s hand like she’s a beggar. You stop it before it gets to the hysterical level. Now it will be a police case and she’ll need a lawyer. Does she think the lawyer will do the work first, before taking the money? Does the midwife wait to get paid? Even when the baby dies, the midwife collects her fee. But I wash my hands of her, that family and their dirty money. Haram ka paisa.”

She smiled. “What the One Leg should do is tell the police, ‘I was born Hindu and these Muslims taunted me and set me on fire because I’m Hindu.’ Then these guys would be inside the prison forever.”

It was 8 P.M. now, the sky above the maidan purple as a bruise. Everyone had decided that when Fatima’s husband returned from his garbage-sorting work, he could take his wife to the hospital.

The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boys waited to see if Fatima’s face would come off. That had happened to a woman who had rented a room from Asha. The woman’s husband had left her, and she, unlike Fatima, had torched herself thoroughly. The woman’s charred face-skin had stuck to the floor, and Rahul claimed that her chest had sort of exploded and that you could see straight through to her heart.

Fatima’s hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she’d put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of Kali had gotten carried away and done the whole face. There was no mirror in Burn Ward Number 10, Cooper Hospital, the large hospital serving the poor of Mumbai’s western suburbs, but she didn’t need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her.

Leaving Annawadi, her spindly husband carrying her on his back, she’d started to be treated as a mattering person. “What have I done to myself!” she had cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. “But it is done