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One morning, she was outside prison gates in a turbid downpour, Lallu cursing because the burqa impeded his access to her breast. She switched him to her other arm in order to answer her husband’s cellphone, now in her care: Officer Thokale, her only ally in the Sahar police station, more furious than Lallu. How had other people at Annawadi come to hear that he’d taken money from her to help with the case?

And what could Zehrunisa say? She had been babbling everything to anyone, waddling around half mad in the weeks since the arrests. Hearing her eldest son screaming as he got beaten at the police station. Seeing her gentle daughter escorted by officers into jail—a moment in which the single word in Zehrunisa’s head was qayamat, the end of the world.

She couldn’t sleep after that. She couldn’t sleep before that. She barely knew which jail she stood in front of this morning. With the rain had come a snaking white fog. Lallu was saying, “I will have that dog bite your body!” Bicycle boys were whirring past, delivering tiffin lunches to office workers. The Saifee Ambulance Day and Night seemed to have a flat tire.

The officer on the phone was still shouting.

“Yes but no, sa’ab,” she told Thokale, frantic. “I am outside. I am in the hospital. Who said all that? No, sa’ab, no. They’re just giving you this false story, instigating all this, making you angry at me. I am in the hospital and my health is very bad. Please listen to me: Such tension about my son, about my daughter. No sir, I am indebted to you. Whoever is saying all this must be crazy. No sir, I said nothing at all.”

At sunset, clouds distended, the monsoon sky corded red, she would be on her knees outside the station, begging the officer’s forgiveness. Allah only knew what an angry officer might do to further hurt her family.

The trial might be years away, and what she’d made from selling the back room of the hut was gone. Mirchi’s earnings from garbage covered food and little else. Should she sell the storeroom next? With the imprisonment of her husband, she was the decision-maker, and every choice she’d made thus far seemed to be the wrong one. Maybe she was the zero she’d insisted to her husband she was not.

She should have paid Asha to calm Fatima down, that day at the police station. She should have paid the special executive officer who claimed to control the witness statements. She should have kept silent about paying Thokale to stop the beatings and postpone her daughter’s arrest. There was only one decision about which she felt confident, which was the decision that she had made for Abdul.

The police were going to charge Abdul as an adult, because he looked like one, and because Zehrunisa lacked any proof of his age. Hence he would be sent to Arthur Road Jail along with his father.

Zehrunisa didn’t know Abdul’s age herself. Seventeen was what she’d said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.

Asha had invented her children’s birthdays and now marked them with parties and cake. In January, Manju had celebrated her eighteenth for the second year running—one of Asha’s tricks to preserve her daughter’s value as a bride. Abdul had never asked for a birthday party. What he’d wanted was a date and a year. His mother could tell him only what she knew:

“Before you were born, Saddam Hussein had been killing a lot of people somewhere. Maybe a year before, or two, I don’t know. Oh, you beat me up when you were inside me, worse than any of your brothers and sisters afterward, and I cried out so often that people started saying I had another Saddam in my belly. When you came out, you were so small, like a rat’s son, not any Saddam. Still we picked a peaceful name for you, because we worried that what people had said might be true. Abdul Hakim, a person who cures others just by his own understanding.