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Had Abdul been more Saddam-like, she would have been less repulsed by the idea of his being in Arthur Road Jail with contract killers, pedophiles, and mafia dons. But she feared that for an argument she had begun, he would be victimized, perhaps raped, in Arthur Road. The only way she could think to prevent this was to pay someone to manufacture a record of his age, to ensure he would be charged as a juvenile.

She went across the maidan to see the brothelkeeper, who had been accused of drug dealing, pimping, robbery, and who knew what else over the years, but had been imprisoned only twice. She thought he would know about efficacious bribery.

The brothelkeeper acknowledged that this was one of his expertises, and was eager to help in exchange for financial consideration. However, age-related records weren’t part of his repertoire.

Who else might know whom and how to bribe for such a record? Of course: the Sahar police. Belatedly, she realized that one constable had been dropping hints for days.

Upon receiving his advice, she sent her money flowing through Marol Municipal School, and into the pocket of the constable. She returned home with just what she’d wanted: a fake school record showing that Abdul Hakim Husain, former student, was sixteen years old. Her son, who had hardly been a child, would at least now be treated like one by the criminal justice system.

Mumbai’s detention center for juveniles was in Dongri, a neighborhood thirteen miles south of Annawadi. For the first leg of the journey there, Abdul had been smushed against two dozen others inside the back of a police van. But after a stop at a courthouse in Bandra, where his status as a juvenile was recorded, he’d come to Dongri in a taxi, a bored female civilian as his only escort. Past her shoulder, he could track the evening street life of a thriving middle-class Muslim neighborhood.

On either side of a dark green mosque, storefronts were humming with commerce despite the rain. Halal butcher. Muslim furniture-wallah. Nazir chemist. Habib hospital. Kitchen shops with ladles dangling from hooks. A restaurant with a bright yellow door. Tattered pennants on poles advertising exam-prep courses and aspiring Muslim politicians. A man in a stall selling pinwheels, right before the street life blanked out.

Immense and mossy stone walls encircled one city block. The front wall was broken by a single iron gate. The gate to Dongri detention center was a strangely small one—child-sized, Abdul supposed.

He could have run instead of ducking through it; the mind of his escort seemed to be elsewhere, her hand barely gripping his own. But through the door he went, and down a dim passage with a wooden Hindu shrine built into the wall. At its end, he was surprised to find a pleasant courtyard with a palm tree.

The juvenile facility was a congregation of handsome sandstone buildings erected by the British early in the nineteenth century, supplemented by newer constructions that were half bungalow, half shed. Indian and British criminals had been hanged here in colonial days, and their bloody bones were piled in the basements, or so other juvenile detainees informed Abdul upon his arrival. The ghosts of the hanged men were said to come out every night. Though Abdul had been as afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did not disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.

Clothes confiscated, Abdul was handed a too-large uniform and escorted to one of the shedlike buildings, where he was locked in a room crammed with other new arrivals. Its windows were shuttered, breath and body smells fouled the air, and after an hour Abdul felt so suffocated that his mind began to go funny. If I stay here any longer, I will cut up a small child and eat him. Afterward, he was astonished that he’d thought this. When the doors finally opened and rotis were passed out, he felt too sick to eat.

To the warden’s office, next, to be registered as