Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [70]
Some Annawadians were confident that Corporator Subhash Sawant could delay the arrival of the bulldozers. But at a nearby crisscross, a political poster flapped, suggesting that deals were being made. “You pretend you’ve hit me. I pretend I’m crying. You people who live on airport lands are familiar with this phony drama. Now the other party says it will be the one to stop the airport from destroying your homes. So why are they meeting in secret with the government and the developers?”
Sunil was spooked by the deaths and the rumors, but of more immediate concern was the fact that his younger sister had grown another inch, increasing the height gap between them. In the monsoon, there wasn’t nearly enough airport garbage to get him growing. He was never more dispirited than when he caught a glimpse of another scavenger boy from Annawadi, built like a blade of grass, lugging a sack so full that it bent him.
This was Sonu Gupta, the blinky boy. He lived seven huts down from Sunil, and was two years older. A few years back, when scavenging at the airport had been less competitive, they’d worked the Cargo Road dumpsters together—a partnership that had ended when Sunil accidentally broke Sonu’s nose. Lately, though, Sonu seemed to be signaling his forgiveness. Sunil sometimes found him loitering on their slumlane before dawn, a look of let’s-work-together spreading over his face.
The face itself was off-putting: wizened, with one of the blinky eyes rolling up. Sonu was half deaf, too, and on hot days his nose spurted blood—some birth disorder that ran in his family. Sunil was old enough now to imagine what other boys would say should he renew such a substandard alliance. Still, he was curious about how the blinky boy secured so much trash. In any season, let alone the monsoon, bad eyesight was a serious disadvantage for a scavenger.
One day, Sunil followed Sonu as he worked. He was surprised to find that a kid with no friends in Annawadi possessed profitable relationships outside it—chiefly, with the security guards at one entrance of the vast Air India compound. In the predawn darkness, Sonu waited outside a set of gates on Cargo Road, a tatty broom in hand. Eventually, an Air India guard let him in, and he began to sweep with comical fury. He cleaned the walkways, the security kiosk, the walkways again, erasing the trace of his small footprints, bending so low that he inhaled the whorl of his sweeping.
It was a display so abject that Sunil felt prepared to disdain it, until the guard emptied two large trash cans at Sonu’s feet. Then Sunil saw the cunning. In the middle of unruly, cutthroat Cargo Road, a slight teenaged boy had all to himself, behind security gates, a wealth of plastic cups, Coke cans, ketchup packets, and aluminum foil trays from a canteen where Air India workers ate.
Somehow—his pathetic aspect?—blinky Sonu had achieved with the compound’s guards what Sunil had failed to achieve with the rich women who came to the orphanage. Sonu had distinguished himself from the raggedy mass. Soon, only a little embarrassed, Sunil was walking out of Annawadi beside him.
Sunil had to shout at Sonu to be heard, and at first he barely bothered. A monosyllabic routine was sufficient for their days: sweeping at Air India, trying to secure bottles and trash from the managers of beer bars and food joints, then splitting up to cover more ground. Sunil excelled at scaling walls and running from airport guards who caught him too close to the terminal. Sonu had no interest in being beaten by guards. His skills were consistency and systematic planning. He’d paid the Air India guards to give him trash the first time, but then they’d stopped asking for money.
The scavenger Sonu supplanted at Air India had beaten him up, and still cursed him when their paths crossed, but Sonu, having been a mockery-magnet all his life, didn’t worry about other people’s opinions. Finishing his daily rounds, he’d stand on Airport Road facing traffic, tightening the strings of his fat sack with crisp tugs, his whole body radiating pride.
“You’ve taught