Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [71]
They started to talk more as they worked. First, little stuff: that toes were almost as useful as fingers for judging the recyclability of goods; that Sonu’s family owned a radio that shocked your hand when you turned up the volume. Then bigger stuff, for Sonu liked to give concise lectures as he scavenged. Imbibing water from the sewage lake gives you jaundice, he argued, against Sunil’s contention that teasing people with jaundice gives you jaundice. Sonu also advised against any involvement with male tourists who stayed in the luxury hotels, given what had happened to his little brother. He suggested that Sunil might want to brush his teeth more than once in a thousand years, since his breath smelled worse than that of the slum’s rotten-food-eating pigs.
One day at the Mithi River, Sonu found a cigarette stub before Sunil could pocket it. Crouching, Sonu began to bash the precious stub with a stone. The tobacco came out, the filter shredded, and he nodded toward to the pulverized remains. “If I see you smoke again, Sunil? I will beat you with a stone like this.”
Sonu objected with equal passion to Sunil’s fascination with Kalu, the garbage thief who acted out movies for the benefit of boys who could not afford to see them. “You stay up half the night listening to this Kalu, and I have to waste so much time trying to get you up the next morning,” Sonu complained. Sonu didn’t understand oversleeping. He pointed out, “Every morning, my eyes open on their own.” Sunil was unused to being worried over, and liked it.
Sonu’s father was a more colorful drunk than Sunil’s father. Occasionally, he tore up the rupee notes he’d earned that day doing roadwork, saying, “Fuck this! What does money matter?” Sonu was fortunate in his mother, though. At night, she and her four children pulled the stringy manufacturing remnants from pink plastic clothespins—piecework for a nearby factory. During the day, she sold packets of ketchup and tiny jars of jam, past their expiration date, on a sidewalk near the Hotel Leela. Airline catering companies had donated the jam, along with plastic-wrapped packets of cake crumbs, to Sister Paulette, for her needy young wards. Instead the nun sold the expired goods to poor women and children, who in turn tried to resell them. Sonu resented Sister Paulette even more than Sunil did.
Sonu was enrolled in seventh grade at Marol Municipal. Though he couldn’t go to class because of his work, he registered for school annually, studied at night, and returned at year’s end to take exams. Sonu thought Sunil should do the same. One morning he cocked his head as if to drain the deafness from his ear, and announced: “Educate ourselves, and we’ll be making as much money as there is garbage!”
“You will, boss,” Sunil said, laughing. “And I’ll be the poor people, okay?”
“But don’t you want to be something, Motu?” Sonu asked. Sonu had taken to calling Sunil “Motu”—Fatty—a description that fit Sunil only in relation to Sonu.
Sunil did want to be something, but it didn’t seem to him that a municipal school education gave Annawadi boys better opportunities. Those who finished seventh or eighth grade just ended up scavenging, doing roadwork, or boxing Fair and Lovely lotion in a factory. Only boys who went to private schools had a chance to finish high school and go to college.
When Sunil and Sonu returned to Annawadi from their garbage-gathering, they stopped talking, and their hips no longer bumped together as they walked. They were skinny kids making a little money—prey. Older boys slapped down the wet road, and suddenly Sunil and Sonu were facing a piledrive, getting a noseful of buffalo shit. A son of Robert the Zebra Man offered them protection from the older boys, for thirty or forty rupees a week. When they didn’t pay, he pummeled them himself.
Sunil envied those children who seemed to have more than their share of protection. It was understood that a