Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [72]
Kalu the garbage thief looked out for Sunil when he was around, though Kalu was pretty small himself. Late in the afternoon, he sometimes joined Sunil on a warm pile of rubble at the far side of the sewage lake, where the slant of light before dusk made the shadows of both boys gigantic. Here, well out of the blinky boy’s sight lines, Sunil could enjoy his daily cigarette in peace. Kalu smoked too, despite the tuberculosis he’d contracted a few years earlier.
The two boys liked studying Annawadi from a hidden vantage, across the water. From the rocks, they could see how crazy-lopsided all the huts were against the straight lines of the Hyatt and Meridien hotels that rose up behind them. It was as if the huts had fallen out of the sky and gotten smushed upon landing.
The other marvels on the far side of the lake were a little farm that felt like a secret in the city, and a jamun-fruit tree where parrots nested. Some of the other road boys had been capturing the parrots one by one to sell at the Marol Market, but Sunil brought Kalu around to the belief that the birds should be left as they were. Sunil listened for their squawks when he got up each morning, to make sure they hadn’t been abducted in the night. Sunil thought of Kalu as the parrot of road boys, although the older boy had recently seemed subdued. Even the movies he enacted were growing darker.
Kalu’s expertise was in the recycling bins inside airline catering compounds. Private waste-collectors emptied these dumpsters on a regular basis, but Kalu had mastered the trash trucks’ schedules. The night before pickup, Kalu would climb over the barbed-wire fences and raid the overflowing bins. He’d managed to secure discarded aluminum serving trays from inside Chef Air, Taj Catering, Oberoi Flight Services, and Skygourmet. The Oberoi dumpsters, he said, had been the most ferociously defended.
Kalu’s routine had become known by the local police, however. He kept getting caught, until some constables proposed a different arrangement. Kalu could keep his metal scrap if he’d pass on information he picked up on the road about local drug dealers.
A white-suited cocaine dealer named Ganesh Anna did a galloping business at the airport, and twice a week sent some of his distributors—Annawadi men in their early twenties—to pick up the bulk cocaine in another suburb. Though Ganesh Anna paid the police to stay off his back, the constables weren’t satisfied with their cut. In return for good information about the time and place of drug buys, they would leave Kalu’s trash pilferings alone. Kalu kept a scrap of paper with the officers’ cellphone numbers in the side pocket of his cargo pants—red-and-brown camouflage, Mirchi castoffs.
Kalu was equally afraid of the police and of Ganesh Anna. He felt like bait fish. He kept bringing up the film Prem Pratigyaa, in which a slum hoodlum feels so trapped by his life that he decides to kill himself with liquor—at which point the glorious Madhuri Dixit saunters to the rescue. Kalu routinely struck out with the girls who waited at the water taps, and both he and Sunil thought it unlikely that any new girl would appear, Madhuri-style, to extricate him from this entanglement. Getting out of Mumbai was the safer bet, and his estranged father had offered him a plausible escape.
His father and elder brother, itinerant pipe fitters, had a hut in a nearby slum that hung perilously onto a hillside; Kalu sometimes cried about how unwanted he’d felt in that home before he came to live on the road outside Annawadi. “I grew up in a second when my mother died,” he told Sunil. “My father and brother didn’t understand me.” Being misunderstood was better than