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To both Meena and Manju, marrying into a village family was like time-traveling backward. In Asha’s village, people of the Kunbi caste still considered Dalits like Meena contaminated: unhygienic people relegated to the outskirts of town and tolerated in Kunbi homes only when picking up garbage or dredging drains. If a Dalit touched a cup in such a house, it had to be destroyed. Those villagers would be appalled if they saw how Manju leaned against her friend, or learned that the two girls shared a sky-blue sari.

Manju had worn the sari on the Maharashtrian New Year, the previous spring. Meena had worn it, draped with narrower pleats, for the Tamil New Year. “I feel too fluffy and puffy, wearing it your way,” she told Manju. Meena would rightfully get to wear it for her final Navratri in Mumbai.

“I’m afraid my mother will decide to marry me to that soldier from the village,” Manju said one night in the toilet, where they always made a point of turning their backs to the slum. Ever since Asha had taken Manju home to Vidarbha, Rahul had been teasing her about her rural future: “You’ll have to cover your head and clean and cook for your mother-in-law, and your husband will be away in the army and you’ll be so lonely.”

“So what will you do if your mother sets up such a marriage?” Meena asked.

“I’ll run to my aunt, I think. She would protect me. How could I spend my life like that?”

“Maybe it’s better just to do what Fatima did,” Meena said. “Escape the situation if you know you’re going to be miserable. But I would kill myself by eating poison, not by burning. If you burned yourself, the last memory people would have of you is with your skin all spoiled and scary.”

“Why are you still thinking like that?” Manju admonished. “You were sick for a week after you saw Fatima’s body lying there. You’ll get sick again if you don’t push such thoughts out of your mind the way I do.”

As they whispered, they couldn’t help looking around every once in a while, to make sure there was no sign of the One Leg. Although her curses floated through Annawadi, wreaking havoc in any number of huts, her actual ghost was known to be lodged in these very toilets. Slumdwellers remembered her walking there, tink-tink-tink, dolled up in lipstick. Many of them had decided it was safer to shit outside.

“Don’t worry,” Rahul told the girls. “The One Leg didn’t take her crutches with her when she died, so her ghost won’t be able to run and catch you.” Manju more or less believed this, and also knew that first-class people did not subscribe to ghost talk.

Meena was unapologetically superstitious, though. Recently, her mother reported seeing a snake slither across a menstrual cloth that Meena had too casually discarded. Her mother had been hysterical—said it foretold that Meena’s womb would shrivel up.

Manju suspected that Meena’s mother hadn’t really seen a snake, and was simply getting more creative in her attempts to keep Meena docile before marriage. But Meena was shaken. “I’m going to dry up and die,” she cried one night. Married women without children were suspect in Mumbai. And to be barren in a village?

Meena started to feel skittish at the toilet; the serpent curse and Fatima’s ghost struck her as a risky convergence. Still, she lingered, couldn’t not linger. The minutes in the night stench with Manju were the closest she had ever come to freedom.

The day before Asha’s Navratri began, the maidan underwent a fury of beautification. Abdul and his garbage piles were banished, and women swept and swept. A teenaged boy shimmied up the flagpole to anchor the strings of lights, while other boys climbed onto hut roofs to affix the ends of the strings to corrugated eaves. Tonight, Manju and Asha would fetch the idol of Durga from a nearby neighborhood, the arrival of which would complete the holiday preparations. Now, returning from college in the early afternoon, Manju rushed across the maidan wondering how she could teach school, memorize a plot summary for English literature, and do the