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“Will come before dinner!” she called out to Meena, who was waving from the doorway of her hut. Manju didn’t intend to be caught with unfinished laundry on a week when dancing privileges could be taken away.

Four hours later, clothes on the line and the final round of Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes completed, Manju walked over to Meena’s. Her friend was sitting in her doorway, looking out at the tidy maidan. This was odd. Meena’s parents didn’t let her sit on the stoop—said it gave a girl a loose reputation.

Manju settled in beside her. Late afternoon was the time many girls and women of Annawadi took a break from housework, before beginning their dinner preparations. When they were younger, Meena and Manju had spent their free minutes playing hopscotch in front of the hut, but marriageable teenaged girls couldn’t jump around. Meena looked wan, and wasn’t as fidgety as usual, but she was fasting as she did every Navratri, to please the goddess Durga.

From time to time, Meena bent over and spit in the dust. “Are you getting sick?” Manju asked after a while.

Meena shook her head and spit again.

“So what are you doing?” Manju said in a low voice, suddenly suspicious. “Chewing tobacco?” With her mother right there inside the hut?

“Just spitting,” Meena said with a shrug.

Feeling a little aggrieved at Meena’s failure to entertain her, Manju rose to return to her work. “Wait,” said Meena, holding out her hand. In her palm was an empty tube of rat poison.

Meena met her eyes, and Manju went flying into the hut, where Meena’s mother was grinding rice to make idlis. Manju’s words came forth in a torrent—rat poison, Meena, foolish, going to die.

Meena’s mother kept grinding the rice. “Calm down. She’s playing a trick,” she told Manju. “She said a few weeks back that she’d eaten poison, and nothing happened.”

Meena’s mother was fed up with her daughter. The prospect of dancing had apparently caused the girl to lose her senses. Meena had been discovered talking on the phone to the city boy at 2 A.M., and taken a beating for it. At lunchtime, she refused to make her younger brother an omelet because she was fasting and didn’t want to be tempted by food. Took a beating for that, too. Her brother was about to give her the third beating of the day, for sitting outside the house, when she concocted this story about having eaten poison.

Manju was momentarily reassured by Meena’s mother. But if Meena was manufacturing a drama, wouldn’t she let Manju in on it? Manju went back outside, leaned into her friend’s face, and sniffed.

Manju thought of cartoon dragons, exhaling fire and smoke. Later, she kept thinking she saw smoke coming out of Meena’s mouth and nose—as if the girl had set herself on fire from the inside. No, that was impossible. Rat poison only. Her mind was looping. If she screamed for help, the whole slum would know that Meena had attempted suicide, which would ruin her reputation. Quiet seemed essential. She ran to a pay phone to call Asha.

“Mummy,” she whispered, “Meena ate rat poison, her mother doesn’t believe, and I don’t know what to do!”

“Oh, shit!” said Asha. “You’ve got to force her to swallow tobacco right away. That will make her puke everything out.”

But what would people say if Manju was seen buying tobacco? Manju chased down some Tamil women on Meena’s slumlane, hoping they would have a better idea. “She poisoned herself!” she hissed. “Help me! I don’t know what to do!”

They shook their heads. “So many fights in that family lately,” someone said.

“No!” Manju cried, forgetting to be quiet. “Don’t be calm! You have to do something!”

Meena had come over, was standing beside her.

“Did you really swallow it?” one of the women asked.

“I did,” Meena said, her voice mild.

“Did you take all of it?” Manju demanded. A woman on this slumlane had recently consumed half a tube of the same brand of poison, Ratol, and survived.

“All of it,” Meena said, then leaned forward to gag, spirals of hair spilling over her face. When the gagging