Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [85]
Sunil understood that the rich people were mourning the devastation of a place where they had relaxed and felt safe. In his equivalent place, the 96-square-foot game shed, no one cried about the siege of south Mumbai, or about the hundreds of people dead and injured. Instead, slumdwellers worried for themselves. By the time the attack ended, sixty hours after it had begun, many Annawadians had accurately predicted the chain of economic consequences.
A city in which terrorists killed foreign tourists in hotels was not a place other foreign tourists would want to spend their winter holidays. There would not be a peak season in Annawadi this winter. The airport would be quiet, the hotels empty. When midnight came on January 1, there would be few partiers at the Intercontinental shouting “Happy New Year.”
Instead, 2009 arrived in the slum under a blanket of poverty, the global recession overlaid by a crisis of fear. More Annawadians had to relearn how to digest rats. Sonu deputized Sunil to catch frogs at Naupada slum, since Naupada frogs tasted better than sewage-lake ones. The deranged scavenger who talked to the luxury hotels stopped accusing the Hyatt of plotting to kill him. Instead, he pleaded to its nonreflective blue-glass front, “I do so much work, Hyatt, and earn so little. Will you not take care of me?”
One January afternoon, Sunil took a bath in an abandoned pit at the concrete-mixing plant. Pushing away the algae, he examined his reflection with care. He was a thief now, and Sonu said it showed in his face.
Sunil knew what his friend meant. He’d seen a change come over the faces of other boys who turned to stealing—a change security guards recognized in an instant. He decided he still looked the same: same big childish mouth, wide nose, sunken torso. Same thick hair, sticking up and out now, but about which he had no complaint when he thought about his sister Sunita. Rats had bitten them both while they slept, and the bites had turned into head boils. But she had recently become a baldie, because her boils had erupted with worms.
Sonu wanted Sunil to renounce his new line of work, and to that end had recently slapped his face four times, hard. Sunil neither slapped back nor changed his mind. Sonu was probably the most virtuous boy at Annawadi, but he also had a mother and younger siblings working to supplement the household income. Sunil, unable to feed himself by scavenging, had to consider his airport terrain afresh, and locals who fenced stolen goods were glad to help him. For Sunil’s first solo mission, a teenaged thief-wrangler, himself with a worm-bald sister, provided a bicycle for a high-speed getaway. By morning, the airport fire brigade was stripped of copper faucet valves. The game-shed man handed over his cutting tools, and metal supports disappeared beneath dozens of concrete sewer covers. As construction workers prepared a cavernous airport car park for its opening, Sunil set to dismantling bits of it, screw by screw.
He was well suited to his work as a new-economy microsaboteur. His climbing ability had been honed on Airport Road coconut trees, his small size helped deflect suspicion, and he didn’t balk at calculated risks, like the ones he took when jumping down to the garbage-filled ledge above the river. The only problem was that his hands and legs shook every time he picked up a piece of metal—a nervous tic other thieves found hilarious.
One of them, Taufeeq, had been asking him all month, “Should we go into the Taj tonight?” The Annawadi boys’ Taj was not the hotel that the terrorists attacked. Their Taj was Taj Catering Services, a squat building on airport grounds owned by the hotel company. Behind high stone walls topped with rows of barbed wire, meals to be served on flights got made. Recently, Sunil had noticed orange netting and iron scaffolding