Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [86]
In his day, Kalu had scaled the barbed wire to raid the dumpsters. Sunil cased the Taj for an easier way in, discovering a small hole concealed by brush at the base of one wall. The fact that the hole sat at the end of an unlit gravel lane made a stealing expedition practically compulsory. Sunil kept putting off the mission, though.
His fellow thief, Taufeeq, complained that other boys would discover the hole if they hesitated any longer. But this Taj Catering made Sunil think of Kalu and of death, as did the military men in blue berets lately crouching behind bunkers, as did the Sahar Police, who seemed to have grown meaner in the months since the terror attacks. Recently, a guard at the Indian Oil compound had caught Sunil sneaking around in search of metal and delivered him to an inebriated constable named Sawant. At the station, the constable had stomped on his back and beaten him so viciously that another officer apologized to Sunil and brought a blanket to cover him.
Given the risks, Sunil wanted to spend more nights watching the Taj guards through the hole, assessing the odds of getting caught. In the meantime, he got money for food by working the four-story car park nearing completion by the international terminal.
By now he knew the best way in: past rows of bright red-and-yellow barricades; past bulldozers and a generator, shrouded at night; past a checkpoint where guards with flashlights were opening car trunks; past an awesome mountain of gravel; past a bitter almond tree whose leaves had reddened, which meant the nuts had gone from sour to sweet; past two of the security bunkers.
One midnight in January when he visited the dark garage, he couldn’t make out which animals were scurrying underfoot. Rats or bandicoots, possibly, but he’d never encountered them in the car park before. Guards he had often encountered, but tonight he couldn’t tell where they were. He moved carefully to a stairwell near an exterior wall made of horizontal steel slats. The slatted wall let in a bit of the blue-white light bathing the international terminal, where travelers were still hugging their families goodbye. Being near the light increased the risk of being seen by a guard, but it allowed for proper surveillance.
He was searching for what Annawadians called German silver—aluminum or electroplate or nickel. Lately, the term was spoken with reverence. The price for German silver had recently dropped from a hundred rupees per kilo to sixty, but the price for everything else had fallen further.
Sunil worked his way up the stairwell, taking care, on each landing, to peer through a small hole in the floor. He supposed that a water pipe would eventually run through the holes, but for now, they allowed him to ascertain whether guards were slinking up the stairs behind him. Nepali watchmen scared him most, because they were sort of Chinese, like Bruce Lee.
On the third tier, in a corner, were two long strips of aluminum. He darted out to grab them, surprised that some other thief hadn’t found them. He thought they might have been parts of a window frame, although the car park didn’t have windows. The practical function of the items he stole at the airport didn’t matter to his work, but he still wondered.
He carried the metal strips up to the roof, where the only German silver he’d ever found was inside a red cabinet marked FIRE HOSE BOX—a flimsy holder for a fire extinguisher, worth little. The roof was also where he was most likely to encounter watchmen, who went there to smoke. Still, he tried to get up to this roof on every visit. At four stories, it was the highest roof he’d ever been on, but what made it exhilarating was the vista of open space, a rarity in the city.
The roof had two kinds of spaces, really. One kind was when he stood exactly in the middle and knew that even if his arms were thirty times longer he’d touch nothing if he spun around. That kind of space would be gone when the