Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [87]
He liked seeing red-tailed Air India planes taking off. He liked the bulbous municipal water tower. He liked the building site of the massive new terminal. He didn’t care for the smokestack of Parsiwada crematorium, where Kalu’s body had burned. Better to spot the glowing Hyatt sign and try to pinpoint which of the dark patches beneath it was Annawadi. Best, though, was watching the rich people moving in and out of the terminal.
Other boys who visited this roof liked watching the moving people because they looked so small. For Sunil, seeing the people from above made him feel close to them. He felt free to watch them in a way he couldn’t when he was on the ground. There, if he stared, they would see him staring.
Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once, he had believed he was smart and might become something—not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.
Enough time-pass: He had to get home with his German silver. He carried the aluminum strips down the stairs and, before leaving the building, unzipped his pants and slid the metal through the legs of his underwear. German silver against the skin didn’t feel good, but when he tried to carry it outside his underwear, it slipped around.
He limped, stiff-legged, past the security checkpoints and the Sahar Police Station. Soon he was at Annawadi, curling up to sleep in the back of a lorry. The next afternoon, he used the game-parlor man’s tools to steal tire locks that the airport parking police clipped onto autorickshaws.
When he returned to the game shed after dark, everyone was talking about a woman who had just tried to hang herself, and failed. Her indebted husband had sold their hut, and she didn’t want to live on the pavement.
Too many Annawadi females wanted to die, it seemed to Sunil. He felt especially sad about Meena, who had been nice to him. And all for an egg, people said.
Abdul contended that what Meena had done was daring. People had called Kalu daring, too. Now the Tamil who owned the game shed said that he, Sunil, was Annawadi’s daring boy: “The number-one thief!” Sunil saw through the guy’s words to his motive. The Tamil was trying to bolster his confidence so that he’d do the theft at the Taj and sell him the goods. Sunil didn’t have that confidence tonight.
On the road outside the shed, his father was careening past, and Abdul was talking animatedly to another boy, who wasn’t listening. As Abdul talked, he was twisting his neck back and forth, same as a water buffalo standing behind him. Sunil laughed as he walked over. It was the kind of goofy behavior Kalu would have mimicked. Abdul and the buffalo were probably flinging back and forth the same killer mosquitoes.
“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?” Abdul was asking the boy who was not listening. He seemed to be in one of the possessions that came over him from time to time, ever since he got locked up at Dongri.
“Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that,” Abdul went on. “I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.’ And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, ‘Don’t confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.’ ”
Sunil thought that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly—the kind that could be ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference