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Cynthia had washed her hair for her court date and put on her best sari, purple with a blue-and-gold border. There was nothing to be done about the teeth. In recent days, she’d envisioned her testimony as a decisive occasion, laying her anticipated performance against climactic trial scenes in Hindi movies.

It had been painful to watch the Husains’ income grow as her family’s foundered. She thought that Zehrunisa had been lucky, having a sorting machine like Abdul come out of her body, but Zehrunisa acted as if she’d been smart. Moreover, Zehrunisa gossiped about how Cynthia, a Christian, had once worked in an exotic-dance bar—a chapter of Cynthia’s life long closed. Lately, she called herself a social worker and was trying to get into the anti-poverty business, just like Asha. There was a lot of government and international money going around.

When Judge Chauhan called her forward, she stood pole-straight, confidently announcing her name and the new profession of social work. Only when the prosecutor began asking questions did her head start to cock.

This prosecutor was nothing like the prosecutors in the movies. He wasn’t looking at her intently, despite her spectacular sari. He seemed as bored by the trial as the judge.

Cynthia’s brows knitted together. She felt the prosecutor was rushing her. Didn’t the judge want to hear the details of the fight she was pretending to have seen? Her story about how she’d helped break down the door to save her smoldering friend? She’d barely warmed up when the prosecutor’s questions stopped coming, and the Husains’ private defender rose for the cross-examination.

This guy did seem like a lawyer in the films. Uncharacteristically alert in the face of a dubious witness—the last witness of a tedious trial—he sprang.

Yes, she admitted to his questioning, her family business had failed as the Husains’ had prospered.

Yes, she said, she lived in a hut some distance from the Husains, in another slumlane.

Yes, her home was far from where the fighting had taken place. Yes, she had been home chopping vegetables for dinner.

So how could you have seen what happened? the defender wanted to know.

“But I saw it,” she insisted, frowning. “She was my neighbor!”

“I don’t think so,” the defender said. “You said earlier that you saw the fight, but that wasn’t true. You lied.”

The judge repeated for her inept stenographer a nonsensical combination of this question and answer: “I lied and I saw the fight.” Cynthia’s eyes went wide.

Cynthia’s son had studied English in a Catholic school, and she’d picked up a little as she helped him study. What she understood was that the judge had told the stenographer to write that she had admitted she was a liar. She wanted a correction. She wanted time to think, regroup. “Wait,” she cried so loudly that Kehkashan and her father heard her over the din of the street. But this was fast-track court—a nothing case in fast-track court. No one was going to wait.

Her witness services were no longer required. Judge Chauhan was calling another case. A policeman was gesturing toward the door. But how could she leave the stand, having been misunderstood? How could she get this false iteration of her own false words out of the stenographer’s computer? She shook with anger. But at whom? The judge? The lawyers? The justice system? She decided to blame the Husains, hunched on the accused bench in the back.

“I will show you!” she yelled as she left the courtroom, raising her fist in high filmi style. But her performance was over, and no one was filming. The misconstrued witnesses and the mystified accused all got on the same train to return to their regular, contentious lives in Annawadi, where they would stew about what they thought had happened but couldn’t know for sure. Closing arguments were to come in two weeks.

One afternoon, Abdul, Mirchi, and their parents stood, hands behind backs, contemplating a motley cache of garbage in the storeroom. They’d tried to forestall a trip to the recycling plants because prices were so low, but now they had