• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I won’t go long,” he had promised his mother. “Just long enough to fill my heart.”

The mosque and tomb of Haji Ali sat on an islet in the Arabian Sea, connected to the mainland by a rocky promontory. Salty gusts turned the burqas in front of Abdul into hundreds of black balloons, floating slowly down the promontory toward the glittering dome of the mosque. On either side of him, merchants with fold-up tables were selling paste jewelry and plastic water guns. Above him, the sky was batting gullwings. It was beautiful—like he was walking into an Urdu calendar. Then he registered what no calendar ever showed.

The narrow road to Haji Ali was lined with One-Legs. No Legs, too. Stretching before him for hundreds of yards were disabled beggars, prostrate, keening and tearing their clothes. It was like a mad multiplication of Fatimas.

He departed Haji Ali in haste. The confusion he felt wasn’t going to be addressed by feasting his eyes on something lofty. It could be eased only by a court deciding that he hadn’t attacked a disabled woman, throttled her, and driven her to a violent suicide.

Abdul could control many of his desires, but not this one. He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.

Asha had conceived of a hundred escape routes from Annawadi, but in the first months of 2009 those paths kept dead-ending, and she began to feel scooped out and sad. Possibly an electrical shock was to blame for disrupting her normal, optimistic mental circuits. Possibly Mr. Kamble had left a curse when he finally died for want of a heart valve. For shortly after his cremation, his pretty widow, in debt to a loan shark, stole one of Asha’s most useful male companions.

It was hardly the first time Asha had been dismissed by a man without warning. In earlier times, though, she’d managed to seal the disappointment in some tidy interior compartment and bustle forth in pursuit of something new. The questions had even entertained her: What to try, whom to try, next? But now, such questions merely illuminated the fact that her previous answers had been wrong. Gold pots flaked away, revealing mud pots.

Asha’s slavish attention to Corporator Subhash Sawant was the biggest mud pot. Shortly after her spectacular Navratri, a judge had expelled her political patron from office for pretending to be low-caste. But her list of disappointments was long. The grocery store for which she’d received a government loan, and which she’d hoped her husband could run from the hut. The tedious, still unremunerative slumlording. The idea of Manju as insurance agent to the Mumbai elite. The idea of Manju as a profit-center bride. The windfall that was supposed to have come from securing flats for Sahar police officers to conduct their side businesses. Other schemes that had sucked up months before sputtering out.

The parliamentary elections were closing in, and she was supposed to be leafleting the slums. Shiv Sena people called five times a day to remind her. The newly installed Corporator, from the Congress Party, also called. To win the slumdwellers’ affection, he had installed elegant paving stones on the maidan, plus a black-marble monument to the Congress Party. Now he needed an Asha. Her power at Annawadi had transcended party affiliation.

But Asha was as reluctant to pledge allegiance to another politician as she was to leaflet. She wanted to stay inside and cry. Coming home from kindergarten, she wrapped herself in a blanket and murmured a Marathi poem she had copied from a bulletin board in Mankhurd.

What you don’t want is always going to be with you

What you want is never going to be with you

Where you don’t want to go, you have to go

And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die.

Manju was distressed to see her mother curled up, making a cave of herself, though she knew better than to ask why. Instead she said, “Not like you, Mummy, sitting still.”

Said the next day, handing over a steaming teacup, “I’m tired, too, from my