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Said the next day, “I’ll copy this poem over, and do it nicely.” Asha had smeared the ink with her tears.

That evening, when Asha pulled her head out of the blanket, she found her ode to low expectations neatly printed, laminated, and hanging from a tack on the wall.

Although Manju attributed her mother’s grief entirely to a secret heartache, Asha’s heart at forty was stubborn and knowing. Her brain was the troublesome thing. When not reflecting on the cause of past failures, she brooded on the smallest of slights: a police officer who no longer returned her phone calls; Reena, a Shiv Sena colleague who had a special puja and failed to invite her. The normal Asha would have been happy not to visit Reena, who was grumpy and had the face of a cow. But in her current mood, small affronts were bundled with larger disappointments and became a body of evidence. Something bright in her had been eclipsed.

Asha had always prized her competitiveness, a quality that she’d failed to pass on to her children. Perhaps because they lacked it, she had valued it more in herself. But over time, the compulsion to win could become self-deceiving. Instead of admitting that she was making little progress, she had invented new definitions of success. She had felt herself moving ahead, just a little, every time other people failed. She had outflanked the Husains, for one, and Mr. Kamble, in a way. But the facts of her days had barely changed. She was still living with a drunken husband in a cramped hut by a sewage lake. Her vanity—a quality she had passed on to all three children—was being undermined. She had failed to crack the code of the wider city, while at home, many of her neighbors had started to loathe her.

Annawadians agreed upon the moment when their respectful wariness of Asha had turned to vibrant dislike. It was during her attempt to capitalize on what they feared: that in 2010 or 2011, the airport slums would start being razed.

Since it was election season, and airport slumdwellers were known to vote, some politicians were still talking about fighting the demolition. But plans were well underway. A small part of the cleared acreage would be used to serve the expanding airport, and the rest would be leased on the open market. In place of thirty-odd slums, there would be more hotels, shopping malls, office complexes, perhaps a theme park.

The airport clearance would roughly follow the state’s slum-redevelopment scheme. Under it, private developers were granted rights to build on slum land only if they agreed to construct apartments for those slumdwellers who could prove they’d lived in their huts since 1995 or 2000, depending on the slum. Corruption in the scheme was endemic; organized-crime syndicates had become major players. But the program had overt limitations as well. Although in the previous two years 122,000 huts had been demolished, two-thirds of the affected families hadn’t lived in their huts long enough to qualify for rehousing. So they had crowded into other slums, or built new slums on the outskirts of the city.

The general failure of Mumbai slum clearance efforts made removing the airport slums even more important. The job was manageable in scale and outsized in resonance. It would signify to the world that Indian leaders were making headway on their goal of a “slum-free Mumbai.”

It irked Asha that officials saw the slums simply as monuments to backwardness. “And if they need space at the airport so badly,” she said one day, “why don’t they bulldoze the hotels?” But luxury hotels were not perceived as the problem; swimming pools and lawns would be preserved. So what was she supposed to do, as a leader of one of the eyesores said to be holding back the fortunes of a nation? Unite her neighbors in some fruitless opposition? It had seemed to her more realistic to pursue her private ambitions and make some money.

She had identified an opening in land speculation, of which there was much at Annawadi lately. The apartments promised to displaced airport slumdwellers would be tiny—269 square feet—but would have