Behind the Beautiful Forevers Read Online Free PDF

aluminum pile. Rich people’s garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic. How was he to classify a loofah? The owners of the recycling plants demanded waste that was all one thing, pure.
    His mother was squatting beside him, applying a stone to a heap of wet, dirty clothes. She glared at Mirchi, drowsing in the doorway. “What? School holiday?” she said.
    Zehrunisa expected Mirchi to pass ninth grade at the third-rate Urdu-language private school for which they paid three hundred rupees a year. They’d had to pay, since spreading educational opportunity was not among the Indian government’s strong suits. The free municipal school near the airport stopped at eighth grade, and its teachers often didn’t show up.
    “Either study or help your brother,” Zehrunisa said to Mirchi. He glanced at Abdul’s recyclables and opened his math book.
    Recently, even looking at garbage made Mirchi depressed, a development that Abdul had willed himself not to resent. Instead he tried to share his parents’ hope: that when his brother finished high school, his considerable wit and charm would trump the job-market liability of being a Muslim. Although Mumbai was said to be more cosmopolitan and meritocratic than any other Indian city, Muslims were still excluded from many good jobs, including some in the luxury hotels where Mirchi longed to work.
    It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as he sorted his garbage, like with like. There were too many people in Mumbai for everyone to have a job, so why wouldn’tKunbi-caste Hindus from Maharashtra hire other Kunbis from Maharashtra, instead of hiring a Muslim of garbage-related provenance? But Mirchi said that everyone was mixing up nowadays, that old prejudices were losing strength, and that Abdul just couldn’t see it, spending his days with his head in his trash pile.
    Abdul was now working as fast as he could in order to finish by dusk, when strapping Hindu boys began playing cricket on the maidan, aiming their drives at his sorted piles, and sometimes his head. While the cricketers sorely tested Abdul’s policy of non-confrontation, the only physical fight he’d ever had was with two ten-year-olds who had turf-stomped one of his little brothers. And these cricketers had just sent another Muslim kid to the hospital, after smashing his head in with their bats.
    High above Abdul, Rahul was bobbling on another tree branch, trying to liberate a second resalable kite. The leaves of the tree were gray, like many things in Annawadi, on account of sand and gravel blowing in from a concrete plant nearby. You won’t die to breathe it, old-timers assured red-eyed new arrivals who fretted about the spoon-it-up air. But people seemed to die of it all the time—untreated asthma, lung obstructions, tuberculosis. Abdul’s father, hacking away in their hut, spoke of the truer consolation. The concrete plant and all the other construction brought more work to this airport boom-town. Bad lungs were a toll you paid to live near progress.
    At 6 P.M. , Abdul stood up, triumphant. He’d beaten the cricketers, and before him were fourteen lumpy sacks of sorted waste. As smoke clouds rose from the surrounding hotels—their evening fumigation against mosquitoes—Abdul and two of his little brothers hauled the sacks to the truckbed of a lime-green, three-wheeled jalopy. This small vehicle, one of the Husains’ most important possessions, allowed Abdul to deliver the waste to the recyclers. And now out onto Airport Road and into the city’s horn-honk opera.
    Four-wheelers, bikes, buses, scooters, thousands of people on foot: It took Abdul more than an hour to go three miles, given calamitous traffic at an intersection by the gardens of the Hotel Leela, around the corner of which European sedans awaited servicing at a concern named “Spa de Car.” A section of