Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him
But something he’d come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.
.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.
The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
Though Abdul had been as afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did not disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.
He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.
It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.
At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope – that the good fortune of others might one day be hers
When I’m engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I’m not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.