detail of an icon of The Parable of the Good Samaritan, by Jozef Sedmak
One dawn in late July, Sunil found a fellow scavenger lying in the mud where Annawadi's rut-road met the airport thoroughfare. Sunil knew the old man a little; he worked hard and slept outside the Marol fish market, half a mile away. Now the man's leg was mashed and bloody, and he was calling out to passersby for help. Sunil figured he'd been hit by a car. Some drivers weren't overly concerned about avoiding trash-pickers who scoured the roadsides.
Sunil was too scared to go to the police station and ask for an ambulance, especially after what was rumored to have happened to Abdul. Instead he ran toward the battleground of the Cargo Road dumpsters, hoping an adult would brave the police station. Thousands of people passed this way every morning.
Two hours later, when Rahul left Annawadi for school, the injured man was crying for water. "This one is even drunker than your father," one of Rahul's friends teased him. "Drunker than your father," Rahul retorted unimaginatively as they turned onto Airport Road. Rahul wasn't afraid of the police; he'd run to them for help when his neighbor dumped boiling lentils on Danush, his sickly baby. The man on the road was just a scavenger, though, and Rahul had to catch a bus to class.
When Zehrunisia Husain passed an hour later, the scavenger was screaming in pain. She thought his leg looked like hell, but she was bringing food and medicine to her husband, who also looked like hell far across the city in the Arthur Road Jail.
Mr. Kramble passed a little later, milky-eyed and aching, on his tour of businesses and charities, still seeking contributions for his heart valve. He had once been a pavement dweller like the injured man. Now Mr. Kramble saw nothing but his own bottomless grief, because he knew miracles were possible in new India and that he couldn't have one.
When Rahul and his brother returned from school in the early afternoon, the injured scavenger lay still, moaning faintly. At 2:30 P.M., a Shiv Sena man made a call to a friend in the Sahar Police Station about a corpse that was disturbing small children. At 4:00 P.M., constables enlisted enlisted other scavengers to load the body into a police van, so that the constables wouldn't catch the diseases that trash-pickers were known to carry.
Unidentified body, the Sahar Police decided without looking for the scavenger's family. Died of tuberculosis, the Cooper Hospital morgue pathologist concluded without an autopsy.
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, pages 152-153)
Which of these ⊠in your opinion, was the neighbor to the robbers' victim?
the Gospel According to Luke (10:36)
The effect of corruption I find most unacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is a shrug. How does that happen? How âto use Abdul's formulationâ do children intent on being ice become water? A clichĂ© about India holds that the loss of life matters less than in other countries because of the Hindu faith in reincarnation, and because of the vast scale of the population. In my reporting, I found that young people felt the loss of life acutely. What appeared to be indifference to other people's suffering had little to do with reincarnation, and less to do with being born brutish. I believe it had a good deal to do with conditions that had sabotaged their innate capacity for moral action.
In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.
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. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be[.]
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, pages 253-254)
[T]o be truly free is to be free from the blinders that prevent us from doing the morally good action. To put it another way: to fail in doing the morally good action is to presuppose some kind of bondage.
Matthew Distefano (The Wisdom of Hobbits: Unearthing Our Humanity at 3 Bagshot Row, page 120)
