Still, I simply could not picture Geeta wading through this sea of offal like other mortals. She must have been forearmed, she was probably wearing a pair of offensively expensive thigh-high custom-made designer boots cobbled by hand out of some high-tech water-repellent material, I decided, a monsoon fashion statement on the slum runway, or maybe she was borne aloft in a palanquin like the Maharini of Mumbai, and her feet never touched the ground, she never left dry land. Then I thought of you, Maya, I pictured your tall rubber boots caked with stinking brown gunk that you took off every night in the hallway outside the door, I pictured you sloshing through this filthy soup day after day, with more liquid pouring down from the low black clouds overhead, and again I thought, thank God your falling sickness days have passed—what if you slipped and fell into this swamp, infested with parasites and feces and disease, what then? The kids trudging ahead of me were soaked, but still they kept badgering Sunny, Where’s the shit lake? Are we there yet? The open lake of raw sewage, it seemed, according to the yelps, was the highlight of the slum tour. They kept on nagging him until finally, even with the positive, gung-ho demeanor all Slum Power employees were required to maintain, he lost it. “The shit lake overflows in monsoon,” he snapped. “You’re walking in it right now.”

It was still midafternoon, but the low cloud canopy brought on an early end-of-day darkness. The blue tarpaulins that were stretched across almost every rooftop in a pathetic effort to keep out the steadily falling rain gave off a dusky, twilight disorientation. In the cramped passageways, people moved about as if in an underworld, picking their way through the large objects bobbing in the water by the light of their cell phones. Water had risen into almost every shack, we could track it flowing in inexorably. Through the doors, open to catch the fading rays of daylight, the whites of eyes glowed out as if from the portholes of a doomed ship, the lower half of bodies were sunk in still, stagnant water like emerging life forms in evolutionary distress.

To demonstrate how ingeniously some citizens improvised and coped, Sunny led us into a comparatively larger hutment, constructed on a slight elevation of compacted trash and recycled junk. Even so, inside the water was at least ankle deep. We were clumped at the entrance, not wanting to invade as uninvited guests by venturing boldly into the interior, pointing the flashlights we had been instructed in advance to bring along as part of our slum tour gear, listening to the master of the house muttering, Welcome, welcome, observing him smiling genially and nodding his head as if in total agreement with every word spoken in a language he likely did not understand, while Sunny directed our attention to the shelves and ledges jutting out high up along the walls. Human figures were reclining on them, or engaging in some domestic task, a mother nursing a baby, an ancient grandma curled up snoring, flicking away in her sleep the drops of rain falling on her hollow cheek, children eating street food, samosas and bhel puri off torn sheets of newspaper since the contamination permeating everything made cooking at home a mortal threat, Sunny explained. In the most protected position, the place of honor, Sunny pointed, we could see the family’s most treasured possessions wrapped in plastic, the television set above all else, though unfortunately it was impossible to switch on the electricity in the basti during the monsoon, not only because the power was on the blink almost full time as usual, but also because of the danger of shock due to the moisture saturating everything.