Opening Night: The scene from the airport slums

by: Katherine Boo
Issue: Feb. 23

This article examines the dynamic between India's rich and poor by telling the story of Sunil, a thirteen-year-old garbage thief who lives in Gautam Nagar, an airport slum. Gautam Nagar is surrounded by fancy hotels and as a result, "[m]usic from weddings and poolside parties drifts over. Ash from cowdung and wood fires drifts back." Close quarters all around, according to Boo.

In his off-time, Sunil can be found at a local game room/snack stand playing Metal Slug 3. Come nighttime, however, he heads to the airport parking garage in search of scraps of aluminum and the like. Boo sets the piece on Jan. 22, the night of the Indian premiere of "Slumdog Millionaire."

Boo describes his nightly missions with such precise detail that one imagines she must have shadowed him in each and every crawl space and stairwell. Toward the end of the piece, she marvels that Mumbai doesn't look more like Metal Slug 3, but is instead held together by "ingenious social constructions" such as "democracy, charity, subtle and blatant articulations of caste, hope, electrified fences." She ventures that the thefts - Mumbai has more than any other Indian metropolitan area - are another piece of the puzzle, what she calls "small leaks that kept the whole contraption from exploding."

The piece's final sentence - "At home, unlike at the airport, he was still afraid of the dark" - reminds the reader of Sunil's innocence. For me, this last line called to mind the title, "Opening Night." Boo is opening night for the reader who presumably has no idea that this goes on in Mumbai. Of course, it's also opening night of "Slumdog Millionaire."

Now, I didn't see the film, but if "Slumdog Millionaire" comes up in conversation, it can't hurt to say you read the New Yorker piece on an airport slums, and it's nothing like in the movie. Jai Ho! I did see the Oscars.