For the Win, Cory Doctorow [english novels for students .TXT] 📗

you want, you want. When I found you, you were a Dharavi rat, no money, no job, no hope. I gave you a good job, good wages, and now you want and want and want?" He made a dismissive noise and waved his hand at her. "You will remove yourself from my cafe and take your schoolchums with you, or you will be hurt. Very badly."

The neighbors made scandalized clucking noises at that and Mr Bannerjee ignored them.

"You won't hurt us," Mala said. "You will go back to your fine house and your fine friends and you will leave us alone to control our destiny."

Mr Bannerjee said nothing, only smoked his cigarette in the night and stared at them, considering them like a scientist who's discovered a new species of insects.

"You are making mischief, Mala. I know what you are up to. You are disrupting things that are bigger than you. I tell you one more time. Remove yourself from my cafe."

Mala made a very soft spitting sound, full of contempt.

Mr Bannerjee raised his hand and his mob fell silent, prepared themselves.

And then there was a sound. A sound of footsteps, hundreds of them. Thousands of them. An army marching down the laneway from both sides, and then they were upon them. Ashok leading the column from the left, old Mrs Rukmini and Mr Phadkar leading the column from the right.

The columns themselves were composed of union workers -- textile workers, steel workers, train workers. Ashok's phonecalls and photos and stories had paid off. Hundreds of text messages were sent and workers were roused from their beds and they hastily dressed and gathered to be picked up by union busses and driven all across Mumbai to Dharavi, guided in to Mrs Dibyendu's shop by Ashok, who had whispered his thanks to the leaders who had given him their support.

The workers halted, just a few paces from the gangsters and their evil smells. Ashok looked at the two groups, the sitting army and the standing mob, and he deliberately and slowly sat down.

The exquisitely elderly ladies leading the other column did the same. The sitting spread, moving back through the group, and if any worker thought of his trousers or her sari before sitting in the grime of the Dharavi lane, none said a word and none hesitated.

Bannerjee swallowed audibly. One of the neighbors leaning out of a window snickered. Bannerjee glared up at the windows. "Houses in slums like this burn down all the time," he said, but his voice quavered. The neighbor who'd snickered -- a young shirtless man with burns up and and down his bare chest from some old accident -- closed his shutters. A moment later, he was on the street. He walked up to Bannerjee, looked him in the eye, and then, deliberately, folded his legs and sat down before him. Bannerjee raised his leg as if to kick and the crowd growled, a low, savage sound that made the hair on the back of Mala's neck stand up, even as she made it herself. It sounded as though all of Dharavi was an angry dog, straining at its leash, threatening to lunge.

More neighbors drifted into the street -- old and young, men and women. They'd known Mrs Dibyendu for years. They'd seen her driven from her home and business. They were making the same noise. They sat too.

Mr Bannerjee looked at Mala and opened his mouth as if to say something, then stopped. She stared at him with utter calm, and then smiled broadly. "Boo," she said, softly, and he took a step back.

His own men laughed at this and he went purple in the dim light of the street. Mala bit her tongue to keep from laughing. He looked so comical!

He turned with great dignity to look at his men, who were so tense they practically vibrated. Mala watched in stupefied awe as he grabbed one at random and slapped him, hard, across the face, a sound that rang through the narrow laneway. It was the single dumbest act of leadership she'd ever seen, so perfectly stupid you could have put it in a jar and displayed it for people to come at marvel at.

The man regarded Bannerjee for a moment, his eyes furious, his fists bunched. He was shorter than Bannerjee, but he was carrying a length of wood and the muscles in his bare forearms jerked and bunched like a basketful of snakes. Deliberately, the man spat a glob of evil, pink, betel-stained saliva into Bannerjee's face, turned on his heel and walked away, delicately picking his way through the sitting Webblies and workers and neighbors. After a moment, the rest of Bannerjee's mob followed.

Bannerjee stood alone. The saliva slid down his face. Mala thought If he takes out a gun and starts blazing away, it wouldn't surprise me in the least. He was totally beaten, humiliated before children and the poor of Dharavi, and there were so many cameraphone flashes dancing in the night it was like a disco in a movie.

But perhaps Bannerjee didn't have a gun, or perhaps he had more self-control than Mala believed. In any case, he, too, turned on his heel and walked away. At the end of the alley, he turned back and said, in a voice that could be heard above the buzz of conversation that sprang up in his wake, "I know where your parents live, Mala," and then he walked away altogether into the night.

The crowd roared with triumph as he disappeared. Ashok helped her stand, his hand lingering in hers for longer than was strictly necessary. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for hugging Yasmin, who was crying, happy tears like the ones they'd shared so many times before. Yasmin was as thin as a piece of paper but her arms were strong, and oh, it did feel good to be held for a moment, instead of holding everyone else up.

She let go at last and turned to Ashok. "They came," she said.

Instead of answering, he led her to two tiny old ladies, and a man with a skullcap and a beard. "Mr Phadkar, Mrs Rukmini and Mrs Muthappa," he said. "This is Mala. They call her General Robotwallah. Her workers have been defending the strike. They are unbeatable, so long as they have a place to work."

Mr Phadkar looked fierce. "You will always have a place to work, General," he said, in a voice that was pitched to carry to the workers who gathered around them, excitedly passing whispered accounts of the historic meeting back through their ranks.

The old ladies rolled their eyes at one another, which made Mala smile. They each took one of her hands in their calloused, dry old hands and squeezed. "You were very brave," one said. "Please, introduce us to your comrades."

They chatted all night, and the women's papadam collective brought them food, and there was chai, and as there were far too many people to fit in the little cafe, the party occupied the whole of the laneway and then out into the street. Mala and her fighters fought on through the night in shifts, stepping out on their breaks to mingle, making friends, bringing them into the cafe to explain what they did and how they did it.

And there were reporters asking questions, and the gupshup flew up and down the streets and lanes of Dharavi, picking up steam as the roosters began to call and the first of the early risers walked to the toilets and the taps and had their ears bent. The bravery of the children, the valor of the workers, the evil of the sinister Bannerjee in his suit and the thugs he'd brought with him -- it was a story straight off the movie screen, and every new ear it entered was attached to a mouth that was anxious to spread it.

Mala and Yasmin's parents came to see them the next morning, as they sat groggy after a night like no other night, on the porch of Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. The parents didn't know what to make of their strange daughters, but they were visibly proud of them, even Yasmin's father, which clearly surprised Yasmin, who'd looked like she expected a beating.

As their mothers gathered them into their bosoms, Mala looked at Yasmin, and saw the haunted look in Yasmin's eye and knew, just knew that she was thinking of the little boy who'd died.

How did she know? Because Mala herself had never stopped thinking of him, and thinking of how she'd taken the actions that led to his death. And because Mala herself knew that no amount of sitting down peacefully and braving thugs with her moral force instead of her army would ever wipe the stain of that boy's death off her karma.

And then Mamaji kissed Mala's forehead and murmured many things in her ear, and her little brother emerged from behind her skirts and demanded to be shown how it all worked and stared at her with so much admiration that she thought he'd burst and for a moment, it was all golden.

Ashok looked on from his little office, meeting with the union leaders, talking to Big Sister Nor. Something big was brewing with him, she knew, something even bigger than this miracle that he'd pulled off. She fobbed her brother off on a group of boys who were eager to teach him some of the basics and bask in the pure hero-worship radiating off of him, then slipped back into Ashok's room and perched at his side on a stool, moving a pile of papers away first.

"That was incredible," she said. "Absolutely incredible." She said it quietly, with conviction. "You're our saviour."

He snorted through his nose, then scrubbed at his eyes with his fists. "Mala, my general, you do a hundred incredible things every day. The only reason all those people came out is because I could show them what you'd done, explain how you had organized these children, these slum-rats, into a disciplined force that was committed to justice."

She squirmed on her seat. "I'm just bloodthirsty," she said. "I'm just one of those people who fights all the time." Thinking again of the boy, the dead boy. His blood was still under Ashok's fingernails.

He turned and, just for an instant, touched her arm. The gesture was gentle, tender. No one had ever touched her quite like that. It broke something in her, some flood-dam that had safely contained all the pain and fear and shame, and she had to turn and run blindly out into the lane and around a corner to weep and weep biting her lip to keep from screaming out her grief. Though she heard some of the others looking for her, she kept silent and did not let them find her. Then she realized she was hiding in the same place in which she'd hidden from Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew, and that broke another dam and it was quite some time before she could get herself under control and head back into the laneway again.

She didn't get very far. Out front of dozens of businesses, there were small groups of people boisterously shouting rhymed chants about working conditions and pay. Crowds gathered to talk to each other, and there were arguments, laughter, a fistfight. She stood in the middle of the road and thought, How can this be?

And at that moment, she realized that she was not alone. All over Dharavi, all over the world, there were people like her who wanted more, demanded more, with a yearning that was always just there, beneath the skin, and it only took the lightest scratch to let it out.

She didn't go back to Mrs