Opening Night.(Slumdog Millionaire)

Gautam Nagar is one of thirty-odd slums, comprising ninety thousand families, on land owned by the Airports Authority of India, in Mumbai. It is ten minutes by foot to the international terminal and is ringed by five of the city's smartest hotels. The hotels charge two hundred to a thousand dollars a night and are enclosed by high walls and barbed-wire fences, so their interactions with Gautam Nagar are primarily airborne. Music from weddings and poolside parties drifts over. Ash from cow-dung and wood fires drifts back. And every evening at precisely six-thirty a Hyatt sign lights up red and white, its glow not quite reaching the dirty screens of two video-game consoles in a tin-roof shed.

Anna, an elderly Tamil resident of Gautam Nagar who wears his loincloths very short, opened the game parlor last year. He quickly regretted the endeavor. Profits have slipped owing to the global recession, and, like businessmen the world over, he is now repositioning: converting the front of the game room into a stall for hot fried snacks. Food hygiene is more difficult at Anna's than it is at the Hyatt, since the air of Gautam Nagar is clotted with grit from a nearby concrete plant. So he covers his skillet with a sign, retrieved from a trash pile, that reads "Hotel InterContinental the Grand."

The uncertain future of the games in this evolving establishment concerns Sunil, a thirteen-year-old boy who works at the airport. He supports their survival as reliably as he is able: one rupee nightly in exchange for thirty minutes of Metal Slug 3. At dusk on January 22nd, as a parade of Mumbai women visited the hotel spas to get manicured, exfoliated, and blown out for that night's Indian premiere of "Slumdog Millionaire," Sunil was deriving a poor return on his one-rupee entertainment outlay. He was having his ass handed to him by a being even worse than the zombies and giant mutant crabs on his screen: a twelve-year-old gloater. "You're dead now," Sunil's rival cried, banging the joystick, making the bombed-out virtual city shake. "Everyone, come and see!" Sunil attempted to rally his Metal Slug man, firing a rocket-propelled grenade at an abandoned tank that provided cover for his enemy, as boys pressed in to watch him fail.

He didn't take the crowd's interest personally. Boys always crammed into Anna's. One reason was Anna himself: bald on top with snarls of silver hair on the rest of his body, something the children found consistently funny. More compelling, though, were the amenities: the games, two light bulbs, and a short metal bench. Sunil's home, in one of the many sumpy lanes behind the shop, lacked lights, water, and a place to sit, and every evening was enveloped in a stink so much worse than all the usual stinks at Gautam Nagar that people doubled over when they inhaled it. The cause was a truckload of rotting hotel food, dumped daily outside his home, which sustained three hundred feral pigs. He would have paid more than one rupee to breathe elsewhere.

Two older boys commandeered the second machine--sophisticates, with rusty bullet casings shoved into holes in their earlobes. This fashion caused infections, but was believed to be the American style.

"To kill me, you will have to do something bigger than this!"

"Take your rocket inside!"