Throw Away Nothing

Of all the neighborhoods in Mumbai that Yusuf Karim considered his own, the stretch of Altamount Road rising before him was his favorite—a steep curve that left Peddar Road and climbed past discreet walls and wrought-iron gates and the shade of ancient neems before plunging down into Kemps Corner. It was hard to pedal up, true, even for his teenaged legs, when the jute sacks that hung from either side of his bicycle bulged already with old newspapers, magazines, plastic jugs, beer bottles, and assorted other raddi he had collected from his regulars. But the watchman at Moti Mahal, the fanciest of the fancy buildings on Altamount, had telephoned him that morning, saying, come Yusuf, new pigeon on the tenth floor, and Yusuf had decided to land up before lunchtime. He didn’t pay the watchman fifty rupees every month for nothing.

He parked his bicycle near the mailboxes and carried with him a skein of rope wound around his palm, an empty sack, and his weighing scale. He paused before the door of flat 10b and frowned at the name in tasteful gilt embedded next to the frame. For not the first time, he wished he could read, wished he understood what his customers saw in the kilos and kilos of newspapers they bought and threw away each month, or would throw away if not for him. The doorbell made a tinkling sound.

“Yes?” Instead of the usual servant girl who answered doors in a building such as this, a vision stood before him. A woman with skin so pale her bones glowed from beneath, her hair catching the sun behind her like a crown of spun gold. A foreigner, a gori, and some kind of beauty queen, even though she was covered from top to bottom in a cotton kaftan, and he could sense her shape, the slight swell of her belly under the cloth. He had never been the type to drool over white women, not even those in the best dirty magazines, and this one a mother-to-be, too. Four months gone, he could tell, from watching his sister carry his nephew seven years back, and his niece, only last year. For shame, Yusuf, he told himself, for shame and a thousand damnations.

“Raddi wala, me,” he said, and snatched his gaze away from her face and toward the room behind her, marble floor big as a field with only one sofa, three chairs without a table, and a tv sitting on the ground, a row of glass windows and the glitter of the sea beyond. “Newspaper, bottle, can, battery, after you use, I pick up. Once a month, Sunday morning, like today.” At least he spoke her lingo all right; every English movie that ran at Regal and Metro and Sterling for the past five years had had a seat in the front row with Yusuf’s name on it, first day first show. Not for him the tapori Hindi films that his buddies and their low-class girlfriends so loved. Look who thinks he’s a gentil-man, they’d jeer. But see, it was coming in useful.

“Oh, for recycling!” said the woman. “Perfect.” Her upper lip gleamed with sweat, even though it was December and cool outside, and a draft from some hidden air conditioner gusted onto the landing. “I’ve been harassing the doorman about color-coded trash bags, and he didn’t seem to understand and neither did the woman at the store down the road. But of course it doesn’t work that way, does it, because you’re here!” She laughed, and Yusuf laughed too, although she made no sense, only her laughter rang like bells on a silver anklet. “I’m Katherine Willows, by the way.” She held her hand out toward Yusuf. “My husband and I just moved here from San Francisco.”

“Yusuf Karim Bismillah,” said Yusuf, and took her hand as he’d seen many a hero do, but he couldn’t shake it, not that delicate wisp of a thing, not when he also felt for the first time the rope...