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Wini leaves them both to marry a wealthier man, and Ben is left responsible for a child who is not his, on a labourer's wage, in the River Road slums. The novel follows him as he improvises care for Baby while drinking, lodging with his co-worker Ocholla, and drifting between the building site and the shebeens.
The labourers who raise a gleaming high-rise are paid in wages too small to let them enter, rent in, or benefit from the building. Seeing construction this way turns 'development' from a shared national project into a transfer of labour from the poor into assets owned by an elite. Each storey added marks both progress and the builders' growing irrelevance, since finishing the job means losing it.
When employment is casual, wages barely cover the week, and dismissal can come at any time, workers rationally spend on immediate relief such as drink, sex, and bhang rather than on a future they cannot secure. What looks like moral weakness in the River Road drinkers is a response to structural insecurity. Planning presupposes stability that the labour system denies them.
In a city where migrants are cut off from village family networks, people assemble provisional households from whoever is at hand. Ben, Baby, and Ocholla form a family through shared rooms, shared wages, and shared childcare rather than blood or marriage. These ties are fragile because they depend on continued proximity and income, yet they are the main safety net the city's poor have.