​Beating the odds of their low social position, the Husains renovate their house using the money Zehrunisa’s oldest son Abdul has amassed through garbage collection. This is a protective measure as well as a simple improvement of the Husain home. The Indian government plans to raze the Annawadi slum so that they can expand tourist hotels and families possessing established homes are more likely to be recognized with new homes of equal worth when Annawadi families are relocated. However, the apparent audacity of the Husains in showing their wealth through their house infuriates their neighbor, Fatima. Fatima’s house shares a brick wall with the Husain house, so when the wall begins to fall as a result of the Husains’ renovations, Fatima complains to the corrupt policemen. When they ignore her plight, Fatima resorts to drastic measures.

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Igniting herself through the combustion of kerosene to draw attention to the Husains’ wealth, Fatima blames her neighbors for her poor living conditions. Wishing to extract money from the wealthy Husains, numerous corrupt Annawadi officials encourage Zehrunisa to bribe them. Although Zehrunisa was always family-oriented, the legal crisis of Fatima’s burning forces her to examine her priorities. She proves her confidence in her former priorities when she chooses to bribe an official to release false school records stating that Abdul is underage so that he will be taken to the less-harsh Dongri Juvenile Detention Denter, rather than the infamous Arthur Road Jail for adult criminals. Zehrunisa has to work especially hard to support her family because her husband has contracted tuberculosis (also known as TB), a disease causing a bloody cough, near-constant fever, and often tissue damage in the lungs.

At the beginning of Boo’s account, Zehrunisa manipulates many of her friends and acquaintances to improve her family’s condition. As the official haggler of her family, Zehrunisa showers abuse on trash collectors in an attempt to lower their monetary demands for trash they have collected (xiii). However, she also verbally abuses her son Abdul because she observes that he obtains more profit when she criticizes him (4). Although this seems like mistreatment of Abdul, especially as he is the primary income-bringer for the family, Zehrunisa protects her collective family by ensuring that any profit from Abdul’s work benefits everyone; without the profit made as a result of Zehrunisa’s abuse, it is possible that her children will starve.

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Making sacrifices of her children to benefit her family as a whole, Zehrunisa preserves her collective family’s well-being. When Karam is taken away to the police station, Boo reports that Zehrunisa’s “own fear, upon waking, was that the officers would beat her husband as punishment for Abdul’s escape. It was the eldest son’s duty to protect a sick father from that” (xxii). Thinking of her husband’s safety immediately after waking, Zehrunisa sacrifices Abdul’s safety in hopes of bringing the patriarch of the family back and thus preserving hope for her family’s unity. Emphasizing loyalty to one’s family, Zehrunisa sends Abdul to the police office even though she knows he has been accused of beating Fatima.

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Zehrunisa also manipulates friends and officials by sensationalizing her emotions. Boo observes, “Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief ways of starting conversations” (xix). Despite the melodrama of Zehrunisa’s feelings, conflict shows that she truly cares about the welfare of her family. The narrator writes that when Zehrunisa’s husband, Karam Husain, is taken away, “her children’s sobbing intensified her own” (xix). Even when faced with a desperate situation, Zehrunisa’s feelings are linked to those of her children. The narrator writes, “She was tender and playful with her children, and her only great flaw, in the opinion of Abdul, her eldest son, was the language she used when haggling” (xv). However, even Zehrunisa’s use of foul language is meant to protect her family. When conservative-minded Abdul criticizes his mother for swearing at customers and asks her what her father would think of such behavior, Zehrunisa replies, “He would say the worst, but he was the one who sent me off to marry a sick man. Had I sat quietly in the house, the way my mother did, all these children would have starved” (xv). Tuberculosis not only affects the person who contracts it but also all of the people who live with them. In Zehrunisa’s case, it forces her to go to whatever lengths are necessary to financially support her family.

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Unfortunately, the social hierarchy in India favors men, so Zehrunisa’s arranged marriage also forced her to follow the rules of her husband. Boo reports, “The Wahhabi sect in which [Karam had] been raised opposed birth control, and of Zehrunisa’s ten births, nine children had survived. Zehrunisa consoled herself, each pregnancy, that she was producing a workforce for the future” (xv). With such an extraordinary rate of infant survival in a land riddled with tuberculosis, malaria, and dengue fever among other diseases, it is clear that Zehrunisa succeeded in protecting her children. However, her practicality in dealing with her abysmal surroundings necessitates putting the children to work at an early age so that the children who are too young to work might also survive.

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Zehrunisa is also loyal to her religion. Automatically placing Muslims in a lower caste than the Hindus, Annawadi binds Muslims together. Zehrunisa tells her children, “It’s easy to break a single bamboo stick, but when you bundle the sticks, you can’t even bend them. It’s the same with family and with the people of our faith. Despite the petty differences, Muslims have to join up in big sufferings, and for Eid” (77). Despite the trouble Fatima’s death caused the Husains, Zehrunisa attends Fatima’s burial and performs the ritual of washing the corpse, finishing by covering Fatima with the Husains’ best quilt. However, when Zehrunisa eventually breaks down at the funeral and cries, Boo observes, “She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing- the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors” (115). When corruption becomes overwhelming, Zehrunisa’s practicality makes her mourn for something so trivial as a quilt because it is all she can control, and her loyalty forced her to give up her family’s most valuable possession to protect the religious dignity of a woman who killed herself to shame her neighbors. Zehrunisa’s faith in her family and religion combined with her practicality in the face of turmoil cause her to perform whatever act is necessary to protect her family even if it is not the most desirable action.​