How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside, and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. The miserable shelters were patched together from rags, scraps of plastic and paper, reed mats, and bamboo sticks. They slumped together, attached one to another, and with narrow lanes winding between them. (1.1.21)
Lin's first visions of India are of extreme poverty: miles and miles of the poorest people living together in makeshift homes and communities. It's not an inviting welcome, to say the least, but remember that Lin is a fugitive. The same precariousness that the impoverished experience will allow him to blend in unnoticed.
Quote #2
It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. (1.1.21)
If there's anything we humans are good at, it's compartmentalizing. That's what makes it possible for the richest and poorest to butt right up against each other without (the rich) even noticing. The "modern airport" is secure, even pre-9/11, because it's too expensive and too well-guarded to let many poor people in for travel. That's why it "seems impossible" that there could be such poverty so nearby.
Quote #3
But they were alive, Prabaker said, those boys and girls. They were the lucky ones. For every child who passed through the people-market there were a hundred others, or more, who'd starved in unutterable agonies, and were dead. (1.3.144)
It's hard to say whether it's better to survive a slave market, but Lin believes that the survivors are "lucky." The point is, though, that the children who go through it—bought, sold, or dead—are there because they and their families didn't have the resources to save them.