“Why not?” The pitch of my voice rises. “Would you rather I go to jail for some stupid theft I didn’t do?”

  “Didn’t you escape Dongri for what you did to the paanwala?”

  “So what? Arora gets to burn down Behrampada and nobody can say anything? Hundreds of people lost their homes. People died. Tazim died.”

  “Life isn’t fair, Rakhi. Sometimes we get out of sticky situations without a scrape, and sometimes we have to pay for things we didn’t do.”

  “When have you ever asked a client what they’ve done in their past before you take their case? You’re happy to represent Tulsi and she doesn’t even want your help!”

  Gauri Ma’am rubs her hands over her cropped hair. “Listen, Rakhi—”

  I stand up. “How can you act like some big important lawyer for people without a voice, when you refuse to help your own people when they need you? How can—”

  “The Arora Group has too much money to be held accountable for things like this,” she blurts out, her nostrils flaring.

  “Not if they have someone like you fighting them.”

  “If I take Arora on, I break my relationship with Rubina Mansoor.”

  “Rubina Mansoor? Two months ago you didn’t even know her.”

  “Justice For All is hanging on by a thread. She has brought in so much money, raised our profile tenfold. Without private donors we are done. Everyone will be fired. Bhavana, Sudeepthi, even I won’t have a job. And we won’t be able to provide legal services to thousands of people. Should I be sacrificing everyone’s wellbeing for you?”

  I smack the wooden table with both palms. “Yes! I have been loyal to you. I have served you, done everything you told me to. You treated me like your child, and I had to obey you like you were my mother. Even when I didn’t agree with it. You owe me this.”

  Gauri Ma’am juts her chin out. “Rakhi, I’m sorry if you thought our relationship was anything more than it was. I was your boss, not your parent. And I compensated you, more than fairly, for your work. I’m afraid I don’t owe you any more than that.”

  The words flow easily, like water from a tap. “You are worse than Jeetendra Arora and the selfish people who step all over other people for their own gain. You are worse because you pretend to care.”

  I glare at her, daring her to reply.

  Instead, she folds her hands in prayer. “Just go, please.” Her voice is soft. “For your own good, leave the city. You won’t find another office job, or get into college, or do whatever it is you’ve been trying to do, as long as you’re wanted by the police.”

  So that’s it. After all this, she’s throwing me out. It feels like my skin has been torn off. “Where am I supposed to go?”

  Ma’am reaches for her purse and throws a thick wad of hundred-rupee notes on the table. “Get on a train, go somewhere far from here. I am sorry I could not do more for you.”

  I reach for the cash quickly, almost as if she might change her mind in the next minute and take it away. “And what am I supposed to do, Gauri Ma’am?”

  Her red-rimmed eyes shine. “You can do whatever you want.” She stands up, walks to the door, and holds it open for me. “Goodbye, Rakhi.”

  * * *

  —

  I stare out ahead of me at Chowpatty Beach. The tide is low and the early morning waves are quiet, measured, far away.

  After I left Gauri Ma’am’s flat, I started walking. Down footpaths, under flyovers, through gullies, until I arrived here.

  Desperate to sit down, I stumble toward the water, away from the city, its tall buildings, its lights, its pulsing energy. I kick off my sandals, the coarse wet sand soothing the bottoms of my hot, achy feet, and sink down to the glassy stretch of beach where the waves would usually be.

  After everything I’ve done for Gauri Ma’am, how could she say I was only her employee? How could she have told me to disappear like that, with an untouched bank bundle and a weak apology? Even Bhavana said it—she treated me like her own daughter. But of course Ma’am already has a daughter. How foolish I was to believe I was anything more than an officewali to her.

  I reach into my bag to count the cash she gave me, the bills rippling in the gentle sea breeze. Ten thousand rupees. It’s a lot, but it’s also nothing. Even with the money Alex gave me, is it enough to start over?

  Just then, my phone buzzes with an SMS. It’s Alex.

  hey. told my aunt and uncle what u said about arora and they were pissed. they said they know u, that some shit went down with u and them? u never told me. i cant afford to get mixed up in ur drama. flying home tonite. good luck w everything. peace out. -alex

  My first instinct is to dial his number but another SMS comes through from him.

  disconnecting this number.

  To think this firanghi, who is escaping on the first plane out of India when I need him most, told me he was going to give me what I needed to do better, be better. To think I ever believed him.

  On Saturday, I was sleeping in a big, soft bed in Pali Hill. I had forty thousand rupees coming my way. I was going to apply to college, go work in a nice hotel, make good money. I had finally found Babloo, after so many years. But instead of being the best friend I remembered, he revealed himself to be nothing like the Babloo I thought I knew. And now I have no home, no job, nobody. Nowhere to go. Nothing to be.

  Then I close my eyes and I see Tazim’s face, smiling and kind. Nobody seems to care that she’s gone. Gauri Ma’am, Babloo, Alex, they barely registered her death. And yet she was the closest thing I had to family. Was her life so meaningless? What does that say about mine?

  That’s when the full weight of the past two days slams into my chest so hard I break into loud, uncontrollable sobs. Pounding the sand, I scream into the wind. My hair whips about my face, wet with tears, mucus, spit, and sea spray.

  The Monday morning beach walkers keep a safe distance from me. Even the seagulls avoid me, crying as they dive at bits of snack paper littering the beach. I remain sitting there until my tears run out. By then the tide starts to come in, and I have half a mind to let it engulf me. To throw Gauri Ma’am’s bhenchodh money into the breeze and let the wind carry it across Chowpatty Beach.

  A strong, frothy wave rolls up the shore, splashing my lower half. As it retreats, smoothing the sand, it deposits a small Ganesh murti beside me. The sea has scrubbed the pink from his cheeks, claimed a leg and an arm. For having floated in the Arabian Sea for the past three weeks, though, he doesn’t look so bad. I peer closer at the string of waterlogged yellow and orange marigolds, now decaying, tangled around his trunk. But lying on his back in the sand, Ganesh looks up at the sky, his right hand upturned in blessing. I untangle the slimy marigolds so they lie flat on his potbelly, then prop him up so he is sitting up on the shore, facing the city.

  The sea brims at my feet and I edge back.

  When life gets hard, remember what I told you, Rakhi Tilak said to me once, all those years ago, on this same stretch of sand.

  The mid-morning sun is gentle, floating up into the milky purple sky. The day is starting for everyone else, but mine has yet to end.

  Rising to my feet, I shake wet sand from the bottom of my salwar kameez and start to head back toward the city.

  EPILOGUE

  With his elbows pointing outward, a sandy-haired American named Kenny holds up his iPhone, struggling to fit all of VT Station into the frame. He leans so far back that his chin disappears into the glistening folds of his strained neck.

  “How do you fit the whole darn building…” he mutters to himself.

  “Come,” I say, tapping the damp fabric of his T-shirt, “I’ll show you where to click the best photo.” Leading him across the street, I tilt his phone camera back, nudge it slightly to the left. “Now try.”

  As Kenny attempts his shot again, motorbikes swerve past him, just another road obstruction. With one eye on his phone screen and the other eye on the early evening traffic, I hold my arm out to block cars from getting too close to him.

  Kenny snaps his shots of VT, then proudly shows them to me and his wife, Lorna. “Will you look at that,” he exclaims.

  “The sky is all peach-coloured, and with the lights on the building, and the cars whizzing by, it’s just…” Lorna trails off, dazzled.

  VT is the second stop on my Bombay street life tour. I’ve been doing them for almost three years now, all on my own. As I lead the tour group through the halls, two French women named Claire and Delphine argue about whether the station is built in the Indo-Gothic or Indo-Saracenic style, then ask me to settle their dispute. I’ve done enough tours with firanghis all into this architecture funda to know that whatever Indo-Gothic and Indo-Saracenic are, they’re the same thing, but instead I wave my hand in the air to cut the French ladies off. “All these small-small things you can read about in your guide books. With me, you’re going to learn what living on the street was like. We didn’t care what style a building was, just that we could rest or play in it.”

  I show the firanghis which platform I arrived at when I was seven, which pillar I leaned on. I tell them about how me and the other kids I ran with watched films being shot here at all hours of the night. There’s a more recent Hollywood film about Bombay street kids they are all very excited about. “Does that sort of thing really happen in India?” Lorna asks me, wide-eyed. “You know, the crime and all that?”

  I haven’t seen the film, but when I think back to how we pranked Derekbhaiyya, I doubt if any firanghi could know enough to tell an accurate story about Bombay street kids. “Real life is worse than movies,” I say casually, as Lorna hangs on my words. “That is why you have come on this tour, na? To hear real-life stories.” She nods, happily, as we continue through VT. The only real-life stories I tell my tour groups are my own, never the ones about the other kids. Those are not mine to tell.

  As we retrace the steps Babloo and I took as the police chased us, through a maze of laneways all the way to Mint Road, I give the firanghis a beat-by-beat demonstration of my first moments in Bombay.

  “The boy who befriended you at the station, what happened to him?” Kenny asks.

  “Don’t know,” I reply. “Haven’t seen him in years.” I never saw Babloo again after I ran from his flat in Ghatkopar. He’s probably up to the same goonda shit, extracting hafta from street vendors. Or maybe he’s gone off to start his own gang, like he said he would. I don’t know. Either way, he’s not a part of my life anymore. Hardly anybody from that time is.

  After I show my tour group the tiny movie theatre where we spent our earnings, then the dabba where we’d sometimes wipe tables, I take them to the Gateway of India, with its crowds of tourists posing for pictures in the bright sun, and explain how we’d startle a flock of pigeons to create a distraction so we could pick pockets.

  “Seriously?” Claire says, touching her waist pouch, slung lazily around her hips.

  “That’s why I am telling to you, keep your money hidden. Put that thing across your chest.”

  “Listen to Bansari,” Delphine says, flipping her hair. “She knows what she’s talking about.”

  Firanghis always pronounce it Bahn-SAHR-ee, no matter which cold, strange country they come from. I don’t mind, though. It’s my name. I haven’t gone by “Rakhi” since that morning at Chowpatty Beach after I left Gauri Ma’am’s. After I shook the sand from my salwar kameez, I thought about what that bhenchodh Alex asked me the night I went to Pali Hill. What kind of life do you want? I wanted a new one. The chance to start over, to shed my skin. But what was underneath? As I stepped off the sand and into the city, the answer was clear: I wanted the life that was paused the second I arrived in this city. To be the person I wasn’t allowed to grow into. Who was Rakhi, anyway, but a name given to me by someone who betrayed me, over and over again? If not for Babloo, I would never have stopped being Bansari.

  At the end of today’s tour, I lead my group back to where we started, and take them to a bhuttawala roasting corn on an open flame.

  “Remember what I taught you about street food,” I announce, as the firanghis order corn rubbed with fresh-cut pieces of lime dipped in chili powder and salt. “If it’s fried or roasted, it’s good. No chutney, no yogurt! And no fresh fruit or vegetables unless…?”

  “Unless you wash and peel it yourself,” Kenny responds triumphantly, as Lorna wipes kernels of corn off his chin.

  “I’ve been craving vegetables ever since we got to India,” Delphine says, holding two cobs of corn as Claire pays the bhuttawala. “How do you know all the best spots?”

  I give her a coy smirk. If all those years of listening to foreign interns complaining at Justice For All prepared me for anything, it’s being able to anticipate what firanghis want. And after leading my tours for the past few years, I’ve figured out that firanghis will tip well if you do three key things: predict their needs, meet those needs, and reassure them that those needs are completely reasonable. So when I meet my tour groups outside Rhythm House, I have a cooler of ice-cold bottles of Bisleri ready for them, and little disposable wet wipes they can use to refresh themselves no matter the weather. They like things they can throw away, and they always assume something is unsanitary, even if it’s not. Most will want to buy coffee because they’re still jetlagged (but not the milky South Indian kind), and a clean bathroom even though they use paper, not water, to clean their behinds, so I point them to that café with white walls that Saskia and Merel used to disappear to.

  As I bid the tourists farewell, reminding some of them of how to get to Leopold Café, and navigating the rest back to their hotels, the tips start to flow in. A few behave as though they’re handing me drugs, awkwardly slipping some bills into my hand and nodding solemnly. I return their gaze, dipping my head in a show of quiet gratitude. Others, like Kenny and Lorna, clasp my hands in theirs.

  “We just can’t believe the life you’ve had,” Lorna says, her eyes gleaming. “What a success story. You should be so proud of yourself.”

  I smile as she lets go, leaving a five-hundred-rupee note in my hands. If only you knew, Lorna.

  “Thank you again, Bansari,” Kenny calls out as they slide into a taxi. “God bless!”

  I wave, watching their taxi zoom up M.G. Road.

  On my way home, I make my daily stop at the bhurjiwala near VT Station, and tell him to prepare the usual fried egg pav as I count the kids milling about nearby.

  “Bansarididi’s here,” one of the boys yells to his friends, his voice hoarse. “Come, come!”

  “Arre, Sanjay,” I say, as his friends dash to the bhurjiwala’s stall. “Is that cough gone yet? Or do you need to see a doctor?”

  I fish in my bag for a throat lozenge, and hand it to Sanjay, who is too busy eyeing the bhurjiwala cracking eggs over the hot tawa to worry about the rattle in his throat. I can tell he hasn’t eaten all day.

  There’s a core gang of ten kids who come every day, and a group of stragglers who show up if they’re in the right place at the right time. Sanjay is the leader—loud, clever, and quick on his feet. He reminds me of the old Babloo. When I started the tours, I considered collecting donations for an NGO working with street kids, but the thought of even having to set foot in an NGO office—of getting caught up in another NGO mess—made my skin crawl. So now I take a cut of my earnings and feed the kids near VT myself. The bhurjiwala charges me half-price, since it’s a daily thing, and because the pav is a bit stale by the end of the day. Feeding the kids isn’t much, but I know what hunger feels like, and at least it gives them one guaranteed meal a day.

  The bhurjiwala hands me my own fried egg pav wrapped in newspaper. As I unwrap it, I catch a glimpse of a small advert featuring a woman with thick, glossy hair smiling up at me like she knows something I don’t. Massage Every Day and Keep Scissors Away! I smooth the paper out and nearly choke on my fried egg pav. It’s Rubina Mansoor, hawking something called “Cold-Pressed Extra Virgin Coconut Oil for Hair and Scalp.” Only big actresses with lush, silky manes get to be the face of hair oil products. I suppose this is a step up from shouting about housing as a human right with Justice For All. I wonder how long she lasted there.

  I learned Justice For All shifted offices two years back when I was planning my tour route and found myself in front of the Maitreya Building. As I darted past, careful not to linger, I noticed new curtains in the second-floor window—Ma’am would never have spent money on those. The next time I was on a computer, I searched Justice For All’s address and saw they moved to Masjid Bunder, probably to save money on rent.

  One time I saw Gauri Ma’am as I was showing my tour group the quiet spots in Ballard Estate, where the other kids and I used to sleep after the office workers emptied out. Just as a trio of English ladies was marvelling at how much the “tree-lined boulevards” and “Renaissance-style architecture” of Ballard Estate had an “elegant London feel,” I caught sight of Ma’am hustling down the wide footpath, past the war memorial, digging through her bag. I froze, ignoring the sounds of my chattering firanghis, and for a moment she stopped rifling through her things and stared straight at me. Quickly, she shifted her gaze to something farther in the distance, and barrelled ahead. I’ve gone over that encounter in my mind so many times. Sometimes I wonder if the lines in her forehead softened when she saw me, or if I imagined it.

  After I finish my fried egg pav, I crumple the newspaper with Rubina Mansoor’s coconut oil ad tight in my fist and toss it on the footpath. The sky has now gone from orange-pink to purple-grey, and I have to get to the bakery before it closes. I hurry back to VT and edge my way onto a Central Line train to Mulund, where I live now. Mulund is on the northeast edge of the city, next to Thane district. And most importantly, I don’t have to pass Bandra Station, or Behrampada, to get there.