After the fire, I would pick up a newspaper every day, scanning the pages for news of what happened to Behrampada. I couldn’t bring myself to go back and see what was left of it being bulldozed for some bhenchodh Arora luxury tower. After six months, I finally saw a tiny article—six lines only—buried in the paper saying that fire officials had closed their investigation of the 2011 Behrampada fire without confirming the cause, although residents continued to claim foul play. I read and reread that part again. Residents continue to claim foul play. Not “former residents” or “people who lived there.” Just “residents.” Armed with the hope that the people hadn’t been pushed out, that the place hadn’t been razed, I rushed to the Bandra Station footbridge and felt my heart soar when I caught a glimpse of where I used to live. Behrampada was still there. Arora hadn’t burned down enough of it to clear and purchase the land, and the people of Behrampada had simply rebuilt over what he had destroyed.

  One big change had come, though: the Marquis billboard was gone and in its place was a sparkling blue-glass building, fenced in by tall walls and even taller palm trees. I gazed out at the Marquis Hotel, casting a long shadow in the morning sun. What was life like for the young people employed inside that curved glass building? In spite of being armed with English and a degree, were they still having to say yes sir, or no madam, or please sir, let me fix it? Were they throwing heaps of food into the trash while just a few metres away were families who would be happy to eat the fruits that went untouched at the breakfast buffet? I shuddered, took one last look at Behrampada, and got back on the train. Going to college so I could work in a luxury hotel had been a bakvaas dream that was never really mine. Just a fantasy cooked up by someone I was foolish to trust.

  But I know better now.

  The train finally reaches Mulund Station, and I shuffle onto the platform with everyone else. The bakery outside the station is thankfully still open when I get there. “One kilo coconut biscuits. And one pineapple birthday cake,” I say to the bakery uncle behind the counter.

  “Any message?” he asks, removing a square slab frosted in pale pink icing from behind the foggy glass.

  “Happy Birthday, Ayub,” I say, smiling.

  “I don’t have enough icing left for that,” he says. “Just ‘Ayub’ is okay?”

  I nod. “But write ‘8’ on there.”

  The bakery uncle squeezes a nearly empty bag of green frosting, slowly decorating the cake in his thin, wobbling cursive.

  Three years ago, I left Chowpatty Beach and went straight back to Behrampada to find Ayub. When I did, I promised him I’d keep him safe with me. I didn’t want him to have to make the kind of choices I had to when I was growing up.

  We quickly found a place to live in a slum in Mulund East, far from everyone I knew. As I suspected, the police never came for me. I got Ayub into a school, and took some odd cleaning jobs here and there so I wouldn’t have to dip into the cash Alex and Gauri Ma’am gave me. Once I started making money on my tours, I decided it was time for us to live somewhere safer. Someplace not at risk of being destroyed by the government or some chutiya builder. Arora’s billboards kept multiplying around the city, like cockroaches in the rainy season. I tried to ignore them, but once they came to Mulund, I shifted Ayub and me into a three-storey chawl nearby, so he could be close to his school and his new friends. Our one-room kholi is on the second floor, and big enough to fit a small bed, a mat on the ground, and a tiny kitchen.

  The day we moved into the chawl, Ayub and I sat on the verandah, taking in our new surroundings. “Bansari Khala,” he started, fiddling with the neck of his T-shirt. “Is my abba dead, too?” I told him no, he wasn’t dead, he was just in a different country. Travelling for his job, I lied. Ayub smiled to himself, happy with that answer. But I lay awake that night, tossing and turning at the thought of having to lie to him about his father forever.

  The next morning, I looked up Vivek’s new office, and went there while Ayub was in school. It had been a year since I’d last seen Vivek, but he beamed when I showed up, and gave me a hug. I noticed he hadn’t sold his gold wedding band.

  When I told him everything that had happened with Hanifbhai, Vivek said it wouldn’t be easy, but he and his staff would do everything they could to bring him back from the Gulf. It’s taken longer than we expected to find him, but we know Hanifbhai is alive and in a safehouse in Riyadh.

  The biggest delay has been getting his passport replaced. When I went to Vivek’s office last week, he told me the passport would be ready in a matter of months, and then Hanifbhai would be home.

  “Ayub will be so happy,” I said, breaking into a grin. “You’ve done so much, Vivek Sir. And I’ve put aside the money for his plane ticket, so we can bring him home as soon as he’s allowed to travel.”

  “I’m proud of you, Bansari, for supporting Ayub and Hanif through this. You’ve really grown,” Vivek said.

  “Sir, I’m the same person you knew at Justice For All.”

  He chuckled, then asked me if I’d consider coming to work with him. “We could really use someone like you on the ground to work in our human trafficking unit.”

  My face warmed but I shook my head no. “I’m doing well, Vivek Sir. I’m making good money with the tours. And…I like it. I get to tell people my story. The way I want to tell it.”

  “I suppose I can’t compete with that,” he said.

  Balancing the cake box so the icing doesn’t smear, I walk through the courtyard of our chawl, greeting people I know. The kids Ayub plays cricket with. The ladies who run a crèche for small children. Like Behrampada, it’s noisy in the chawl. Doors are always kept open—a shut door means nobody’s home. Every evening, you can smell what vegetables people bought at the market, as well as who is using fresh methi leaves and who is using dried. After dinner, the old people gather on their shared gallery-like balconies to talk loudly about elections, TV serial plots, and everyone who lives in the chawl. For a long time they talked about me and Ayub, until I finally joined them and told them everything they wanted to know, from how Ayub and I were related to why I wasn’t married.

  I’m making enough money now to afford a small flat nearby, but I don’t want to leave the chawl just yet. The people here know me, they know Ayub. There are some chutiyas here, but then there are chutiyas everywhere, from the hutments shrinking in the shadow of five-star hotels to the marble-floored flats of the rich.

  “Bansari,” one of the women on the third floor calls down to me from beneath towels drying on her laundry line. “Ayub’s up here watching TV. Should I send him down?”

  “In ten minutes,” I say, pointing to the box of cake. “You come down, too, and bring your boys.” Ayub’s friends always pass out sweets on their birthdays.

  I set the cake down on the small table inside our kholi and flick on the lights. With a few minutes left before the room fills with Ayub’s friends, I slide my sandals off and sink down on the narrow cot for a brief moment of peace. I eye the walls—the butter yellow paint browns in some places and peels in others. My gaze shifts to the box of cake and the biscuits, and I can hear snatches of Tazim’s voice in my head, chattering about her son’s eighth birthday. If she were still here she’d be cooking up his favourite dishes for dinner, asking me to flip the rotis while she added a sizzling tadka to the dal. Sometimes it hits me that I am here, in this Mulund chawl, because she is gone.

  Staring down at my tired feet planted firmly on the cool concrete floor, I take a deep breath in, then let it out. That firanghi Lorna said I should be proud of myself. And she doesn’t even know the half of what I’ve been through. Even to me, my story sometimes seems hard to believe. How often my whole world has cracked open and crumbled. How many times I’ve had to pick up the pieces, shake off the dust, and start again.

  When Hanifbhai returns, I’ll let him and Ayub have this kholi and move into my own. I have the money for it, though I know better than to believe the money will always be there. Anything can happen.

  Maybe I’ll get sick of looking at sweaty, squinting firanghi faces all day, or maybe they’ll stop wanting to go on street life tours and I’ll have to pivot to something else. Maybe I’ll call up Vivek and help him rescue all the Hanifbhai types who were foolish enough to put their trust in those who promised them better lives. Whatever happens, one thing I know is for sure: I will do whatever I want.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 2009, after my first year of law school, I spent a summer in Mumbai, working at a human rights law organization. In June of that year, a major fire tore through a slum named Behrampada.

  According to reports, almost three hundred huts were destroyed in the fire. Three people died, twenty-nine people were injured, and two and a half thousand people were left homeless. Officials did not determine the cause of the fire. Residents and housing rights advocates alleged foul play, pointing the finger at builders. Behrampada’s proximity to Bandra Station and a major commercial hub in Bandra East made it a gold mine for private developers. Some media reports suggested that the blaze spread by accident, after a fire caused multiple adjacent cooking cylinders to explode. I even read a report suggesting the residents set the fire themselves, to stave off an impending demolition drive.

  After I returned to Canada, I searched for news of what had become of Behrampada. As they did in Such Big Dreams, its people rebuilt after 2009. But the slum caught fire again in 2011, gutting as many as seven hundred hutments.

  In the years that followed, I thought about Behrampada often. What really caused the 2009 and 2011 fires? Were they set deliberately? If the fires were accidents, what role did the municipal and state governments play in permitting the kinds of conditions that allowed for this level of destruction? What was it like for the people who had built homes and communities for themselves in a space that was constantly at risk of being expropriated for commercial gain? What myths contribute to our ideas about who is entitled to occupy land, and who isn’t? Halfway across the world from Mumbai, I couldn’t find answers to any of these questions. That’s when I started writing what would eventually become this novel.

  Though I have spent time in Mumbai and the novel is loosely inspired by the Behrampada fire of 2009, Such Big Dreams is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are creations of my imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For dramatic purposes, I have taken liberties with the timing of Ganesh Chaturthi, which usually takes place in late August or early September.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my extraordinary agent, Stephanie Sinclair, for believing in this book first, holding my hand through every new twist and turn, and hustling hard and smart.

  I hit the debut-author jackpot when my editor at McClelland & Stewart, Anita Chong, made an offer on this book. Thank you, Anita, for elevating this story to heights it wouldn’t have reached with anyone else. Your patience, generosity, and wisdom have been a gift.

  Thank you to my brilliant team at McClelland & Stewart: Jared Bland, Andrea Smitko, Kimberlee Hesas, Gemma Wain, Erin Kern, Emma Dolan, Kim Kandravy, Sean Tai, Sarah Howland, and Tonia Addison.

  To my editor at Ballantine, Chelcee Johns, thank you for your clever insight, and for helping me to finesse these final drafts.

  Thank you to Daniella Wexler and Jade Hui for earlier edits.

  I would never have imagined this story had I not been given the enormous opportunities I had at Windsor Law, the finest law school in the country. A big thank you to Chris Waters for your support.

  I am fortunate to have lived and worked in Mumbai in my early twenties. Thank you to the staff at Railway Children and the Human Rights Law Network for demonstrating what social justice in action looks like.

  I started writing what would become Such Big Dreams after signing up for a creative writing class at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. That decision set me on a course that changed my life. Much of this book was workshopped there. Thank you to Lee Gowan and the instructors who each played a critical part in imparting skill and knowledge. Thank you to my fellow students, whose early readership helped shape this story.

  I am grateful to Helen Walsh, Zalika Reid-Benta, and Diaspora Dialogues for the opportunity to take my manuscript to the next level under the mentorship of Shyam Selvadurai, which was a dream come true.

  It took me ten years to finish this book. To my dear friends, thank you for sticking it out with me. Especially Shikha Sharma, Morgan Koch, and Sarah Kromkamp, who have always treated my ambitions as though they were their own.

  My parents are the picture of determination, and I drew on their example to carve out space for myself in a world I knew very little of. Thank you to my father, Jagdish Patel, from whom I get my sense of humour and love of storytelling, and my mother, Reeta Patel, from whom I get my curiosity and hunger for reading.

  Thank you to my mother-in-law, Kajori Datta-Ray, an expert fact-checker, for your love and support.

  My sister, Priya Patel, can pinpoint the origin of every single inside joke in this story. Thank you for your constant reassurance, which kept me going on this journey. I wrote this book for us.

  And lastly, thank you to the incomparable Sumantra Datta-Ray, who can be counted on for absolutely everything, from triple-checking the price of gold in the 1980s, to having all the answers, to sustaining me in ways I never knew I needed.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR SUCH BIG DREAMS

  Throughout the novel, we encounter many changing names: Bombay to Mumbai; Victoria Terminus (VT Station) to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (although Rakhi says everyone still calls it VT Station); Mohammad to Babloo and back to Mohammad; Bansari to Rakhi and back to Bansari. What does this tell us about the importance, or lack of importance, in a name? Why does Rakhi return to using Bansari at the end of the story?

  Fire plays an important role in Rakhi’s life. Consider the dream in the opening sequence (this page), Rakhi’s failed attempt to burn down the girls’ school (this page), the fire involving Babloo and the paanwala (this page), and the fire in Behrampada (this page). How does each instance affect her life?

  Babloo and the other street kids proclaim that they “do what [they] want,” and have “complete freedom” (this page). Later in the story, Rakhi laments, “What if your options are so limited you don’t really have a choice at all?” (this page). How does Rakhi have and not have the freedom to make choices in her life? What are the factors that affect the choices available to her? How do these choices, or lack of choices, propel her story to the point where she can assert “whatever happens, one thing I know is for sure: I will do whatever I want” (this page)?

  “Up close, I could see how her eyelashes resembled spiders’ legs and the powder on her face cracked like the earth before monsoon season. Her mouth was painted with a thick pink ribbon of colour, and when her lips parted into a smile I swore she had a snaggletooth” (this page). What does Rakhi’s perception of Rakhi Tilak tell us about the cult of celebrity and illusions of celebrity perfection? How can we relate this back to Rubina Mansoor?

  “You’re not born only once, on the day your mother gives birth to you,…life forces you to give birth to yourself, over and over again” (this page). Consider how moments of rebirth happen for the various characters in the novel.

  Alex laments the challenges of being biracial, and of living a liminal identity. In Canada he is too brown, in India he is too white. How does he navigate his sense of identity in Bombay? How does his sense of belonging impact his actions?

  Most of Rakhi’s relationships are built around some kind of transaction. Consider her relationships with Gauri, Tazim, and Alex. Why might someone with Rakhi’s history find herself in so many transactional relationships? Why might she be leery of other people’s intentions?

  “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” (this page). Why does Rakhi insist on telling only her own story? Examine instances in the book when Rakhi’s power to tell her own story was taken away from her.

  “What must it be like, being a starched-shirt Pali Hill rich boy like Alex? Or these white girls with yellow hair, all of them coming to India to dip their toes into our shit, pretending like our problems are their problems, then going home and never coming back?” (this page). Discuss this statement and Alex’s story of his well-building trip to Honduras. How does the concept of foreign aid or intervention help and hurt the people in the story?

  How do such privileges as wealth, formal education, English proficiency, and race factor into the story and into the lives of the characters? Which characters have which privileges, and how do these privileges affect their viewpoints and their actions towards one another?

  After Rakhi confronts Gauri about the fire, Gauri states: “The Arora Group has too much money to be held accountable for things like this” (this page). Then she goes on to tell Rakhi that she doesn’t owe her anything. How does accountability play out, or not, within the story? Who is accountable to whom, and what do they, and we, owe to one another?

  How are dreams, both literal and aspirational, important in the story? How does the ending of the story align with Rakhi’s dreams? Are Rakhi’s dreams ultimately dashed or realized?