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  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  SUCH BIG DREAMS

  “An appealing debut…. Cynical, street-smart Rakhi is…a sharply drawn protagonist [who] gives this novel power and zest.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  “Such Big Dreams charts the ambitions, disappointments, and dreams of two people who are improbably thrust together as they try to find their way in—and make their mark on—a bustling Mumbai that’s indifferent to their struggles. Unflinching and unsentimental, yet written with compassion and insight, Such Big Dreams is a richly textured and powerful novel that, like Mumbai itself, pulsates with humanity. Reema Patel is a writer to watch. I absolutely loved this book.”

  – Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don’t Know the Words and If You Want to Make God Laugh

  “From the very first page, Such Big Dreams grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. Reema Patel’s prose jumps with energy, plunging the reader into a page-turner of a story that doesn’t shy away from exploring hard and painful truths about the way people navigate the systemic conditions of society. With assured writing, Patel explores themes ranging from societal elitism to the nuances of interpersonal betrayal and never loses sight of pacing. Visceral and kinetic, Such Big Dreams is a splash of a debut.”

  – Zalika Reid-Benta, author of Frying Plantain

  “Mumbai has inspired many great novels about the city, and now we can add Reema Patel’s Such Big Dreams to that list. Her portrayal of Mumbai is fresh and vivid and personal, in part because of the novel’s charming and perceptive narrator, Rakhi, whose daily life straddles the city’s distinct social and economic classes and geographies. I left the book with a sigh of regret, feeling already the loss of Rakhi and the gift of Patel’s Mumbai.”

  – Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy

  “An astonishingly gifted storyteller, Reema Patel writes with a confidence, insight, and skill that belies her status as a debut novelist. Such Big Dreams is a book that examines how we treat society’s most vulnerable, and leaves us questioning our own perception of the ideas of freedom, safety, charity, and humanity—but it’s also a gripping and emotional story of a young woman who is fighting to live her life on her own terms. A smart, haunting, compulsively readable novel with a tightly woven plot and an unforgettable narrator, Such Big Dreams is a novel you’ll want to simultaneously race through at breakneck speed, and slow down to savour every word.”

  – Amy Jones, author of We’re All in This Together

  Copyright © 2022 by Reema Patel

  Trade paperback original edition published 2022

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780771073717

  Ebook ISBN 9780771073724

  Book design by Emma Dolan, adapted for ebook

  Cover art: Emma Dolan

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_6.0_139912365_c1_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions for Such Big Dreams

  About the Author

  For my parents

  1

  THIS TIME, THE FLAMES are everywhere—licking the walls, sweeping across the tin roof of my one-room hut.

  I bolt upright in the dark, a full-body scream ready to erupt from somewhere deep inside my lungs. My hands reach for my throat as I gasp for air. Panic courses through my body while I try to recall Dr. Pereira’s bad-dream exercise, the one she told me to do each time this happens.

  “When you wake up,” she said, “sit on the edge of your bed and put your feet on the floor.” I had to tell her I don’t have a bed, just a thin mat. “So sit at the edge of your mat cross-legged,” she replied, patiently. “Then, name out loud the objects in the room.”

  Trembling, I fold one leg under the other and try to focus on the dim outlines of my belongings scattered around me.

  In the corner of the room, my heavy, steel cabinet. “Almirah.”

  Beside it, the cooking vessel I never use. “Pot.”

  Drenched, sweaty clothes plastered to my back. “Kurta,” I mutter.

  Then I notice the damp, heavy weight tickling my neck. “Hair.”

  I slide a cautious hand toward the little blue Nokia that Gauri Ma’am gave me when I started working for her. “Phone.” I clutch it tight. The small screen oozes a dull green glow, which I hold up in front of me to illuminate the room.

  Shining the light on my cassette player, I press the eject button with a trembling finger and retrieve the tiny crystal elephant from its hiding spot. “Elephant.” As I say the word and cradle the figurine in my palm, I can sense the flames of my nightmare start to recede.

  And now for the last, most stupidest part of Dr. Pereira’s night terror exercise: “I am awake,” I whisper into the shadows. “I am safe.”

  My shoulders tense as I wait for flames to climb back up the walls, sparks to burrow into my clothes. None of that happens, though. I let out a deep breath and flop back onto my mat, dank and musty from my sweat and the humid monsoon air.

  The nightmares started eleven years ago, after the paanwala incident. Just after I lost Babloo. They used to come almost every night. They’ve since tapered off to a few times a week, but they’re just as vivid as ever. Most nights I try to stay awake for as long as I can, fighting the lull of the dead air and emptiness of my one-room hut, before drifting into broken sleep by two or three in the morning.

  Behrampada slum sprawls out over seven acres in the middle of Bombay—or Mumbai, if that’s what you want to call it—an island city flooded with too many people with too-big dreams. By the time I come home in the evenings, the slum roars with noise: The hiss and flare of gas cooking cylinders being lit; tawas and kadais clanging on stovetops. Women shouting at their husbands, who in turn shout back. Someone’s shrieking child is always chasing someone else’s bleating goat. And when India wins a
cricket match, firecrackers burst in the lanes like fistfuls of corn popping. By midnight, though, people retreat inside and switch off their television sets, and the pressures that build up in Behrampada’s crowded huts and narrow lanes fizzle out until dawn. Except for the squeals of horny rats and the occasional bottle smashing, all goes quiet—and that’s when the night terrors come for me.

  Letting out one of those big yawns that almost unhinges my jaw, I roll onto my side. Last night, flash rains banged down on my leaky tin roof like a herd of sharp-clawed cats. The steady sound of water dripping into a plastic bucket would drive anyone else to tears, but I was grateful to be kept awake for a little while longer. As the storm died down, though, so did the noise, and I eventually fell asleep. If I had the secret weapons that important people do, like loud English or proper Hindi, I’d command the nearby Garib Nawaz Masjid to keep the call to prayer going all night, crying out “Allahu akbar” and “la ilaha illa-Allah” on loop from their tinny loudspeakers. “We have to help Rakhi keep the night terrors away,” the muezzin would reply flatly, if anyone complained about his six-hour azaan.

  Already, I hear the clamour of the people of Behrampada as they start to stir, which means it’s just past five. By six, the sun has risen, and by seven, I’ve used the stinking public toilet and bathed. By eight, I’ve drunk a cup of tea and gotten dressed, and am ready to leave for work.

  On this muggy July morning, the main road from Behrampada to Bandra Station glistens with a slick layer of oil, water, and dirt. I take careful strides over the puddle-filled potholes dotting the street, but the cotton ankles of my clean salwar end up speckled with mud anyway. “Dressing smart tells the world you think our work is valuable,” Gauri Ma’am told me during my first week at the office, after I wore the same salwar kameez for three days straight. She handed me a stack of her daughter’s old clothes the next day.

  It’s only as I pause on the station bridge to inspect the mud splatters on the backs of my pant legs that I spot my train pulling into the station. The people who have been waiting on the platform are already getting inside, which means I have less than fifteen seconds before it departs. By the time I fly down the stairs to the platform, the train has started to move again. The slanted green-and-yellow stripes of the ladies’ general compartment are exactly two cars away.

  I haven’t chased after a moving train in a long time. During our years living on the street, Babloo and I were always running. Running away, that is—from policewalas, shopkeepers, and passengers who’d had enough of us. While other children had their hair oiled and combed, rode in autorickshaws to school, and ate proper lunches and dinners, we were leaping onto moving trains, travelling ticketless up and down the railway lines, looking for something to put into our growling bellies.

  The train picks up speed, so I do, too. There’s only one way on now, and it’s to jump in the open door closest to me—the first-class ladies’ compartment. I don’t have a first-class pass, but that’s never stopped me before. I reach out for the pole in the doorway, the tip of my middle finger grazing the cool metal, but it’s inching away from me. I’m going to have to leap for it. Bracing myself, I lurch forward, stretching for the pole with my left hand, this time gripping it firmly. Quickly, I suck in my breath and vault over the gap as the train gains momentum, and my outer hip takes a sharp blow from the pole while my feet slam down onto the metal floor. Out the open door, the city rushes past me. I am inside. Panting like a dog on a summer day, but inside.

  The train roars down the Harbour Line toward the next stop, Mahim Station. I’ll hop out there and switch into the ladies’ general compartment. The total fine for ticketless travel would come to three hundred rupees if they caught me right now. I only have seventy rupees in my purse, and the Railway Police holding cells swell with ankle-deep sludge during monsoon season.

  The wind from outside undoes most of the curls from my ponytail, which blow about in a thousand directions. I must look like some deranged woman, the kind whose uncle or husband drags her to a temple so a priest can beat the evil spirits out of her. As I twist fistfuls of hair into a massive bun at the back of my neck, strong gusts continue to hit my face, and the curls around my forehead whip at my temples.

  When I finally turn away from the door and toward the inside of the car, I am struck by the emptiness, the quiet of first class. Nobody is inching in front of me, threatening to steal my breeze. On the bench facing me are a tall college girl in a pink T-shirt and a squat lady in a faded yellow salwar kameez with white embroidery. Between them are two whole inches of empty space. In the general compartment, four or five women will squash onto one bench together. The last one to jostle in will tell the others to “shift, please,” until at least a third of her behind is on the seat. And she’ll hang off the edge like that, straining her hips and thighs, because if she doesn’t sit there, someone else will.

  Seats by the window with maximum airflow are in high demand, like gold at Diwali, or a fair price for onions. At this time of day, the ladies’ general compartment is so packed that nobody who boards at Bandra gets breeze. Only a few months ago, in the pre-monsoon heat that drives the entire city into random fits of rage, some fat, middle-aged woman with green glass bangles thought she could elbow me out of a seat I was about to squeeze into. She didn’t know who she was dealing with. Somewhere in the scuffle, her glass bangles snapped, scraping into my wrist, cutting deep enough to leave a mark. I got the seat in the end.

  Apart from the extra room and the softer seats, there’s not much difference between the compartments. First-class ladies pay ten times more so they can buy space for their first-class hips, I guess—and more air for their first-class noses, too.

  Outside, the city flies by, followed by the mangrove swamps that protect the city from storm surges, then Mahim Creek, choking on thickened blue-black sewage. Now we’re passing a row of squatting bare bottoms. The pink-shirt college girl wrinkles her nose, but the naked bums greeting the Harbour Line passengers in the morning light make me smile.

  The first time I laid eyes on Bombay was like this, from the window of a train. That was sixteen years ago, when I was seven. The city had only just been renamed Mumbai, and I was merely hours away from being renamed Rakhi myself.

  Our train rolls into Mahim Station, and only three women board the first-class compartment. I peek out onto the platform to see thirty or so women fighting their way into the general car. I duck back into first class. One more stop in this breezy compartment can’t hurt. As soon as we start to move off, one last woman hoists herself into the first-class car, leaning back on the wall opposite me.

  Shit. It’s Gauri Ma’am. We’re moving too fast now for me to jump out. I slouch down, lowering my head. She hasn’t seen me and I intend on keeping it that way, at least until I can slip out at the next station.

  Gauri Ma’am, or Gauri Verma as she’s known in the newspapers, is the Executive Director of Justice For All, the NGO where I work. Ma’am is one of India’s biggest human rights lawyers. I know this because when she gives interviews to the papers, it’s my job to cut the news stories out and keep them in a big yellow folder. Gauri Ma’am leads a team of lawyers who argue human rights cases and do social justice campaigns, fighting for the rights of Dalits, hijras, blind people, children, prisoners, women, that sort of thing. “Champion of the Exploited,” they sometimes call her in the papers.

  Lately, Gauri Ma’am has been talking about how we have to focus our efforts. When I say “we,” I don’t mean me. I don’t get involved in this social justice funda. That’s for the lawyers and interns. My job is photocopying important papers I’ll never understand, and boiling tea for everyone several times a day. Accepting deliveries, going to the post office, organizing things here and there. And, of course, taking care of the foreign interns, who somehow require more attention than small children. Ma’am calls me her office assistant. Most people would just say “peon” or “office girl,” but
Ma’am says our office doesn’t endorse classist language. Still, I take home less than a quarter of what the others earn per month.

  Gauri Ma’am dabs the sweat from her upper lip with a starched white handkerchief. With her wire-framed glasses and cropped peppery hair, she stands at least a head taller than me. Her broad hips and bulky shoulders are swathed in a grey handloom-cotton salwar kameez. Standard Indian intelligentsia look. Pulling her BlackBerry from her purse, she punches at its tiny keyboard with her thick thumbs.

  Trying not to make any sudden movements, I hold my breath and drift farther away inside the train, but she glances up from her phone and frowns. “Rakhi?” Her eyes narrow. “What are you doing, riding in first class?”

  “Ma’am, by mistake—”

  “If the ticket inspector comes, you’ll be fined for travelling without a pass.” She presses her lips together. “How much is the fine these days?”

  “Two hundred fifty rupees penalty, Ma’am, plus the first-class fare…So, three hundred.”

  “That much, only?” Gauri Ma’am tilts her head forward, raises her thick, black eyebrows, and pauses as if she has just made a closing argument in front of the Bombay High Court, before lowering her eyes to her BlackBerry screen once more. She doesn’t have to say anything else. She’s good like that.

  Rubbing the back of my neck, I return to the doorway without a word, ready to switch compartments at the next station.

  “Accha, listen,” Gauri Ma’am says. “There’s a new intern starting this morning. A Canadian. He’s a Harvard graduate student. We’ve never had someone from Harvard before.”

  What’s Harvard? And why is she telling me now, only? Usually I spend a good month preparing for a foreign intern’s arrival.

  “He can sit at the empty desk in the corner. And when we get to VT, fetch a bottle of mineral water for him. I don’t want to hear any this-that about loose motions in the first week.”

  The train rattles on. I scan the advertisements plastered all over the car’s interior. Most of them are written in English. Gauri Ma’am made me take lessons when I first came to work for her. “Your spoken English is slow and choppy, but you read and understand well,” my tutor told me. “You just have to converse more.” I told him I got plenty of practice while babysitting the foreign interns at the office, which was a lie, because those firanghis mostly talk to each other, only. I read over a sign with big black block letters: RAMESH BALAKRISHNAN, ASTROLOGER, OFFERS HELP WITH ALL PROBLEMS IN THE LIFE: MARRIAGE, INFERTILITY, IN-LAWS, DIVORCE, HEALTH, DISEASE, ACCIDENT, EVIL EYE—