Such Big Dreams Read online

  Before I can finish the list, I feel two hard taps on my shoulder. Then an unfamiliar, stern voice says, “Ticket.”

  I glance back. It’s the squat woman in the yellow salwar kameez who, moments ago, was sitting with her hands folded in her lap. Now she’s got an ID card around her neck and the smug sneer of an undercover ticket inspector on her face.

  “Ticket,” she says again, her lips curling.

  “Wait one second.” I rustle through my bag, pretending to search for a ticket I don’t have, clinking coins together for dramatic effect. If Ma’am wasn’t here, I could stall the inspector until the train slowed into the next station, then hop out and sprint down the platform. Nothing I haven’t done before.

  But Gauri Ma’am is here, and she’s staring me down. What would she do if I made a run for it? Scold me? Force me to pay the fine? Send me to Dr. Pereira every day instead of once a week, when I already hate having to go at all? Or worse, would she fire me for cheating the railway? I’d be jobless. Nobody would hire me. I’d have to live on the street again. And then what?

  I shove those thoughts back into a distant corner of my head while I continue to push coins around in my purse.

  “This ticket must be in here somewhere,” I mumble.

  Gauri Ma’am clears her throat, then steps forward and wedges herself in between me and the inspector, her legs planted wide.

  The inspector ignores Ma’am and starts to scribble a ticket with a blue pen.

  “Put that away, right now,” Ma’am demands.

  The stone-faced inspector glances up from her notepad, oblivious that the woman towering over her has argued twelve different cases against the government at the Supreme Court of India, and won eleven of them. “If I don’t see her ticket, she pays the fine. Three hundred rupees.”

  Gauri Ma’am raises her voice now. “The only reason she is riding in first class is because these damn trains are stuffed beyond capacity. What is she supposed to do, let ten of them pass her by until she can get in? Tell me,” Ma’am bellows, “is being on time for work only a privilege of the rich?”

  When the other women on the train start to peer up from their newspapers and mobiles, Ma’am calls out to them. “Ladies! Are any of you bothered that this girl is riding in here?” The women glance at one another, but none of them answer Gauri Ma’am.

  “You see?” Ma’am turns her attention back to the inspector. “Go on. Deal with actual problems instead of troubling yourself with who’s travelling in which compartment.”

  Unmoved by Gauri Ma’am’s rant, the inspector finishes writing the ticket and tears it from her notepad. That’s when Ma’am snatches the paper from the inspector’s hand, crumples it in her palm, and flings it out the moving train. Then she lowers her voice and leans in very close to the inspector’s face. “If you try and write another ticket, I will lodge a formal complaint about you with the BMC. And you know none of the goondas who run this city will bother defending you.”

  The ticket inspector takes a step back.

  “Thousands of people are waiting for a job like yours to open up,” Ma’am adds. She holds out some creased bills. “Take this.”

  Without missing a beat, the ticket inspector seizes the money and slips it into her pocket. Cracking her knuckles, she steps off the train at King’s Circle Station.

  My ears burn from embarrassment. India’s top human rights lawyer just offered hafta? For me?

  “That was a tip, not a bribe,” Ma’am grunts at me. “And how many times must we go through this? You must work at undoing all these bad behaviours with Dr. Pereira, or you’ll keep finding yourself in situations like this.”

  “Ji, Ma’am.”

  Frowning, she pulls out her handkerchief again and wipes her forehead. “I can’t keep bailing you out, Rakhi. You have to behave like an adult now. Nobody lives a life without consequences.”

  “Ji, Ma’am.”

  Ma’am eyes the rest of the women on the train and then glances back at me. “This city is mutilating itself with these bloody class divides. If they did away with this first-class nonsense, there would be more space for everyone.”

  Now is not the time to point out that she herself travels in first class.

  For the rest of the journey down the Harbour Line, we travel in silence, until our train rolls into VT Station, its final stop. The inside of VT is a drab warehouse filled with soaring ceilings, old trains, thousands of people, and a few extended families of crows who glide from beam to beam, raining shit everywhere. On the outside though, it looks like a grand palace. The kind of place where firanghis stop to click photos.

  Gauri Ma’am says that fundamentalist governmentwalas renamed Victoria Terminus as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus after the Maratha warrior king, even though it was the Britishers who built the station. That was in 1996, a year after Bombay became Mumbai and VT became my new home. A lot of names changed then, but no one I knew called the station CST, so neither did I. Babloo, the other street kids, and me, we knew the building inside out, all its main arteries and hidden veins. We learned who was allowed to go where, who wasn’t, and how to get there anyway. We named all the gargoyles on the outside of the station after famous movie villains—Gabbar Singh, Mogambo, Kancha—and we steered clear of the beedi-smoking older boys who also lived around the station, dodging their violence, offers of hard drugs, and attempts at sex. Well, we tried, anyhow.

  I hop out of the car before the train grinds to a halt, waiting on the platform for Gauri Ma’am to descend with the other first-class ladies. She plods toward me, hands me twenty rupees, and waves her handkerchief, motioning at me to keep going without her. “Go buy water for the new intern. I’ll see you at the office. And make it quick, haan?”

  I weave past slow-walking older women, sinewy coolies with large parcels atop their heads, and half-asleep stray dogs sprawled on the ground. A little girl with a tangled ponytail, sun-bleached yellow T-shirt, and tattered orange shorts steps out in front of me.

  “Just one rupee, didi,” she moans, her cupped hand outstretched my way. “Didi, didi, one rupee.”

  I shake my head no and she pivots to the woman behind me. I could teach that girl a few things. You have to relax your eyes, for one. Droop your upper eyelids, specifically. But no dramatics. Quiet crying can double or triple your earnings with firanghis. And don’t take no for an answer. Following someone closely—but not too closely—also works.

  “You have big eyes, and you’re a girl, so you’ll make good money begging,” Babloo told me the day I arrived in Bombay. So, when a particularly good target came along—a firanghi, usually—I would walk up to them and release big, fat, silent tears. Pocket change fell freely into my outstretched palm. Once, I built up to a carefully timed whimper and managed to squeeze a five-hundred-rupee bill out of an old gora with beige socks pulled up to his pale, freckled knees. I told only Babloo about the money. We hid it behind a pile of bricks in our little laneway and spent it, bit by bit, on movies and food. That was after we finally managed to find a shopkeeper willing to take such a large note from us.

  When I was twelve, Babloo and I were picked up by the police, and that was the end of my time on the streets. I haven’t seen any of the other kids we ran with since. I heard some girls ended up in the brothels of Kamathipura, to no surprise. Most of the boys got involved with local gangs. One of them became a political goonda, terrorizing Muslim shopkeepers and taxi drivers from Uttar Pradesh. A couple of them are dead now. But I never heard anything about Babloo.

  When I returned to Bombay five years ago, I circled around the city for weeks, asking if anyone knew Babloo’s whereabouts. Nobody around VT had a clue. Not the beediwala, not the poori bhaji guys, not even the old ticket-selling uncles waiting for retirement. I still scan the faces of thin-limbed beggars to see if any are his.

  The road outside VT crawls with morning traffic. A chauffeur
-driven jeep honks furiously at the bicycle delivery boys carrying four-foot-tall stacks of newspapers. Sidestepping a bullock cart that appears out of nowhere, I turn three corners to Sai Krishna Vegetarian Lunch Home. Outside the restaurant, potato vadas crackle and hiss in a huge black kadai filled with hot oil.

  “One Bisleri,” I say, motioning toward the large water bottles in the fridge behind the counter. Ma’am prefers me to buy this brand for firanghis because the plastic bottle is sturdy enough for them to reuse, even though they end up chucking them anyway. I count out some of my own coins and point to the kadai. “And one of those.”

  Even though Gauri Ma’am is waiting for me to hurry back, freshly made vada pav is impossible to resist. I tear off the paper wrapping and sink my teeth into the soft white bun and then the crispy fried potato inside. The tamarind chutney is sweet and tangy. I wipe my oily fingers on the hem of my kameez and grab the cold, sweaty water bottle for the intern.

  As I turn a few more corners to reach the Justice For All office, beads of cold water roll off the bottle and onto my hands and down my wrists. I dab the wetness onto my throat. It is refreshing for a few seconds, but then the water dries, leaving my neck hotter than before. I roll the bottle against my cheek, behind my ear, shaking my shoulders a little to help the water roll farther down my back.

  Mid-bottle-rub, I hear a foreign-sounding voice behind me. “Hi, excuse me?”

  I turn around, yanking the bottle out of sight. A light-skinned man in a pressed white shirt and shiny brown shoes walks up the street toward me. A dark blue BMW idles behind him, too wide to pass by a small lorry blocking its way. The driver squints out at the buildings on either side of the narrow lane. Using the back of my hand, I try to brush the vada pav crumbs from the corners of my mouth.

  Up close, the man’s face shines like buttered toast and his brown hair is neatly combed. “Excuse me? Speak English?”

  I nod yes.

  He breaks into a wide smile and holds out a small piece of paper with an address written on it. “Do you know the Maarrr-tray-eeya…no, May-treeya Building? My driver thinks it’s on this street.” His voice has that familiar firanghi drawl where they stumble over and then spit out Indian names they’ve never heard before.

  I nod again and point down the lane toward our office, which sits on the second floor of the Maitreya Building, an old four-storey structure with monsoon-blackened outsides, fungus-dashed ceilings, and a lift that’s always out of service.

  Before I can tell him that I’m going there myself, Gauri Ma’am’s voice cuts through the air: “Ah, this must be our new intern from Canada.” She plods down the lane toward us, beaming.

  Ma’am and the firanghi exchange greetings, and she tells him that the office is a few steps away and she’ll be ready for him in an hour. She trudges along and calls out to me in Hindi. “Take him upstairs and get him settled in. And show him around the office, introduce him to the others.”

  The firanghi jogs over to the BMW, bends down so his head is level with his driver’s, then points my way. Once the car disappears, he jogs back to me. His eyes are a muddy green, and his eyelashes are thicker than mine. Pleasant-looking, in that Jawaharlal Nehru sort of way. Tall, like so many firanghis are.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rakhi,” I say, rubbing my arm.

  “Alex Lalwani-Diamond,” he says, his hand hovering over his chest.

  I want to laugh. A name like that, and he couldn’t figure out how to say Maitreya?

  2

  GAURI MA’AM’S husky voice thunders from across the office. “Rakhi! Have you cleaned up the empty desk for the new intern?”

  “Ji, Ma’am. Almost done.”

  With a damp blue towel, I wipe specks of dirt from what’s supposed to be Alex’s computer mouse. Bombay grit gets everywhere. It blows through the windows daily, caking furniture, lodging itself under your fingernails.

  She calls out to me again. “Where did he go?”

  “Sitting in the waiting area.” I peek out from behind the computer to see him standing before a faded prisoners’ rights poster by the front door, stroking his chin. We printed those posters a few years back, when we still had money to waste on things like that.

  Gauri Ma’am grunts something about how the new intern was supposed to arrive much later in the morning. “So eager, these Canadians.”

  I set down the mouse, now several shades lighter than how I found it. A vinegary scent swells as I wring the towel out in the morning light. Last Monday, one of our other foreign interns, Saskia, found five newborn kittens taking shelter beneath her desk. I used this same towel to scoop the kittens up while a raging Saskia shrieked about everything that was wrong with India. I left the kittens outside on a piece of cardboard behind a parked bicycle, hoping their mother would turn up before the rats.

  Showing the foreign interns around when they first arrive is one of my jobs. This year, we have Saskia and Merel, two Dutch graduate students who have been with us since the middle of May. For Saskia, the office is too hot, the tea is too sweet, and she complains of employee abuse whenever one of the senior lawyers asks her to go to court to file documents. Merel is always taking photos of herself with her digital camera. A few weeks back they returned from a mini holiday in Rajasthan, and Merel showed everyone pictures from their trip: Saskia winking beside two villagers in bright pink turbans; Merel raising an eyebrow and frowning into a beer bottle by the hotel pool in Udaipur; both girls in the middle of the desert, riding creaky old camels dripping with faded multicoloured pompoms.

  I work the musty towel over the computer screen, leaving sideways streaks that won’t go away no matter how hard I wipe.

  “Hey, Rakhi?”

  Startled, I turn around to find Alex behind me. Who told him to come in?

  “Are there other interns working here? Or is it just going to be me?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Two girls.”

  He lowers himself onto an office chair a few feet away. It’s off balance, so he tilts down on one side. In his starched white shirt and shiny leather shoes, he looks like he should be working at a bank with sparkling white tiles and glass doors. Not a human rights law office cluttered with lopsided chairs and stacks of yellowing papers bundled with string, and dusty cobwebs fluttering from the ceiling fans.

  “Where are these girls?” he asks, fiddling with the knobs under his seat.

  I shrug. How should I know where they are? I haven’t spoken to Merel and Saskia since the kitten drama. “Pata nahin,” I mutter to myself.

  “Sorry,” he says with a laugh. “My Hindi’s a little rusty. Can you say that in English?”

  How do I reply? I am not know? I do not know? “I…no know,” I offer.

  Alex gives me one of those polite nods that’s meant to show he understands, even though he doesn’t. Firanghi classic.

  Lately, Merel and Saskia have been showing up three days a week only. A year ago, Gauri Ma’am might have cared. These days, though, she has more to worry about than a couple of unpaid interns bunking off. Her funding agency in England is only giving her half the money she needs for the next year. Back in April, after everyone had left for the evening, I overheard Ma’am on her phone. “I understand you want us to make cuts,” she said, her voice straining, “but the need for our work is critical—I simply cannot scale back.” The conversation ended soon after, and Ma’am stayed at her desk for a long time, rubbing her temples. The next morning, she fired three of the junior lawyers, shut down our satellite offices in Assam, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu, then lectured everyone else about something called “efficiency.” I didn’t bother asking what it meant.

  “Rakhi,” Gauri Ma’am shouts from her office. “Show him around the office, na? Do I have to tell you how to do everything myself?”

  “Ji, Ma’am,” I call back. Turning to Alex, I stand up. “You come? See office?”


  “Sure, that’s great.”

  “Building old. Lift no working,” I say, opening the doors leading into the corridor. “Men’s toilet this way.”

  He peeks his head out into the hallway.

  I lead Alex back through the waiting area and into the lawyers’ workspace, a U-shape formation of desks pushed up against the wall at the front of the office. It’s separated from the interns’ workspace—a unanimous request from the lawyers once Justice For All started hiring firanghis to work for free.

  “All lawyers working this space,” I say, and a few of them turn their heads toward us, eyeing him.

  I’ve steered Alex back to his workstation and left him there when Bhavana, the lead lawyer in Justice For All’s anti-human-trafficking cases, calls me to her desk. “So,” she says in a low voice. “Who’s that guy?”

  “I don’t know. Some firanghi.”

  She studies me carefully, flipping her shoulder-length hair to reveal a grey streak that grows wider every week. “Arre, you were talking to him, weren’t you?”

  “He’s an intern from Canada, I don’t know anything else.”

  “The interns always start in May. Why would Gauri Ma’am hire one in July?” Bhavana asks, resting a finger on her chin. “And why wouldn’t she tell any of us?”

  How should I know?

  “Is Vivek Sir aware of this?” Bhavana continues impatiently. “Gauri Ma’am would at least tell him, na?”