SUCH BIG DREAMS

Making an appealing debut, Canadian lawyer Patel draws on her experiences at a nongovernmental organization in India to follow the fortunes of Justice For All, a financially strapped human rights agency, where underpaid lawyers toil mightily to represent the poor of Mumbai.

Cynical, street-smart Rakhi is the agency’s 23-year-old office assistant whose menial tasks include taking care of a changing cast of naïve interns, who, she remarks, “come here wanting to fix India and leave after two stomach bugs, whining about how much they miss clean air and something they call almond milk.” Rakhi was hired by the agency’s director, Gauri, who first met her at a girls’ school where she had been remanded after living on the streets for 5 years—an experience that Patel recounts in gritty detail. Learning about Rakhi’s childhood—abandonment, hunger, physical harm—Gauri was astonished by the girl’s fierce spirit and intelligence: “Every door had been slammed in your face,” she tells Rakhi, “and yet there you were, still surviving.” When Rakhi turns 18, Gauri gives her a job that, she thinks, will grant the girl “another chance at life”; but for Rakhi, working for Gauri seems, instead, like another incarceration. Paid a pittance, she lives in a slum of “open sewers, monsoon floods,” and teeming “multilevel hutments”; and furthermore, Gauri monitors her every move. Rakhi’s longing for a different future and Gauri’s desperate effort to keep her agency afloat make them vulnerable to two characters—vivid though stereotypical—who seem to offer an answer to their dreams: a well-connected Canadian intern bound for Harvard’s Kennedy School who takes an outsized interest in Rakhi’s life; and a fading Bollywood star, hoping to revive her career, who promises to lure big donors in exchange for becoming the “public face” of the NGO.

A sharply drawn protagonist gives this novel power and zest.