A savvy former street child working at a law office in Mumbai fights
for redemption and a chance to live life on her own terms in this
"smart, haunting, and compulsively readable" (Amy Jones, author of
We're All in This Together) debut novel about fortune and
survival.
"A heartbreaking yet hopeful story about the resilience of the human
spirit in the face of insurmountable odds."--Etaf Rum, New York Times
bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man
With a sharp wit and sharper tongue, twenty-three-year old Rakhi Kumar
is nobody's fool. Sure, she lives alone in a slum and works as a lowly
office assistant for the renowned lawyer, Gauri Verma, who gave her a
fresh start. But she's come a long way from her childhood on the streets
of Mumbai. Most important, she's busy enough to distract herself from
the nightmares of a grisly childhood incident that led to the
disappearance of her best friend.
Fiercely intelligent, Rakhi could be doing so much more than making
chai, but she allows herself to be underestimated by her colleagues at
Justice For All, Gauri's cash-strapped rights law office. These days,
it's becoming harder for Rakhi to keep her head down as Gauri
desperately tries to save her organization by recruiting former
Bollywood actress and infamous nineties "thong girl," Rubina Mansoor, to
be their celebrity ambassador. But not all money is good money.
Convincing Gauri to make increasingly brash moves, Rubina demands an
internship for a young family friend, Harvard-bound graduate student,
Alex Lalwani-Diamond. An ambitious, naïve rich kid with a savior
complex, Alex persuades Rakhi to show him "the real India." In exchange,
he'll do something to further Rakhi's dreams, in a transaction that
seems harmless, at first.
As old guilt and new aspirations collide, everything Rakhi once knew to
be true is set ablaze. And as the stakes mount, she will come
face-to-face with the difficult choices and moral compromises one must
make in pursuit of self-preservation, and ultimately, survival. Such
Big Dreams is a moving, smart, and arrestingly clever look at the cost
of reclaiming one's story.
