"Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways." —Damon Galgut, The Promise

The sun had yet to claw its way above Delhi’s muggy skyline when Kavita, nineteen and wiry, dragged her first bucket of water across the construction site. The city was still yawning. But the machines weren’t. They never did. The cranes stretched their metallic arms over the half-built tower, an unfinished promise to people who would never live there. Kavita wouldn’t set foot inside once it was done. Neither would her father, Bholaram. For them, it was another half-built skeleton of someone else’s future, where they pieced together their survival, brick by unnoticed brick.

Nothing more than ghosts building the world.

Dust clung to her like a burdened inheritance she didn't ask for. Her salwar, once pink, had long given way to shades of cement-gray, the fabric splitting at the edges.

Around her, laborers moved like ants—silent, nameless, tireless, replaceable—and the air buzzed with hammering, the clatter of steel, and the occasional curses of insecure men barking orders. Her father knelt by the unfinished wall, frail, trowel in hand, with patience only exhaustion can teach. He was smoothing mortar with the precision of a man who’d spent thirty years bending to this work. His face was etched with lines deeper than the cracks in the concrete slabs, palms calloused, a back curved like a question mark, signs of quiet defeat.

“A little faster, Kavita,” he muttered without looking up. “Ramadhir’s watching.”

She dumped the water into the cement mixer, fingers curled stiff, arms burning from years of carrying weight that wasn’t hers.

The tower they were building had a name: Udaan. Kavita thought it was a good joke. No one like her had ever flown. They stayed in the gutters, knees pressed against the ground.

#

The sticky morning heat had settled—unwelcome, heavy, impossible to ignore. Kavita wiped the sweat trickling down her temple, her dupatta felt more grime than cloth. The air smelled of wet cement and rusted iron. Somewhere near the scaffolding, a man grunted in pain. No one turned. Injuries were like unpaid wages—expected, inevitable. Never worth complaining about.

Ramadhir’s voice slashed through the noise.

“Oye! You think this is a yoga retreat?”

Kavita stiffened, but he wasn’t talking to her. Not yet. Raghu Kaka—a laborer old enough to remember a time before safety harnesses were optional—had made the grave mistake of straightening his back for one whole second, pressing a hand to the base of his spine as if his vertebrae were protesting the day’s shift.

Ramadhir approached, his polished shoes crunching over loose gravel. A man who counted bricks but never carried them. His shirt—stiff, white, untouched by labor—made him look more out of place than the glass towers against the slums.

Raghu ducked his head. “Just a second, sahib. My back—”

“Your back?” Ramadhir sneered. “You’re lucky you still have one. You want to rest? Rest at home. No work, no paisa. Simple. Idiot!”

He nudged a pile of bricks near Raghu’s feet, sending them tumbling. “Pick those up. Fast.”

Raghu hesitated a moment too long—long enough to taste the insult. Then—

Slap.

The sound landed before Raghu’s body reacted. His head tilted, his hand hovering near his cheek as if debating whether dignity was worth touching.

Ramadhir sighed, already bored. “Lazy pigs. If any one of you does not want to work, ten more are waiting outside. Pack your dirty stuff and leave. The sahib wants the fifteenth floor done by the weekend. Move.”

Then his gaze landed on Kavita. She forced herself to keep her head down, her hands gripping the bucket tighter.

“Oye ladki,” he called, voice like a boot on gravel. “Your father teaches you to work or to stand and stare, haan?”

“She works, sahib,” Bholaram answered before she could, stepping in like a human sandbag. “She’s small, but she works hard.”

Ramadhir spat, then smirked. “Remember, small things break faster. Better hope she doesn’t.”

Then he walked off, his leather soles leaving faint, temporary imprints in the dust.

The men moved faster. Hands blurred. Backs bent lower. As if working harder could erase what had happened. Only Kavita stood still, nails digging into her palms, her breath a tight, burning coil in her chest. The world had rules; the first rule was that men like Ramadhir counted the money. People like Kavita, Bholaram, and Raghu counted the hours.

The glass towers continued its slow, inevitable rise—impervious to the blood mixed into its foundations.

#

At dusk, after the site exhaled its last breath of dust, Bholaram and Kavita retreated to the tin-and-tarpaulin box next to the construction site they called home. The air inside was mixed with the scent of kerosene, sweat, and the faint, bitter scent of hopelessness. Her mother, crouched in a corner, was sorting through a pile of scrap: twisted metal, cracked plastic, and the occasional discarded god’s idol. Sellable things. Even gods, if chipped at the edges, had a price.

Kavita pulled out a crumpled cement bag from beneath her mat, pulled out an old tattered notebook, and unfolded it. With a stub of charcoal, she planned to sketch—a slanting roof, a sturdy wall, and a window letting in the kind of light she’d never known in her own life. The towers she helped build loomed in her mind, but this one would be different. This one will be hers.

It was a foolish hope, she knew—girls like her didn’t build homes; they carried the bricks for them, mixed cement, cleaned floor.

She had traced the first pillar when Bholaram’s shadow filled the doorway.

“Still doing the same nonsense?” he shouted, wiping the sweat. His shirt, once white, had surrendered to the dust long ago. “What’s the use? You think drawing pictures will fill our stomachs?”

Kavita kept her head down. She had long learned that words thrown into the air landed like stones.

Bholaram let out a tired chuckle, though there was no humor in it. “Girls bring loss when they get too many ideas.” He nudged a plastic plate aside with his foot. “Look at you—nineteen, and still here. Still unmarried.”

Her mother's bangles jingled as she shifted, but she said nothing.

Kavita gripped the charcoal tighter, pressing it into the paper until the tip snapped.

“It’s shameful,” Bholaram went on as if reciting a fact from Ramadhir’s ledger. “A grown girl in her father’s house is like unpaid debt. The neighbors talk. ‘Bholaram’s daughter is still here. What’s wrong with her?’ They ask me this. What should I say, Kavita?”

She said nothing. Because what could she say? That she didn’t want to be handed off like a liability in human form? That she dreamed of steel and glass, of things more permanent than fate? That she wasn’t waiting—she was building?

Instead, she did what was expected. She put the notebook inside the cement bag, folded it with utmost care, pressing the creases flat. Then she tucked it back under the mat, beneath the weight of a reality she wasn’t ready to fight.

Bholaram grunted in approval. "Good. Now get some sleep. Morning comes fast, and bricks don’t lay themselves.”

#

The next morning, the site received visitors. Not the usual kind that screamed about delays or threatened to replace them with hungrier and cheaper workers. But college students. Their clean shoes sank into the mud, their notebooks fluttered like clueless birds, and their voices, crisp with certainty, sliced through the air. They huddled near the scaffold, pointing at beams, their words carrying the casual confidence of people who had never lifted anything heavy in their lives.

Kavita lingered nearby, pretending to sweep gravel. Load-bearing, elevation, symmetry. The words rolled off their tongues like incantations, reshaping reality. She didn’t understand it all, but she wanted to. It clung to her mind like wet cement, drying into something solid.

One of them, a girl with a clipboard, let a paper slip from her fingers. It danced in the wind, weightless—unlike the thick, brutal weight of cement sacks on the backs of poor men surrounding her every day. She snatched it up before it could escape.

"Architecture Scholarship for Underprivileged Youth."

Her pulse stuttered.

She read it again, half-expecting the words to rearrange themselves into a cruel joke. A scholarship. A seat in a world she had only ever glimpsed through dust and distance.

Someone cleared their throat. A boy from the group—tall, well-fed—looked at her. His gaze flicked to the paper in her hands. A slight frown, then a shrug, as if the wind had picked up trash.

She gripped the flyer tighter, the thin paper already softening from the sweat on her palms. The words blurred in the midday heat, but she had read them enough times to etch them into memory. Scholarship. College. Architecture. She had to ask.

She wiped her hands on her cement-covered kurta and stepped forward. The students, deep in their discussion about load distribution, hadn't noticed her approach.

"Didi," she said, voice steady despite the uneven drumming in her chest.

The girl with the clipboard, the one who had dropped the flyer, glanced at her before exchanging a quick smirk with the boy beside her. He nudged another student. And before Kavita knew what was happening, the whole group had turned their attention to her, their expressions ranging from mild curiosity to concealed amusement.

"Yes?" the girl asked, dragging out the word.

Kavita cleared her throat. "How does someone apply for this scholarship?"

The boy who had been nudged snorted. "You want to apply?"

A ripple of loud chuckles spread through the group. One of them—a short guy with glasses—crossed his arms. "It’s for students, you know, people who have some training in architecture."

Kavita swallowed hard. "I can draw. I—I understand structures. I just..." she hesitated, looking down at the flyer. "I want to learn more."

The clipboard girl tilted her head. "That’s cute." She turned to the others, grinning. "Maybe she can teach us how to mix cement properly."

More laughter. Louder.

Kavita’s face burned, but she forced herself to stay still. This was not the first time someone had laughed at her dreams.

"No, but seriously," the tall guy added, shaking his head. "This is competitive. They’re looking for real potential, not—" he gestured vaguely at her dust-covered clothes and her surroundings "—workers."

Kavita’s fingers curled around the edges of the flyer. She wanted to fling it at their faces, to make them see her, not as a worker, but as someone who could be more. But the weight of their laughter pressed down on her, the same weight she had carried her whole life.

She turned on her heel, walking away before they could see the sting in her eyes.

Later that evening, as she stood near the half-constructed wall, letting the wind cool the heat on her cheeks, she noticed Ramadhir.

He was not yelling, not hurling abuses at the workers. Instead, he stood with the visiting college students, his posture straight, his tone measured.

"We focus on efficiency, of course," he was saying, "but also longevity. Reinforced structures in a big city like Delhi need to withstand more than just weight—they need to endure neglect, weather, and time."

The students nodded, some scribbling notes. Kavita frowned.

Ramadhir, the same man who counted every rupee before paying laborers, who screamed if a bucket of cement was mixed slightly wrong, who slapped Raghu Kaka yesterday, was now talking about endurance. About structure.

A bitter taste filled her mouth.

Did words change value depending on who spoke them? Did knowledge only belong to those who could afford it?

She looked at the flyer again, crumpled in her grip. They had laughed at her today. They thought she wasn’t worth listening to.

But that did not mean she would stop asking.

Back at the tin house, she pored over the flyer by the flicker of a kerosene lamp. She needed proof of education, but her school in Bihar had shuttered years ago, its records lost to time and neglect. The next morning, she skipped breakfast to visit a government office, clutching the flyer like a lifeline. The clerk didn't glance up from his chai. “No fee slip, no certificate. Next!” he snapped, waving her off. She stood there, invisible, her dream slipping through her fingers like dry sand.

That night, Bholaram found her sketching again. His face darkened. “Why are you so stubborn?” he growled, snatching the notebook and tearing it in two. “Education is for rich people, not us. You’ll marry a boy from the village and stop this foolishness. It's already difficult finding a boy for you because of your schooling.” His words landed like a slap, but Kavita’s jaw tightened. The scholarship had ignited something in her—a spark the system, her father, and even her doubts couldn’t snuff out yet. She wouldn’t let it go without a fight.

#

The sun had set when Kavita wiped the grit from her hands and slipped away from the site. The night was fuelled by its version of hunger, and tonight, it was hers. She’d overheard a laborer mutter about a night school near the Yamuna—some crumbling room where an underpaid clerk pretended to teach the doomed how to read. It wasn’t much, but neither was the world’s mercy.

The walk was three kilometers of flickering streetlights, dogs snarling over rotting scraps, of men watching her like she was another thing they could take. She tied her dupatta tighter and walked faster. The classroom was a graveyard of stale air and cheap plaster, packed with men whose backs had bent too early under other men’s dreams. The teacher, a balding man with a voice like a dead engine, dragged them through the lesson with the enthusiasm of a man who had long since stopped believing in living. Kavita sat in the back, her pencil trembling as she traced the words she had abandoned back in Bihar. It felt like carving her story into the world with a rusted nail.

But the world had other plans.

At the site, Ramadhir had noticed her absences. The next morning, he cornered Bholaram, his voice low, the kind that made men sweat even when the air was cold. “Your daughter thinks she’s too good for work? She misses again, and you’re both out.”

Bholaram didn’t argue. Men like him couldn’t afford dignity. That night, his grip found Kavita’s arm like a vice. “You think books will feed you? You think you’re better than us?”

Kavita met his eyes. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t better. She was hungry for something. And hunger didn’t ask for permission, it ignited a basal instinct.

Pain.

Sleep unraveled. Days passed as days did. Hours spent hauling bricks under the sun’s merciless eye. Nights stole in dim kerosene light, her fingers red from holding both a trowel and a pencil, one erasing the other. But it wasn’t enough. She needed more.

One evening, she found it.

A passing comment from an old mason led her to an architecture college near the site. The library smelled of polished wood and privilege, of lives planned decades ahead. Kavita slipped inside, past the guard who saw only another poor girl too afraid to belong. She couldn’t read the spines, but the drawings were a language she understood: beams, arches, symmetry, the bones of buildings she had carried but never owned.

A janitor found her, his broom swatting at her like she was a stray dog. Out.

Still, she returned. Because now she knew something the world didn’t want her to know—she wasn’t just a majdoor’s daughter. She was a thief, stealing knowledge from the future. And she wasn’t about to stop.

#

Kavita had spent weeks scraping knowledge like contraband, sketching on torn paper, and hiding pages between the folds of her dupatta. Knowledge was a dangerous thing. It made people notice.

One day, it did.

Professor Vikram, lean as a corroded needle and twice as sharp, found her sketches scattered near a bench in the library. Rough lines. Charcoal smudges. But something about them caught his eye. After asking around, and being full of disbelief, he made a decision.

The next evening, he spotted her near the construction site, hands still powdered with cement and brick dust. “Did you draw these?” he asked, holding up her work.

Kavita braced for laughter, for scorn, for the world to once again remind her where she belonged.

Instead, he handed her a battered textbook. Basic Principles of Design. “Meet me after seven. We’ll start with geometry.”

She waited for the catch. It didn’t come and her dream felt like more than a fever hallucination under the Delhi heat.

Lessons slipped into stolen hours. Kavita devoured lessons under the dim sputter of the lamp, drawing shapes until her fingers cramped. Her mind, trained to measure cement and ration rice, now calculated angles and stress loads.

Vikram didn’t praise. He corrected. “Again,” he’d say, handing back her flawed calculations without a glance.

But his belief in her was a lifeline.

Kavita dared to imagine it now—an exam hall, a sharpened pencil, and a world that finally had to let her in.

#

Destiny had the hands of a careless child. As they say, nothing is more poisonous than hope.

The scream cut through the afternoon like a dull blade, jagged, out of harmony. Kavita dropped the water bucket. The metal clanged against the stone, but the sound didn't register as she ran.

The site was a mess of dust and shouted orders. A beam had slipped. The hoist had given up. And Bholaram was on the ground, his leg twisted into something that didn’t belong to him anymore. Blood darkened the dirt. Workers heaved him free, muttering prayers and curses, but none of them stopped to ask if he would survive. That wasn’t their job.

No ambulance, of course. Just a wooden cart with wheels that screamed louder than her father did. By the time they reached the government hospital, the doctor barely looked up. “Permanent disability,” he muttered like he was diagnosing the weather.

The real disaster arrived after sundown.

Ramadhir kicked open their tin door, all sweat and whiskey. “No cripples in my camp,” he spat. “Pack up.”

Kavita’s mother begged. Kavita argued. Ramadhir laughed.

“Compensation? Bloody cockroaches!” he echoed, wiping his mouth. “For what? A broken tool?” Then, turning to her: “You want to stay? Stop playing with your nonsense and work double shift from tomorrow.”

Then he was gone, leaving behind the smell of cigarettes and authority.

Her father moaned beside her. Her mother held back tears. Kavita sat in the dim light, staring at the sketches in her lap.

Bholaram called her over as the city swallowed the last of the light. “Enough, Kavita,” he rasped. “No more books. No more nonsense. You think those college people care about us?” He coughed, wincing. “Tomorrow, you take my place. That’s the end of it.”

She wanted to scream. Tell him he was wrong. That she wasn’t built for this. But the truth settled in his hollow gaze—dreams were for people who could afford them. She nodded, walked outside, and stared up at the half-built skyscraper. Udaan. It stood like a monument to men who were worth something.

The textbook Vikram had given her was buried somewhere under a pile of rags. Hope? No, not here.

Hope was for people with places to go.

#

Days passed. Mornings came. She lifted bricks, skin cracking, lungs filling with cement, dragged buckets of gravel through the sludge, her fingers raw, her back screaming. The sun watched like a bored butcher, but the real weight stayed in her chest.

Then one day a voice. Crisp, misplaced. “Kavita?”

Professor Vikram. Standing at the edge of her world in his spotless shirt, looking like he had wandered into the wrong story.

“Why’d you stop coming?” he asked. “You were doing so well.”

She stacked bricks, stacking silence between them.

He stepped closer. “You have something rare—talent, grit. Don’t throw it away.”

She laughed, the bitterness evident. She stopped, her hands shaking. “What’s the point?” she snapped, voice cracking. “My father’s broken. We were almost out on the street. Talent doesn’t fill an empty stomach.”

Vikram’s face softened. But she turned away. The weight of survival was heavier than any brick.

#

Kavita stood at the edge of the construction site.

Her father’s words echoed, the same way hunger did: “Dreams are for those who can afford them.” But then there was the professor’s voice, cutting through like the shrill horn of a bus about to run you over: “You have something rare.”

She had ten days before the entrance exam. Ten days to outrun fate. To make something of the knowledge scavenged like scrap metal.

Step one: swallow pride, which, to be fair, was already extremely malnourished.

She walked toward the group of college students huddled near the site, sipping chai and debating the tensile strength of cantilever beams—important knowledge for the elite few designing a city they’d never have to break their backs building.

“Bhaiya, I need help,” she said. Her voice betrayed her—steady, but just enough of a tremor to invite amusement. One of them, Aryan, leaned back with a smirk, already prepared to shoo her out of existence like the beggar he thought she was. Then she pulled out the sketches.

Thin lines given shape with a cracked pencil. Imperfect but precise. Buildings she knew by touch, by weight, by the way, they groaned under the strain of indifferent engineering.

Aryan hesitated and heard her story. “Fine. But you’ve got no time to waste.”

She studied that night. One candle at a time. Kerosene had long dried out.

She traced diagrams, memorized equations, and willed her exhaustion into something useful. Sleep was for those who didn’t have deadlines bearing down on them.

Exam day arrived, wrapped in the damp breath of early morning smog and angry shouts of early commuters. The college loomed ahead—glass, steel, and air-conditioning cold enough to preserve meat. The students walked in, lifted by coaching centers and generational wealth. Kavita walked in on nothing but fumes and misplaced charity.

She sat at the back. The borrowed pen felt like a foreign object as if it knew it belonged to a better life and resented the temporary deviation. The invigilator droned.

“Begin.”

The paper stared back at her, unimpressed.

Angles she’d never calculated. Concepts she’d barely touched. And then—one question. A beam under load. She had seen beams suffer. Had watched her father mutter curses while reinforcing them with instinct and desperation.

She closed her eyes. The site emerged in the darkness of her mind, loud, chaotic, real. She saw the concrete struggle, the rods inside it like brittle bones. Her hand moved. Calculations scratched into existence, half-logic, half-memory, all hope.

The final bell rang, and she was still writing.

Outside, the world continued as if nothing had changed. Maybe nothing had. The hammers still clanged. The site still stood, waiting for someone else to give it a purpose.

But she walked inside it differently now. She had fought. And that was its kind of foundation.

#

The days after the exam blurred into a jumble of sweat, cement, and the slow crawl of time. Kavita was back at the construction site, hauling water buckets, stacking bricks, and perfecting the callouses in her hands. At home, her father crawled around, pretending he hadn’t pinned his last shred of dignity to her success. Kavita had seen that look before—on laborers watching cement dry, knowing they’d have to break and redo the whole thing if it cracked.

The day the results were due, after work, she slipped away to the college notice board, dodging security guards who had perfected the art of cursing away the unwashed masses. The list was up. She scanned the names, her lips forming silent prayers to a god she didn’t quite believe in. Kavita Kumari. Her name. But beside it—47th percentile. Not enough. The cutoff was 60th. The universe had spoken: dreams were for people who could afford them.

She walked back past the towers, their glass facades gleaming with expensive indifference. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream. She wanted to find the engineer who designed these buildings and ask if he ever considered the ghosts of laborers crushed under his calculations. Instead, she went home, sat beside her father, and ate watery dal in silence. No one asked. No one had to.

The next morning, Vikram found her at the site. He looked at her like she was still something rare. "You were close," he said. "Closer than most ever get." Then, a card—his version of a golden ticket. A draftsman needed an assistant. "It’s not a degree, but it’s a start. You’ve got talent, Kavita. Don’t let this stop you."

She turned the card over in her fingers. A start. Not a scholarship, not a classroom, but a crack in the concrete she could wedge herself into.

She hadn’t won yet. But she’d fought. And she would fight again.