Every city has two skylines. There is the one that appears in tourism brochures — glass towers, expressways, gleaming metro stations. And then there is the other one: cramped settlements hemmed in by those very towers, where families negotiate every day for the basic dignity of a roof that doesn't leak.
It is the second skyline that Niteesha Salgaonkar writes about. Her debut work of fiction, The Homes We Dream Of, arrives at a time when India's urban development story is being told almost entirely from the top down — and makes an urgent, unambiguous case for hearing the voices at the bottom.
The World of Lotus Nagar
The novel is set in Lotus Nagar, a fictional settlement that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time in the resettlement colonies and informal clusters that ring Indian cities. At its center are Durga and her young daughter Radha — a mother and child trying to hold a life together in a home that is, in every sense of the word, precarious. Leaking tin roofs. Walls that shudder in the monsoon. Spaces so overcrowded that privacy is a luxury no one can afford.
What distinguishes Salgaonkar's approach is restraint. She does not reach for melodrama. Instead, she builds tension through accumulation — a flickering bulb, a worried glance, the sound of rain on tin at two in the morning. Fear in The Homes We Dream Of is not dramatic. It is chronic.
The plot pivots on the arrival of redevelopment promises — the kind that come with government announcements, community meetings, and freshly printed pamphlets — only to disappear into the machinery of bureaucratic delay. The wait stretches. The uncertainty compounds. And in one of the novel's most striking passages, twelve-year-old Radha sits down and writes a letter — a simple, direct plea on behalf of her family and every family like hers — that crystallizes what the book is really about: the distance between those who make policy and those who live inside its silences.
Policy and Its Human Cost
Salgaonkar is not writing a polemic, and that is what makes the book work. The critique of administrative failure is delivered quietly, through the lived experience of people waiting — not through argument. The reader does not need to be told that housing is a matter of dignity. They feel it, page by page, through the anxiety of not knowing whether tomorrow's roof will hold.
This is, of course, not fiction for fiction's sake. The conditions in Lotus Nagar mirror realities documented by urban researchers, journalists, and housing advocates across the country. Millions of families in Indian cities live under threats of demolition, displacement, or simple structural collapse. Redevelopment projects that promised transformation have, in many cases, either stalled indefinitely or delivered outcomes that displaced the very communities they claimed to rehabilitate.
The book does not offer easy answers to any of this. It offers something rarer: genuine attention.
The Author's Own Story
Salgaonkar's biography lends her writing a particular kind of authority — not the authority of expertise, but of proximity.
The daughter of an Army civilian, she lost her father early and was raised by a single mother. By the time she was still in school, she had taken up teaching to support herself — an experience that placed her alongside families navigating poverty and precarity long before she thought of herself as a writer. Her professional career in education brought her into sustained contact with army widows, underprivileged families, and communities housed in conditions not far removed from Lotus Nagar itself.
Over time, that exposure pushed her beyond the classroom. She has worked as a CSR activist, a spiritual healer, and an advocate for environmental welfare — the kind of ground-level engagement that rarely produces tidy narratives but almost always produces honest ones. She has also built a parallel identity as a singer, receiving recognition through awards including the Rashtriya Pratishtha Puraskar and the India Karaoke Superstar title, among others.
What emerges from this unusual trajectory is a writer who does not need to imagine her characters' lives from the outside. She has been close enough to understand what it feels like to wait, to hope, and to keep going anyway.
Why This Book, Why Now
There is a version of the housing rights story told through data — square footage per capita, slum population percentages, redevelopment project timelines. That story is important. But it is not the story most people carry with them.
The Homes We Dream Of tells the other story: the one where the data points have names and daughters and letters they never know whether to send. In doing so, it joins a small but vital tradition of Indian fiction that insists on holding the urban poor in focus even as the larger culture looks past them toward whatever comes next.
The title is deliberately simple, and deliberately sad. The homes these families dream of are not mansions. They are dry, safe, stable places to sleep. The gap between that modest dream and the reality of their lives is the book's entire subject — and, in a quietly devastating way, its most powerful argument.
The Homes We Dream Of by Niteesha Salgaonkar is available now on Amazon — https://amzn.in/d/06etj2yr
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