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Many begin their urban careers like Archana Kelkar, a 16-year-old girl who spent her childhood down the road from Sanjay’s family, in a one-room mud-and-dung hut with her parents, uncle, aunt, brother, and sister. Three years before, a mysterious crop disease had ravaged the Kolhewadi rice harvest. Archana, her sister, and her brother were the first Kelkars to make the trip northward on the Konkan Railway to find work in the city.

Today, Archana spends her nights curled on the polished marble living-room floor of a large middle-class apartment in Goregaon, a northwest Mumbai high-rise enclave. She is the live-in housemaid for a university-educated couple who work as composers in the Bollywood film industry; they have family roots in the same region of southern Maharashtra and found Archana through that network. Archana cooks, cleans, and maintains the house six days a week, sleeping across the room from the couple and waking before them to prepare their morning meal.

In exchange for this, Archana is paid exactly nothing. Like many middle-class Indian couples, her employers keep her, in a vestige of the caste system, on a promise to ensure her urban welfare, plus some funds sent to her family to support them between harvests, but, more importantly, on a guarantee that they will pay her dowry and other costs when she marries a village boy, likely at 18. Dowry fees are a constant and agonizing source of worry for peasant farmers, most acutely in India but to a lesser extent throughout the developing world.* A few decades ago, a small sum of cash and a cow may have sufficed, but the urban revolution has placed fast-mounting obligations of cash and treasure on parents of girls. Officially, the couple say they are saving Archana’s salary earnings on her behalf, and she eagerly embraces this arrangement, though her form of employment still falls within most accepted definitions of slavery.

Given this, it might seem natural that Archana will return to the village when she marries and that her migration to Mumbai, like so many others’, will have been strictly temporary and contingent. She yearns to go back. “I terribly miss the smell of bamboo forests and the music we sing together in the village,” she tells me as she cleans the floor. Yet there is a powerful force pulling her toward permanent settlement in the city, whether she realizes it or not. That force is her 21-year-old brother Anant who has found his place in Mumbai.

I meet Anant at an air-conditioned pathology laboratory in Vile Parle, which, today, is a mix of tree-lined streets and dense slums near the Mumbai airport. His start in Mumbai was even more perilous than Sanjay’s or his sister’s: this extremely tall and thin young man arrived here at the same time as his sister and moved into a one-room chawl with his uncle, who had been in the city for 20 years and considers himself a permanent urbanite. After staying home with his uncle for a month, he finally found a job at a factory making springs, a hard physical job for the outrageously low wage of 1,200 rupees ($25) a month. Then he worked for an office-cleaning agency for four months, cleaning all night for 2,500 rupees a month, still not enough to give him any hope of living on his own. Then, one day, his luck changed, as it so often does for rural arrivals. Cleaning a gymnasium early one morning, he struck up a conversation with a wealthy Maharashtrian doctor and helped him with his weights. They developed a friendship in the weightlifting room, and soon Anant was hired as an assistant. His training wage is 3,000 rupees ($63) a month, allowing him to save, in the forbidding Mumbai shantytown property market, to purchase a real home in one of the better slums. He misses the rice and livestock of his home, he says, but he realizes now that the urban life will give his family options they never could have dreamed of before, and he hopes to move them all over for good someday.

The back-and-forth movements of people like Sanjay, Archana, and Anant have eluded most