By Haritha K
On May 2, just days after millions of workers took to the streets across India and the world to mark May Day, journalist and author Neha Dixit spoke to a packed audience at Copley Square in Boston, drawing from her widely acclaimed debut book The Many Lives of Syeda X, a work ten years in the making. The timing felt deliberate and right.
Through her protagonist, Syeda X, Neha charts the lived reality of cheap female migrant labour in India, over 50 jobs in 30 years, none counted in official statistics. This work, which goes unacknowledged by official sources, drives the nation’s economy. These are women creating wealth for Indian suppliers and international corporations under gruelling conditions, while remaining invisible to the system that profits from them.
She talked about Syeda’s family, and about gender roles that shift and reverse in ways that confound expectations where women bear the weight of primary providers while still being abandoned to carry it alone. She also offered a lighter moment: Syeda’s own disappointment at finding a screwdriver on the book’s cover of all things.
Neha spoke with remarkable articulateness, weaving together the stories of Syeda and other characters with a storyteller’s instinct and a reporter’s precision. She also spoke honestly about the difficulties of documentation, about the decade spent meeting Syeda and others, building trust slowly and carefully, until her subjects felt safe enough to let their stories be known. That relationship grew over the years and became inseparable from the work itself. What emerged was not just a portrait of one woman but a whole world of interconnected lives, each illuminating the machinery of exploitation from a different vantage point.
Questions touched on the deep sisterhood running through the women characters, how they find and sustain each other across difference and hardship.
Neha spoke about the relationships of marginalised men with religion too, not as villains, but as people caught in systems that offer faith as the one dignity left to those stripped of everything else. She talked about her methods, years of field visits, returning again and again, letting testimony breathe before concluding. Neha spoke with such humility about moving between worlds, the lives of her characters and her own.
She also acknowledged the difficulty of stepping back into ordinary life after sitting with extraordinary hardship.
And the erasure is ongoing. In April 2026, factory workers in Noida took to the streets against poverty wages and brutal working conditions, workers doing twelve-hour shifts for wages that cannot cover basic survival.
The state’s response was to blame outsiders and conspirators rather than address a decade of frozen minimum wages. Weeks earlier, in Odisha’s Sijimali, tribal communities protesting a bauxite mining project faced police force, their legal protections under forest and land rights laws allegedly bypassed to serve a private company. These are not isolated events. They are the living context of Neha’s book, playing out in real time.
As India endures another brutal summer, a recent investigation by The Wire documents home-based workers in Delhi, women stitching garments, packing goods and embroidering inside cramped homes where temperatures cross 45 degrees Celsius, what one worker described as “like working in a pressure cooker.” These are Syeda X’s sisters in every sense. Their labour feeds the same supply chains, their lives shaped by the same structural abandonment.
Sussen Gazal, a journalist from Brazil based in the Boston area who also attended the event, reacted, “On a May Day weekend, it brought us light into the lives & struggles of Muslim migrant women in India. I know so much more about their historical and ongoing fight for Workers Rights, their strikes, their victories and their families! During her 9 year research, writing her book, Neha not only filled us with India’s mistreatments and injustices regarding their female workforce, but also restored those women, their humanity! I’ll never buy another almond milk or merchandise, without thinking those are always available for us at the expense of Muslim Indian Migrant Women losing their fingerprints and, therefore, their citizen rights! All Solidarity to them and their children!”
In a moment of rising right-wing Hindu supremacy, where dissent is suppressed, and inconvenient histories are being rewritten or buried, voices like Neha’s are what shake us from slumber. That this is her debut book makes it all the more remarkable and necessary.
The event was organised by Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, Boston South Asian Coalition (BSAC), Indian American Muslim Council, and Sapan, hosting a conversation about labour, faith, gender and resistance, in the days after May Day, reminding us that these fights are far from over.
Haritha K works in Human Resources with a focus on people, equity, and inclusion. Outside of work, she is involved with Southasian coalitions and collective movements working towards an equitable world.
Feature image: Neha Dixit speaking at the event. Photo via BSAC