Bombay may be India's film capital but Mira Nair, in this fiction feature, eschews the studio for the city's gutters, brothels and jails. She ushers us into the world of the street children who inhabit its teeming demimonde, making homes of alleyways, and surrogate families of beggars, prostitutes and pimps in the hopes of staying out of the government's "children's prisons." Nair found her child actors in the streets, and while she may have taught them the rudiments of acting, they provided in return the soul of her film, which is to be found less in its story than in its rare combination of blunt authenticity and a surprising, uncontrived lyricism. At the film's center is eleven-year-old Krishna (Shafiq Syed), who, deserted by the circus, makes his way to Bombay, a city that eats boys like him for breakfast. Or, more precisely, has them serve breakfast: Krishna becomes the tea boy, or Chaipau, to the local whorehouses. Wide-eyed and wiry, and insufficiently wary, Chaipau, as he is called, gradually learns the ropes in an intimate community of druggies, beggars and all manner of young rip-off artists. Chaipau adopts a friendly prostitute (Aneeta Kanwar) and her little daughter, and falls in love with a virginal neophyte named Sweet Sixteen; in his insistent passion, he becomes an unwitting catalyst in all their lives. In her way, director Nair has called up the spirit of neorealism, both in its challenging love for lives too often dismissed as "tragic," and in its incongruous forays into the magical. She has called Salaam Bombay! a film that "celebrates the spirit of survival." Note: Mira Nair's documentary India Cabaret screens Tuesday, October 17.