The third fight came in faster. I was getting more popular. People wanted to see me fight. But this one was different.
His name was Thakur. He had a record at this circuit of seven wins and one loss, which Karthik told me and which I would have guessed from the way he stood in the opposite corner. Not technical in the way the second opponent had been technical. Something older than technique: the quality of a person who has been absorbing damage for years and has decided, somewhere along the way, that it simply does not matter. His build was heavy – not slow-heavy but dense-heavy, the kind that means hits land differently when you land them because there is less give underneath.
He was also, I understood within the first thirty seconds, not going to oblige me by falling over.
He took the first combination without going anywhere meaningful and replied with a straight right that I got most of my guard up for but not all of. I felt it in my jaw and noted it. Not a problem yet. A data point.
The first round went five minutes and at the end of it we were both still standing, which had not happened to me in the previous two fights. Thakur returned to his corner unhurried and sat down with the composure of someone who had expected this to be a long evening and had budgeted accordingly.
I stood in mine and thought.
The question was not whether I could hurt him. I could hurt him. I had hurt him three times in the first round and he had absorbed all three and kept working. The question was architecture – how to structure the second round so that the cumulative weight of damage, landed precisely at the right intervals, reached a threshold his body could not override regardless of what his will intended.
The second round I slowed down and hit harder. Fewer combinations, more weight behind each strike. I took two more punches getting into range – one to the cheekbone that would leave a mark, one to the ribs that I would feel for a week – and paid them as the cost of the position I needed. Then I worked the body methodically, four strikes in sequence to the same location, and watched his guard shift to protect it.
When his guard shifted, his head moved.
The kick that ended it was not a spinning technique. It was a simple rear-leg head kick, thrown with the full rotation of the hip and the accumulated weight of two rounds' momentum behind it. His guard was fractionally out of position and fractionally was enough.
He went down and did not get up in the way that meant the referee did not need to count. He was breathing and his eyes were tracking. He had just reached the threshold I had been looking for, and his body had made the decision his will had been refusing to make.
The crowd made a sound I had not heard from them before. Something between appreciation and relief, the sound of people who had watched something difficult and were glad it was over and impressed that it had happened.
Back in the corridor I sat on the bench and touched my cheekbone with two fingers. It was already swelling. Karthik looked at it with professional concern and handed me an ice pack.
"You'll need to cover that," he said.
"I know," I said.
I spent the drive home thinking about this problem. The office had a dress code that was business casual but the building had a biometric entry system and Abhijit had eyes that noticed things. A bruise the size of a palm on my cheekbone was not a detail that would go unobserved or uncommented on.
The solution arrived in two parts. The first part was a beard, which I began growing the following morning and which, within ten days, had achieved the thickness needed to break up the landscape of my face enough to make a fading bruise significantly less visible. The second part was, and I want to be clear that I am not proud of this, a small tube of tinted moisturiser that I purchased from a pharmacy in Koramangala under conditions of maximum personal discretion, paid cash for, and transported home inside a paper bag from the adjacent bakery as though it were a pastry. It worked. Nobody at the office said anything. The Colonel noticed the beard and said only, "Suits you," and served more rice.
The fight purse for the third bout had been forty thousand. The winnings on top brought the total to seventy. I added it to the growing stack of envelopes in the bottom of my cupboard under a pile of folded winter clothes I had not needed since leaving the northern winter behind.
I was changing physically in ways I could track in the mirror and the Colonel could track in the quality of my appetite at supper. The heavy muscle mass I had built over years of maximum-load training was redistributing. I was losing bulk from the upper body and gaining it in efficiency – more speed in the fast-twitch groups, more endurance in the sustained work. The net result was that I was still large but leaner, harder in the way that a rope is harder than a post. Less impressive as a static object. Considerably more alarming when it moved.
The Colonel looked me over one Friday evening as I came in from training and said, with the directness of someone who has spent decades making fast accurate assessments of men, "You're not just lifting weights."
"No," I said.
"Competition?"
I paused just long enough that he understood the answer was yes and the specifics were not available.
He accepted this without pressing. "Whatever it is," he said, "respect your recovery. A man your size burns through reserves faster than he knows. Eat properly and sleep." He looked at me a second longer. "And keep your guard up." He said this last line in the specific tone of a man who is being both literal and figurative and intends both meanings equally.
I thanked him and ate a second helping.
The fourth fight was two weeks after the third.
I knew within ten seconds of the bell that this one would be different in a way that had nothing to do with size or speed or technical level. His name was not important. What was important was the way he moved and the way his eyes were positioned – not on my chest where a trained fighter holds his gaze to read the whole body, but darting, calculating, already measuring specific targets that had nothing to do with sport.
He confirmed it in the first exchange. A jab at my face that I slipped, and in the slipping his thumb was extended. Not a fist. A thumb, aimed at my eye socket. I moved my head clear by centimeters and something cold settled into the base of my thinking.
The second attempt was at my throat – a chopping strike with the edge of his hand during a clinch that the referee technically should have stopped but did not. I rolled my chin down and took it on the jaw instead, which is unpleasant but survivable. The third was a knee aimed forward at my groin during what looked from the outside like a grapple and which I blocked with a leg rotation that cost me my balance for a half-second.
I was angry. I want to be accurate about this. I was not furious in a way that clouded anything. It was the cold, focused variety of anger that I had first encountered at sixteen in a courtyard in Karimpur – the kind that sharpens rather than blurs, that takes what would otherwise be controlled and adds precision to it.
I did not fight dirty in return. That was a line I had no interest in crossing and no need to cross. What I did was methodical and clean and substantially more thorough than the previous three fights. I worked his guard apart with a patience I had not needed before and landed strikes with the accumulated intent of someone who has decided that the problem in front of them requires a complete solution.
He was tough. He did not make it easy. He landed several shots of his own, including one legitimate elbow to my brow that opened a small cut and added a second cosmetic problem to the beard-and-moisturiser management system I had already established.
The final kick was a rear spinning heel that caught him mid-torso and mid-chin in rapid sequence. The torso strike turned him and the chin strike ended the discussion. He went backward and sideways simultaneously, which is an unusual trajectory, and the crowd at the ringside scattered briefly as he cleared the ropes and landed in the aisle between the front row and the ring. Nobody was hurt. He was collected efficiently by the corner staff and the referee and assisted to the back.
The crowd made a noise that I suspect the promoters had been hoping to hear since the first fight.
Ravi found me in the corridor afterward with an expression that I now recognized as his satisfied face.
"Top of the card next time," he said. "The purse will reflect that."