Two months had passed since the first fight. The bottom of my cupboard now held a respectable quantity of cash in envelopes of various sizes, all of it stacked with the organizational instincts of someone who works with data and cannot help sorting things even when the category is technically irregular income from an underground fighting circuit.
Karthik came to me after the sixth fight with a different kind of conversation.
"Someone wants an exclusive arrangement," he said. We were in his office again, door closed.
"Who?"
"I don't know. That's not me being cagey – I genuinely don't know. The approach came through Ravi and Ravi said the client has specifically requested that their identity not be shared at this stage. They want to see your response to the offer first." Karthik paused. "The terms are generous. Fight fees guaranteed regardless of outcome, with winner bonus on top. Exclusive means you fight only on cards they sanction, which in practice means the top two or three cards a year, not the smaller monthly ones. You'd be under contract to a single patron."
"And in exchange?"
"In exchange, they have first claim on your appearances and the associated commercial interests. Whatever those turn out to be." He looked at me carefully. "It's a significant step up in money and profile."
I thought about it for the time it deserved, which was about thirty seconds.
The money was not the problem. The problem was the word exclusive and the fact that I did not know who was on the other end of it. In any other context, signing an exclusive arrangement with an anonymous patron would be inadvisable. In my specific context – working inside the most sensitive data infrastructure of a company that built classified systems for defence ministries and intelligence-adjacent agencies, having already been given one clear warning about what happened to people who attracted the wrong kind of attention – it was not inadvisable. It was a category of risk I had no business entertaining.
There were also, I noted to myself, quite a few people of influence and resource who attended these events. Some of them were straightforwardly wealthy entrepreneurs who came for the same reason wealthy people have always come to underground prizefights, which is that it gives them proximity to something visceral and unmanaged that their ordinary lives do not provide. But some of them were not simply that, and in a city that served as the operational base for several significant tech-adjacent intelligence interests, the category of 'not simply that' covered a wide range of possible scenarios.
"Tell Ravi I'm interested in principle," I said, "but not in anonymous principle. I'll meet with whoever this is before I sign anything. If they want exclusive access to me, I want to know who I'm dealing with. Name, background, what their actual interest in this arrangement is." I paused. "If they're serious about the offer, that's a reasonable condition. If they won't agree to it, that tells me something I need to know."
Karthik nodded slowly. "I'll pass it on." He looked mildly impressed, which for Karthik was a substantial display. "Most fighters would have just taken the money."
"Most fighters don't work where I work," I said.
The message from Abhijit came on a Thursday morning, between the scrum and the first coffee of the day. It appeared in my internal chat with the typical cryptic air of a message from a man who does not reveal more than he wants to.
It said: Come see me when you have a moment. Today. It is important.
Abhijit's important covered a wider range than most people's important. I had seen it applied to a latency issue in a pipeline handshake and to a conversation about the division's classification protocols in the same week. The word did not necessarily mean crisis. It meant that whatever it was, it had his full attention, which was a different kind of signal.
I finished what I was working on, which was a section of the architecture documentation for Vikram's defence sector project, saved and locked my screen, and walked to his office.
He was standing rather than sitting, which was unusual. Three monitors still running, paratha nowhere in evidence, which in my experience of Abhijit meant he had been in the office for some time without stopping to eat, which itself meant he had been thinking hard about something.
He saw me come in and closed the door behind me, which he did not always do.
"Sit down, Das," he said. Then, in the tone of a man who has received really upsetting news: "I've had a call from Helsinki."