Chapter 1: The God of Small Things
From my throne on the fourteenth floor, the city of Hyderabad lays itself at my feet. By day, it's a mess—a chaotic symphony of honking, haggling, and collective perspiration I do my best to ignore. But at night, under my watch, it transforms. It becomes a silent, glittering circuit board of light, a kingdom of sleeping dreams woven against the black velvet of the Deccan Plateau. This is the only time the city behaves. This is the only time I feel at peace.
On the fourteenth floor, only my light remains on. A single, defiant rectangle of white in the monolithic darkness of the Orion Tower. This is my office. My kingdom. And for me, the real game has just begun.
Inside, the world is one of muted greys and chilled, recycled air. The silence is absolute, a perfect vacuum where a man can finally hear himself think. My rituals, I've been told, are sacred. My manager, Mr. Rao—a man whose intellect is as bland as his beige trousers—calls it OCPD. I call it having standards. First, the keyboard: I slide it until its bottom edge is perfectly flush with the line of the desk. A micromillimeter of alignment that feels like a perfectly tuned sitar string. Second, the mouse: placed at a perfect, non-negotiable ninety-degree angle. Third, my water glass: condensation beading on its side, resting in the exact centre of its square cork coaster. These are not habits. They are the foundations of genius. You can't build a palace on a crooked foundation, can you?
My job title is Senior Data Analyst. It's a name so boring it could sedate a bull. It's like calling Shah Rukh Khan a "professional emoter." What I really am is the king of this digital jungle. The terabytes of data that flow through the bank's servers are my subjects, and I am a just, if demanding, ruler. My gift, or my curse, is that I require the world to make perfect, mathematical sense. A single paisa out of place is not a rounding error. It is an act of rebellion. And I do not tolerate rebellion in my kingdom.
Tonight, like every night after the quarterly reports are filed, is the night of the 're-reconciliation'. A ritual Mr. Rao calls "a waste of company resources." I privately think his daily two-hour lunch break spent watching cricket highlights is a bigger waste, but one must allow the common folk their simple pleasures.
I lean back, the expensive leather of my chair groaning in appreciation, and I hit 'enter'. On my central monitor, a custom script of my own design—my beautiful, brutal baby—begins to tear through the bank's soul. It is not a gentle audit. It is a digital storm, a brute-force interrogation of every transaction across the subcontinent for the last ninety days. A torrent of green text scrolls past, a waterfall of code so fast it would give any other mortal a migraine. But I see it all. I see the patterns, the logic, the perfect, humming symphony of a system in balance. It's my own private concert.
98%... 99%... The river flows, clean and pure. All is well. The numbers are true. The kingdom is secure.
Then, a flash of red.
A single line, stark and bloody against the waterfall of green. An error. A flaw. A traitor.
FLAG: Mismatch Deviation. TR-GL-Acct-774B. Delta: ₹0.03
Three paisa.
I stop the scroll. The humming symphony in my head screeches to a halt. I lean forward, a slow smile spreading across my face. Three paisa. It is nothing. An atom. A speck of dust. An amount our CEO wouldn't bother to pick up if he dropped it.
But for me, it is a challenge. A glove slapped across my face. A whisper in my silent temple, saying, "Catch me if you can."
"Oh, I can," I whisper back to the empty room. "And I will."
My fingers, long and elegant, dance across the keyboard. The rhythmic clatter is the only sound. This isn't work; this is a duel. I pull the transaction. A floral distributor in the crowded chaos of Begum Bazaar had paid a vendor in Singapore. The amount was trivial. But somewhere, in the digital void between Hyderabad and the South China Sea, three paisa had slipped through a crack in my universe.
A familiar heat rises in my chest. Not anxiety. Exhilaration. The thrill of the hunt.
I begin to dig, not like an analyst, but like a hunter on a fresh trail. I pull the transaction histories for both accounts. The data floods my screens, arranging itself into neat, orderly columns at my command. I scan them, my eyes not reading but absorbing the flow, the rhythm, looking for the break in the pattern.
And there it is again. Two months ago. The same two accounts. Delta: ₹0.02
And again. Four months ago. Delta: ₹0.04
My smile widens. My blood runs cold with delight. This isn't a mistake. Mistakes are clumsy and random. This is a pattern disguised as a mistake. It is intelligent. It is deliberate. It is a whisper in a hurricane, designed to be missed. It is a signature. And it is beautiful.
I lean back, the truth of it settling upon me like a perfectly tailored suit. This isn't a flaw in the system. This is a feature. Someone has taught the numbers to lie. And I, Ravi Kiran, have found their first lesson.
Just then, the soft click of a door echoes down the hall. A figure emerges from the offices of the news agency that leases the floor below. It is Maya. A journalist. A creature of chaos, of messy human stories and inconvenient questions. She is a walking, talking anomaly in my ordered world. And, I have to admit, a rather interesting one.
She sees me, a solitary king on his throne, bathed in the glow of his power, and a tired, amused smile touches her lips. "Ravi Kiran," she calls out, her voice echoing slightly in the vast, empty space. "Still here? Are you trying to make the rest of us look bad?"
I swivel in my chair to face her, a slow, deliberate motion. "My dear Maya," I reply, my voice smooth as silk. "I'm not trying to do anything. Some of us are just naturally brilliant. It's a burden, I assure you."
She laughs, a sound like wind chimes in the sterile air. "Of course. And I suppose you're up here solving world hunger with your spreadsheets?"
"Not tonight," I say, gesturing vaguely at my screens. "Tonight, I'm merely fighting a ghost."
She raises an eyebrow, intrigued. "A ghost? In the machine?"
"No," I say, my smile turning sharp at the edges. I turn back to my monitor, to the single line of red that has changed everything. "A ghost in the balance sheet. And I'm about to declare war."