The old lane behind Jing'an Temple smelled of mildew, coal smoke, and yesterday's cabbage. Rajendra found the green door, its paint peeling like sunburnt skin. He knocked.
It was opened by a woman so small and wrinkled she seemed made of dried ginger and dust. Mrs. Chen. She looked him up and down with eyes like black pebbles.
"You are the Indian," she stated.
"Yes."
"One week?"
"Yes."
She told him the price. He paid in U.S. dollars. She took the money without counting it, stuffed it into her apron, and stepped aside.
The room was on the second floor, up a staircase that groaned like a dying animal. It was small, clean, and bare: a wooden bed with a thin mattress, a desk, a chair, a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The window looked out onto a sea of grey-tiled rooftops and crisscrossing laundry lines. It was perfect.
"Rules," Mrs. Chen said from the doorway, holding up three bony fingers. "No loud noises. No women. No politics." She looked at him as if expecting an argument. He just nodded. She seemed disappointed, turned, and shuffled back down the stairs.
He dropped his small bag on the bed, sat at the desk, and listened to the sounds of the lane: a bicycle bell, a shouted argument, a radio playing tinny opera. He felt the strange, heavy quiet of being alone in a foreign city where no one knew his name. It was a luxury. He lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl toward the water stain on the ceiling, and did nothing. For the first time in months, he just sat, and the world did not demand anything from him.
The next day's meeting was in a different, slightly shabbier conference room. The men were younger, their suits less impressive. They were less interested in the philosophy of the pressure cooker and more interested in the pipes it moved through.
"Your Singapore company," one of them asked, his English slow and deliberate. "It handles export paperwork. How many containers per month can it clear through Port Klang?"
Another asked, "Your distributors in South India—are they tied to local political families?"
It was a logistical probe. They were mapping his network. Rajendra gave answers that were true but incomplete, like showing someone a map of Bombay but leaving off all the street names. The meeting had a rehearsed, checkbox quality. By 12:30 PM, the tea was cold, the notebooks were closed, and everyone was standing up, exchanging bows and handshakes that meant nothing. Mr. Liang looked pleased. A foundation had been laid. Nothing had been built, but the ground was flat.
"A good start," Liang said outside, lighting a cigarette. "Now we wait. Maybe they send someone to Pune. Maybe not. In China, maybe is a very important word."
With a free afternoon stretching ahead, Rajendra felt a sudden, simple urge: to be a tourist. He bought a cheap plastic camera from a roadside stall, the kind that took flimsy film canisters. He walked toward the Bund.
He spent an hour on the waterfront, taking pictures. The grand, soot-stained buildings of the colonial Bund, looking like tired old Europeans. The muddy churn of the Huangpu River. The hazy outline of Pudong across the water—still mostly fields and low warehouses, but you could feel the future humming there, waiting. He took a photo of a old man flying a kite shaped like a bird with no wings. He thought, Shanti would like that one.
He wandered away from the river, into the maze of markets near Yuyuan. The camera clicked: pyramids of persimmons, rows of hanging roast ducks gleaming with oil, a shop selling nothing but brass locks, an old woman smoking a pipe while her cat slept on a pile of newspapers. He was invisible, just another foreigner with a camera, and the city unfolded around him without caring.
It was in a quieter street, lined with plane trees and walls of faded propaganda posters, that he raised the camera again. He framed a shot of an old stone moon gate, a relic of some razed garden, with a bright blue Flying Pigeon bicycle leaning against it. A nice contrast.
He clicked the shutter.
As he lowered the camera, he saw her. In the visual echo of the shot, standing just under the curve of the moon gate, was Guo Huilan. She wasn't in the frame by accident. She was looking directly at the lens, as if she'd been waiting for him to take the picture.
Before he could process this, she was walking toward him, her heels clicking softly on the pavement. She wore a simpler grey jacket today, but the same severe precision.
"Mr. Shakuniya." Her voice was calm, but there was a thread of purpose in it. "My friend has not come. I need a… stand-in. Can you help me out?" She didn't smile. "I'll repay you sometime later."
It was so blunt it circled back to being funny. Rajendra looked around the empty street. What friend? What stand-in?
"Okay," he found himself saying, the curiosity outweighing the caution. "What do I need to do?"
"Just follow me. It will take five minutes."
She led him down the street, turned a corner, and stopped in front of a bland, three-story building with a small plaque by the door: Xuhui District Civil Affairs Bureau. It looked like the kind of place where people went to register births, deaths, and profound boredom.
Inside, the air was stale. A ceiling fan turned slowly, moving the smell of dust and old paper around. A middle-aged officer sat behind a foggy glass partition, reading a newspaper. He didn't look up until Guo Huilan cleared her throat.
She spoke to him in rapid, low Mandarin. The officer listened, then looked past her at Rajendra. His eyes traveled from Rajendra's face to his shoes and back. He sighed, a long-suffering sound that seemed to come from the bottom of his bureaucratic soul. He muttered something in Chinese.
Guo Huilan ignored it. "He asks if you are sure," she translated, her tone flat.
"Sure of what?" Rajendra asked.
"Of helping." Her gaze was steady, unblinking.
Playing along, Rajendra nodded at the officer. "Yes. I'm sure."
The officer shrugged, as if to say, Your funeral. He slid a single sheet of paper and a cheap ballpoint pen under the glass. "Write," he said in heavily accented English. "Your name. Your father's name. Your mother's name."
Rajendra took the pen. The form was all in Chinese characters. He glanced at Guo Huilan. She gave a slight, encouraging nod. As he bent to write, she leaned in slightly, her hand resting casually on the left side of the paper, obscuring the header.
He wrote:
Name: Rajendra Shakuniya
Father's Name: Vinayak Shakuniya
Mother's Name: Laxmi Shakuniya
He signed at the bottom with a flourish. Guo Huilan took the pen from his fingers, her hand brushing his. She signed below his name with a few swift, practiced strokes of Chinese characters. Her signature looked like a drawing of a swift bird in flight.
The officer took the paper. He glanced at the names, shook his head almost imperceptibly, and disappeared through a door behind him.
They waited. The fan creaked. Somewhere, a phone rang once and was ignored. Rajendra looked at Guo Huilan. She was studying a crack in the linoleum floor, her expression serene.
The officer returned less than two minutes later. In his hands were two small, bright red booklets. He placed them on the counter with a soft thump. He looked at Rajendra, then at Guo Huilan, and recited a line in a monotone voice, like a bus driver announcing a stop.
Guo Huilan translated, her voice clear and calm as a newsreader's. "He says, 'May you live happily. Happy married life.'"
She reached out and picked up one of the red booklets. The officer pushed the other toward Rajendra.
It was a hùnshū. A Chinese marriage certificate.
The air in the room vanished. The creak of the fan, the dust motes in the light from the window, the bored expression on the officer's face—it all snapped into a terrible, silent clarity.
Rajendra stared at the little red book on the counter, then at the one in Guo Huilan's hand. Her face was still a mask of perfect calm, but her eyes held a glint of something fierce, final, and utterly, terrifyingly pragmatic.