VOLUME ONE — AWAKENING
CHAPTER FOUR
New Delhi — June 9, 2002
The apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been constructed in the late 1980s and had not been substantially altered since, which meant the walls were a shade of yellow that had once been white, the window frames swelled in the monsoon and jammed in the winter, and the water pressure in the morning hours was a matter of daily negotiation between the three men who lived there and the building's plumbing, which had opinions of its own.
Aman had moved in three weeks before June 7. He remembered this the way he remembered everything from the days immediately preceding his arrival in this body — in broad strokes rather than detail, as if those days had been lived at a slight distance from full attention. He had paid two months' rent in advance: Rs. 3,200 per month, his share of the Rs. 9,600 total. He had carried one bag. He had met his flatmates briefly in the hallway and formed first impressions that June 8 and June 9 had not substantially revised.
He spent the morning of June 9 in the apartment for the first time without an agenda pressing immediately behind the hours. The classified advertisement had been drafted in his head and would be placed that afternoon. The call to Suresh Gupta was planned for the evening. In between there was a Sunday in South Delhi in June, which meant heat, the smell of someone cooking somewhere in the building, and the particular Sunday-morning quiet of a city that had stayed up too late the night before.
He used the time to understand where he was living.
—
Nitin Grover occupied the room at the end of the hallway.
Aman knew this because Nitin's name was on a piece of paper taped to the door — not a nameplate, just a folded sheet torn from a notebook, written in the careful handwriting of someone who took clerical precision seriously even in informal contexts. Nitin was studying for the CA Foundation examination. This Aman had inferred from the stack of ICAI study materials visible through the door on the one occasion it had been open, and from the three different highlighter colours in Nitin's pen cup, which sat on the kitchen counter like a small, organised declaration of intent.
He had seen Nitin in total perhaps four times since moving in. Once leaving at six in the morning with a bag full of textbooks and the focused expression of a man who had somewhere to be that was more important than wherever he currently was. Once returning at ten at night with the same bag, slightly lighter, and the same expression with the focus replaced by a controlled exhaustion. Once in the kitchen, making tea with the economy of movement of someone who had decided that cooking was a logistics problem rather than a domestic experience. And once, briefly, in the hallway — a nod exchanged, three words about the water pressure, and then each of them continued on their way.
Nitin Grover was, functionally, a rumour of a person. He occupied the apartment the way a library occupied a building — his presence was felt through evidence rather than encounter, through the textbooks stacked in the kitchen, the single cup washed and left to dry, the light under his door at two in the morning. Aman found this entirely compatible with his own requirements. A flatmate who was rarely present and asked no questions was, in the current circumstances, precisely the right kind.
—
Siddharth Roy was a different kind of quiet.
Where Nitin's absence was purposeful — driven by a schedule, a syllabus, a set of examination dates that organised his life into blocks of preparation and blocks of recovery — Siddharth's presence was simply undemanding. He was there. He read. He made no claims on the common areas beyond occupying them occasionally with a book and a cup of something warm, and he vacated them without fanfare when someone else needed the space.
Siddharth was studying English literature at a Delhi University college. Aman knew this because Siddharth had mentioned it once, in passing, the way people mention the names of the cities they live in — as context rather than information, offering it in case it was useful and not particularly concerned whether it was. He had a shelf of books in his room whose spines Aman had read once through the open door: a mix of the required and the voluntary, Achebe and Fitzgerald alongside paperbacks whose covers suggested he read for pleasure as well as examination.
On the morning of June 9, Siddharth was in the common room with a novel Aman did not recognise, his legs folded under him on the old sofa that had come with the apartment and would probably outlast all three of them. He looked up when Aman came through, said good morning in the mild tone of someone for whom good mornings were a genuine sentiment rather than a ritual, and returned to his book.
Aman made tea in the kitchen and stood at the window while it brewed.
Through the common room doorway he could see the top of Siddharth's head, slightly bent over the page. The building across the lane was visible past him — the third-floor window where someone had been moving behind a curtain last night now had its curtains open. A child's drawing was taped to the glass. A sun, yellow, with rays going in all directions. The new family's. He filed this automatically and returned to the tea.
—
Tarun Gupta he understood most immediately.
Not because Tarun was simple — he was not, or at least not in the way the word implied — but because Tarun was legible in a way the others were not. He wanted things and he pursued them without embarrassment and he was satisfied with them when he got them. This morning he had wanted to win a cricket match. Yesterday morning he had wanted to sleep until nine. He communicated both desires with the same directness, made no apology for either, and bore no visible resentment when the world declined to cooperate, which it did occasionally.
Tarun was pursuing a BCom degree at a college in East Delhi with an approach to academics that Aman could only characterise as strategic minimalism — the identification of the precise level of effort required to clear examinations without the waste of additional engagement. He had explained this to Aman once, unprompted, in the kitchen, while making Maggi noodles at eleven at night. He had said: I know what I need to know and I know what I don't need to know. He had said this with the satisfied confidence of a man who had arrived at a personal philosophy and found it functional.
Aman had not argued. It was, in its own way, a coherent position.
What he noticed about Tarun, beyond the cricket and the strategic academics and the Maggi at eleven, was the quality of his good nature. It was not performed. It was not the social lubrication of someone managing the discomforts of shared accommodation. It was simply how Tarun was — present, untroubled, genuinely unbothered by Aman's refusals and Nitin's absences and Siddharth's silences, treating all three with the same even warmth of a man who found the world, on balance, a reasonable place to be.
Aman would not have chosen to live with any of these three men. He had not chosen them — the landlord had assembled the arrangement before any of them arrived, placing an advertisement and taking the first three applicants who could pay the deposit. But having been placed here, Aman found that he had no objections to the arrangement. The apartment was functional. The kitchen was shared equitably. The common room was available when he needed it and occupied without intrusion when he did not.
It was, in the particular vocabulary of shared accommodation, fine.
—
He spent an hour after tea going through the apartment with the attention he had given the GK-1 commercial strip on Friday morning.
Not surveillance. Understanding. He wanted to know the building's rhythms, its sounds, its reliable patterns — who used the bathroom at what hour, when the water pressure was strongest, whether the electricity supply was stable or subject to the load-shedding that affected parts of South Delhi with irritating regularity. He wanted to know these things because he would be working here, thinking here, making decisions here for the foreseeable future, and a man who understood his environment made fewer small errors than a man who kept being surprised by it.
The water pressure was best between six and seven in the morning — Nitin had already used it, Tarun had not yet woken. The electricity had cut out twice in the past week, both times in the afternoon between three and five, which suggested a load-shedding schedule he could plan around. The building's chowkidar arrived at eight and left at eight. The front door could be locked from the inside with a bolt that worked, and from the outside with a padlock that was slightly stiff. The letterbox in the ground-floor lobby was checked irregularly, which meant anything sent there might sit for days.
He noted all of this without writing it down.
Then he sat at his desk and looked at what he had in front of him.
—
A desk, a chair, a shelf, and nothing on the walls.
This was what he had arrived with and what he intended to keep. Not from asceticism — he was not opposed to comfort in principle, and he understood that a certain quality of environment improved the quality of work done inside it. But from a specific and considered decision about what was worth spending attention on in the next six months.
He had Rs. 840 in his wallet. The bank loan was pending. The system fund was commercial only. Every rupee that came in through the settlement rewards in the next thirty days needed to go somewhere purposeful, and none of the purposes he could identify included making the apartment more comfortable.
The desk was sufficient. The chair was slightly too low, which he corrected by folding a thick textbook and placing it under the rear legs, which levelled the seat angle and removed the faint back discomfort he had been ignoring for three days. The shelf held his B.Com admission letter, the three-address paper, a copy of the Companies Act he had borrowed from a library, and nothing else.
On the wall above the desk, where another person might have placed a calendar or a photograph or a motivational statement of some kind, there was nothing. A faint rectangle of slightly less-faded paint where something had once hung suggested the previous occupant had felt differently about this. Aman looked at the rectangle for a moment, decided it did not require resolution, and looked away.
He had one rule about the apartment that he had not stated to anyone because there was no reason to state it: he would not bring work home in a way that was visible. No documents on the desk that could be read from the doorway. No phone calls in the common areas about anything substantive. No conversations with Priya, once hired, that could be overheard. Not because he distrusted his flatmates — he had no particular reason to distrust them — but because the habit of compartmentalisation was one of the few disciplines from his previous life that had served him consistently well, and he intended to maintain it.
What happened in this apartment was: a young man studying B.Com, living simply, working part-time at a cyber café he had recently opened. That was the version available to anyone who happened to be looking.
Everything else was filed elsewhere.
—
At two in the afternoon Siddharth Roy knocked on his door.
Aman said: come in.
Siddharth opened the door and stood in the frame, not entering, with the consideration of someone who understood the difference between a conversation that required crossing a threshold and one that did not. He was holding a book. Not the novel from the morning — a different one, thinner, with a worn spine. He said: I found this in the common room shelf when I moved in. I don't know who it belongs to. I thought you might want it if it's yours, or if it isn't, you might want it anyway.
He held it out.
Aman took it. It was a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. Published 2001. The Delhi edition, imported. One previous reader had underlined three passages in pencil and then, apparently, thought better of marking the book further. The underlining stopped abruptly halfway through chapter four.
He looked at the cover for a moment.
He said: not mine. But I'll read it.
Siddharth nodded, satisfied, and withdrew. A moment later Aman heard the sofa in the common room accept his weight again.
He set the book on his shelf. He will read it this week. He had read it before — in 2009, too late to be useful in the way it might have been useful in 2003, which was the particular tragedy of reading the right book at the wrong time. Reading it now, in 2002, with what he knew and what he was about to build, would be a different experience entirely.
Some things are only useful when you are ready for them, he thought. The timing of knowledge matters as much as the knowledge itself.
He had put this in the memory inventory under a different heading. He saw now that it belonged here too.
—
At four-thirty he left the apartment with the classified advertisement drafted in his head and three hundred rupees in his wallet — money he had set aside from his savings for exactly this purpose.
The newspaper office that accepted classified advertisements was on a main road twenty minutes' walk from the apartment. He knew the walk well enough by now: down the lane, left at Ramu Kaka's corner — the stall was closed on Sundays, the equipment covered with a plastic sheet weighted down at the corners with small stones — right at the main road, past the provision store and the chemist and the tailor whose shop was always open and always empty, past the building where the chowkidar sat outside on a plastic chair reading a newspaper with the engrossed attention of a man who took local news seriously, and then another ten minutes along the main road to the office.
The advertisement he had written was precise. He had been precise about the salary — Rs. 6,200 per month, stated clearly, which would filter out candidates who were looking for more and candidates who were suspicious of a number that seemed too high for the role described. He had been precise about the qualifications — organised, English-literate, comfortable with technology, available to start within the week — because imprecise qualifications attracted imprecise candidates and he did not have time to conduct interviews from a long, undifferentiated list. He had been precise about the location — GK-1 South Delhi — because the commute would matter to the right person and there was no reason to obscure it.
What he had not included in the advertisement was any description of what the business was or what it would become. He had listed it as operations support for a new business in GK-1. Candidates would not know what they were walking into until they arrived for the interview, at which point the right candidate would find the uncertainty interesting rather than concerning.
The right candidate. He had a clear picture of what this person looked like in terms of qualities, if not in terms of appearance. Someone who used the minimum number of words necessary. Someone who answered questions with answers rather than qualifications. Someone who, when asked a hypothetical, worked through it practically rather than asking for more information before they had used what they had.
He reached the newspaper office, paid for the advertisement to run in two papers for three days, confirmed the text, and walked back.
—
He called Suresh Gupta from the PCO booth at the end of his lane at six-fifteen.
His uncle answered on the third ring with the unhurried warmth of a man who was glad to hear from anyone who called him, which Aman had always understood to be a genuine quality rather than a practised one.
They talked for eight minutes. Aman explained what he needed: a co-signer for a business loan. Rs. 4 lakh. A cyber café. GK-1. He answered Suresh Gupta's two questions — is it legal, and will you be able to repay it — directly and without elaboration. His uncle said: come on Tuesday. I'll sign whatever needs signing.
Then he said: does your mother know you're doing this?
Aman said: not yet.
His uncle was quiet for a moment. Then he said: she'll be proud of you. She won't say it that way. But she will be.
Aman said: I know.
He hung up the phone and stood at the PCO for a moment, his hand still on the receiver though the call was finished. The lane was cooling slightly as the evening came on. Ramu Kaka's stall was still covered, the small stones still in place at the corners of the plastic sheet. A group of children were playing on the road — some game involving a chalk line and a stone and a system of rules that appeared to be evolving as the game progressed.
He stood and watched them for a moment, which was not something he had planned to do and which he could not entirely account for.
Then he walked back to the apartment.
He had placed the advertisement. He had arranged the co-signer. Tomorrow he will visit the GK-1 shop for the second time and take a closer look at the structural details he had not checked on Friday. Tuesday he would meet his uncle and submit the co-signer form to the bank. This week the first interviews will begin.
The sequence was intact.
One thing at a time, he thought. In the right order. Without rushing what cannot be rushed and without slowing what does not need to be slow.
Upstairs, through the window he could see Siddharth's light on. Nitin's was off, which meant he was either out or asleep, both of which were equally plausible. From somewhere in the building came the sound of a television, the evening news, a voice reading the day's events in the measured cadence of someone paid to make all things sound equally significant.
The apartment was, he thought, exactly sufficient for what it needed to be.
He went upstairs. He made rice and dal on the two-burner stove, ate at his desk, read thirty pages of the Taleb book, and went to bed at ten-thirty.
The ceiling above him was familiar.
He had already memorised it. That was fine. He did not need it to be interesting. He only needed it to be there, consistent and unchanged, while he worked out what came next.
He closed his eyes.
End of Chapter Four
Next: Chapter Five — Family Visit