Chapter Five
Chapter
Five
Tejas stood in line at the Sunstag Café at Vittal Mallya Road, which was a five-minute walk from the Akhtar, Kumble & Co.
office. He rubbed the scruff of his beard with one hand as he scrolled through his unread emails.
It was only his second day at his new job, and he already had an overflowing inbox.
He bit his lip to hold back a chuckle when his thumb rested, mid-scroll, on the name Naina Shetty.
It was still wild to him that he’d actually run into her.
A year and a half of trying to find her face in every crowd, hoping for an impossible coincidence, and now, finally, here she was.
Not just in his daydreams, but in his contacts list.
“Hi, what can I get for you?” the barista asked brightly as Tejas got to the front of the queue.
He smiled back. “Can I get a caramel latte with whipped cream?”
“Sure.” The barista wrote down his order on a cup and accepted his credit card, while another barista yelled out, from the end of the counter, “Pumpkin spice latte for Naina, Americano for Anil?”
Tejas turned so fast toward the other side that his neck cricked. There, just a short distance away, stood a frowning Naina. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and shook her head when the barista tried to hand her the latte, reaching instead for the Americano. Anil took the latte, snorting.
“This is why I hate ordering together,” Naina fumed. “They always assume I want the god-awful, basic, overhyped coffee order, just because I’m a woman.”
Tejas tore his gaze off her cute scowl when the barista said to him, “Sir, we’ll call your name when the order’s ready.” Nodding, Tejas took his card back from her. He stepped aside and watched Anil boop Naina on the head while she swatted his hand away. They still hadn’t noticed him.
“Enough about coffee,” Anil said, pushing the door open as cold, drizzly air floated into the café. “We still have to talk about Prince Charming. Did he really—”
Tejas couldn’t help the loud chuckle that escaped his mouth. Anil and Naina froze, halfway out the door, and Naina turned to lock eyes with Tejas. Pink dusted the apples of her cheeks as her nostrils flared, and she all but shoved a laughing Anil out onto the street.
When his name was called, Tejas grabbed his coffee and went outside.
Naina and Anil were a few strides ahead of him, talking animatedly.
She’d seemed so unapproachable to Tejas yesterday, and clearly his second first impression of her had been spot-on.
Where was the energetic, eager, free Naina Stark he’d fallen for seventeen months ago?
Was she giving him the cold treatment because of how they’d left things in Goa…
or had something about her changed since then?
He slowed his pace, not wanting to disturb the two friends or their gossip session that was likely about him.
As he walked to work, he replied to some of his sister’s texts—she still couldn’t believe Tejas had run into Naina—and then he checked the footage from the cat camera he’d installed so he could keep an eye on Astrid while he was at work.
Sure enough, she was napping in one of the many moving boxes Tejas had yet to throw out, her vibrating snores loud and clear.
He grinned and resumed his walk as the tall office building loomed before him.
Astrid seemed more at home in Bangalore.
Maybe it was the weather—a healthy mix of breezy, rainy, and sunshiny, unlike the perpetual heat and humidity of Mumbai—or perhaps she liked that they now lived in a spacious one-bedroom with a small storage area and a balcony.
Despite the beauty and culture infused into every Mumbai street, the rents were always tragically high.
Never again would Tejas have to spend half his paycheck on a matchbox-size studio apartment that was so tiny even his cat seemed to judge him for it.
Tejas tapped his key card against the entrance and took the elevator to the twenty-first floor, heading to his cubicle.
He passed by Naina’s desk and smiled, but she only averted her gaze to her keyboard.
Holding back a sigh, Tejas slid into his chair and greeted his cubicle mate, Dhanush. “Morning.”
Dhanush grinned at him. “It’s a good morning, indeed. My uncle told me we’re getting assigned a bunch of new cases today. I can smell victory already.”
“Nice,” Tejas said, chuckling. He went through his inbox again, noting that Iqbal had assigned to him a workshop on sole-proprietorship law.
The workshop was for a nonprofit that worked with domestic violence survivors, helping them start their own entrepreneurial ventures so they could support themselves and their children.
Per Indian law, neither lawyers nor law firms were allowed to openly solicit business or advertise their services.
Save for hosting a modest website with basic information and taking on countless pro bono cases for PR and word of mouth, law firms couldn’t legally chase after clients without breaching that pesky law.
Tejas had grown up watching American legal thrillers and dramas, but after his first few months at law school, he was shocked by the jarring contrast between the legal systems in the West and in India.
Akhtar, Kumble & Co. boasted an impressive roster of clients, but neither founder had strong nepotistic ties to the corporate world, unlike the law firm Tejas had worked at in Mumbai, where every other client they represented was a friend of a friend in Bollywood who’d done something horrible and now needed a lawyer, stat.
Most of Tejas’s nicer, hardworking, actually innocent clients had been pro bono cases.
AKC, on the other hand, seemed to have good people with good intentions doing good work. Tejas smiled to himself. He’d fit right in here.
An hour later, Tejas sat in the conference room with all the junior and senior lawyers for an urgent meeting scheduled by Iqbal. It was five past ten, but Iqbal had wanted the other managing partner to be present too, and it looked like Ramesh Kumble was late.
Dhanush sat beside Tejas, his brows furrowed. “Apparently there’s a really important client on the case list. I need to land it to get the promotion and the partner mentorship.”
Tejas looked at him curiously. “Aren’t you pretty much a shoo-in? Being Kumble’s nephew and all?”
Dhanush scoffed, as though that were irrelevant. “Iqbal would never let me get it without earning it.” His fingers shook as he drank his black coffee. “I have to prove myself to him.”
Across the table, Naina was in conversation with Anil, their voices hushed.
Tejas’s eyes drank in her snug cream-colored shirt, tucked into a high-waisted pencil skirt, her toned legs crossed.
Her glasses glinted in the light as she shot a glare at the door.
Patience was clearly still not her strong suit. Tejas remembered that from Goa.
Finally, Ramesh Kumble strode into the room and took his seat at the head of the table, next to Iqbal. Chairs screeched and pens clicked as people sprang to attention.
“Good morning, everyone,” Kumble said in his booming voice, his wrinkled hands folded on the table. “I’m sure you’re all eager to take on more cases, and this first one is certainly a big fish. Iqbal, if you please?”
Iqbal nodded, straightening his collar, and went up to present the new case as the room fell silent. He flicked the remote, and a picture of a smiling old man with silver-gray hair filled the presentation screen.
Tejas jerked his head back, having recognized the man.
“Kamal Subramanian,” Iqbal said, standing back and appraising the photo, “is said to be India’s most ethical billionaire.
He’s funded hundreds of infrastructural projects to improve our standard of living, there’s a never-ending Wikipedia page of his philanthropic efforts, and his companies offer well-paying jobs to millions of middle-class college graduates every year across industries. ”
What could this case be about? Tejas wondered. A merger? A patent? Or perhaps a pivot in his business strategy?
“Unfortunately, his PR team is going to have its hands full.” Iqbal flipped to the next slide, his teeth gritting.
The gasp that left Tejas’s mouth was echoed by several other lawyers in the room. The screen now showed a blurry but unmistakable picture of Subramanian being taken away in handcuffs by two cops.
Kumble stood, leaning his hands on the table. “Embezzlement and money laundering,” he said. “An accusation that could destroy not just his stakeholders’ careers but also India’s economy.”
Iqbal clicked over to the next slide. “The press has caught wind of the case as of this morning, although Mr. Subramanian has known this was coming for some time now—which is why he came to us last week.”
“He knew this was coming,” one of the other lawyers repeated. “So he’s guilty?”
Kumble scoffed from his seat. “That’s irrelevant. Our job is to prove he isn’t.”
Tejas bit the inside of his cheek. Well, it seemed AKC wasn’t all that different from the other law firms out there.
This was one of the things Tejas hated about being a lawyer, apart from the long, grueling work hours and the ass-kissing needed to get to the top of the chain: having to put his morals aside and defend the bad guys.
He’d be happy to sit this one out, thanks.
Naina lifted her head and spoke, her words confident. “Sir, I’d like to take point on this case.”
Iqbal cleared his throat. “I appreciate your directness, Naina, but Ramesh and I have already discussed this in private, and we’ve decided to go a different way.”
Tejas thought that would be that, but Naina didn’t seem ready to give up. “I’ve worked on three white-collar criminal cases in the past year and won all of them,” she continued. “I believe I—”