CHAPTER 20 The Calm #2
Somebody had ordered mithai from the expensive place in Breach Candy, in boxes built like jewellery cases. Somebody else had found a speaker and put on old Bollywood, songs about money and getting to the top. The junior executives began taking selfies with the orchids.
Raghav went to the window with a glass he was not drinking.
Below, Mumbai was trying to get dry. Water ran off the half-built towers in thin bright falls. The lots between them were lakes with cars in them. At the light on the Kalanagar side a man was selling umbrellas, ignoring the sun, on the reasonable assumption that it wouldn't last.
In the glass, laid over all of it, he could see the room, and Arvind in it. He had not moved from his chair. He had not celebrated. He had not once looked at his phone. He sat writing at a steady pace with the party going on around him like something in the next room.
"You know what's remarkable?" Krishnamurthy had come to stand beside him with a fresh glass, tie already loosened.
"A fortnight ago I thought — I don't mind saying it — I thought we were finished.
Founder in a lift shaft. That business with Rane.
Legal dead at her own desk, God rest her, and Singapore ringing me every hour asking if there was anything else they should know. " He drank. "And look. Look at us."
"Yes," Raghav said. "Look at us."
"It's as if the whole thing was — I don't know. A filing error. Something that got corrected."
Behind them, in the glass, Arvind's pen stopped moving. For one second, no more. Then it went on.
"Filing errors," Raghav said.
"Exactly! That's what I'll say to the Bloomberg woman. Every company has filing errors. The great ones know how to correct them." He clapped Raghav on the shoulder, hard. "Enjoy it, Malhotra. Nobody gets two of these." And went off toward the mithai, a little drunk on having survived.
Raghav stayed where he was. In the reflection he watched Arvind stand and gather his things in three movements — notebook, glasses case, briefcase — and put the pens into the breast pocket of the grey jacket, where they made three small bulges, evenly spaced.
He did not need to turn round to know the man was coming across the room toward him. He turned round anyway.
"Congratulations, sir," Arvind said, in his flat administrative voice. "The company is stable again."
"Is it?"
"Oh, yes. Very stable. All irregularities have been—" the smallest pause, a man choosing a word from a drawer "—resolved.
" He adjusted his cuffs, left, then right, a millimetre each.
Then he looked past Raghav at the window, at the sun on the water and the umbrella seller, the way a man looks at weather he intends to remark on.
"I hear you have been to Cotton Green," he said. "Very damp this time of year."
Raghav did not move. Not moving was a thing he had found he was good at. It was not the same as courage. It would have to do.
"I've been a lot of places," he said.
"Yes. That is what I hear." Arvind took the glasses off, looked at them, put them back on.
"Building maintenance tonight. Three a.m. Lifts, lighting, the server floors — systems will be briefly unavailable.
Documented in advance, of course. There is a circular.
You may not have read it; you have been busy.
" A beat. "I mention it only so that nobody is inconvenienced.
People do wander into buildings at night.
It is best if they know when the lights will be off. "
"Thank you," Raghav said. "That's very considerate."
"It is in the circular." He looked at the room once — the orchids, the phones, the young men with the mithai — the way you look at a desk you have decided to leave as it is. "I should go. There is the reconciliation to begin. Sir."
He left without waiting for a reply. He passed Meera, who did not look up. He passed the junior executive with the K, who stepped back without knowing why. Then he was gone into the corridor and the door swung shut behind him.
Raghav looked at Arvind's place at the table. Nothing. No glass, no napkin, no folded programme. The chair had been pushed back in to exactly where it had been before anyone sat in it. Only the soda-water ring on the wood, drying, and in a minute not even that.
◆
The party went on without noticing it had lost anyone.
Meera was live-tweeting the room, #TrinityTriumphs, thumbs going: a photograph of the signed folder, a photograph of Krishnamurthy's tie.
Somebody turned the music up. Somebody said the sun was still out, and a small group went to the windows to check and came back reassured.
"More champagne, sir?" A waiter at his elbow, bottle wrapped in white.
Raghav looked at his glass. Still full. The bubbles had gone flat while he wasn't watching.
"No," he said. "I think I've had enough."
Krishnamurthy tapped a spoon against crystal at the far end.
"One more, one more, humour an old man — to Krishnan Deshpande, who should be standing here, and who would have hated every word of this, and stayed anyway.
" Glasses went up, and the applause came again, louder than before, because they had all needed a name to put it on and the dead man's was the safe one.
Raghav raised his flat glass with the rest, lowered it, and looked past the applause to the wall by the door where the catering staff had stacked the empty crates.
Alisha Verma was standing there.
She had not been on the list. He had approved the list on Monday, in a car, and hadn't needed to read it to know her name wasn't on it.
The board had thanked its consultants on Friday.
This morning was for principals. She stood against the wall in a dress the colour of the wet stone outside, a flute in her hand she hadn't touched, one earring turning slowly between finger and thumb.
She was not looking at Krishnamurthy or the folder or the sun.
She was looking at him, and had been, he understood, for some time.
The applause went on. Under it, across thirty feet of orchids and champagne and people congratulating themselves, she held his eyes and let her mouth make one word, slowly, so there could be no mistake.
Tonight.
Then a waiter went past with a tray, and when he had gone the wall was just a wall with crates against it. A full glass stood on the top crate, untouched. The door to the corridor swung by half an inch, and stopped.