We arrived at noon, the bar room noisy with chatter. For a moment I tensed, unable to spot a free seat. They’d refurbished the lounge at Christmas, new green-leather chairs and small glass-topped tables arranged in unfamiliar configurations, the pillars of the massive wooden bar, a relic of British times lurking at the back, freshly painted maroon. A bearer who knew me salaamed and gestured to a table by the windows where elderly men were rising from their chairs. As Jeff and I made our way across, a few heads turned. Jeff was an impressive man, probably six-four, towering over me. An acquaintance called out ‘Happy New Year,’ since we were just a week into 2002. I put up my hand in greeting, glad to have him see me with an American. He’d know it could mean only one thing: something was happening for me.

“Hello, young man, how are you?” a senior lingering at the table gave me a thick-lipped smile. His tweed cap was pulled sharply over his brow, dark age spots staining his cheeks. To my embarrassment R.K. Khanna had recognized me before I realized who he was. I hadn’t seen him in months, though my father would tell me about their occasional encounters. “Have Satish give me a ring,” he commanded. “We were supposed to play a round of golf last month. Then I got busy with grandchildren arriving from the States.”

My father would love to play—anytime—yes, I’d tell him. R.K. Khanna remained a man of great stature, widely-respected for his proposed reforms, my father proud to count himself in his social circle. I turned hurriedly to introduce Jeff—“visiting from California—he’s got a tech firm there”—noting to Jeff that Mr. Khanna had been instrumental in implementing liberalization policy in the very beginning, back in the ’80s.

“Jeffrey Close.” Jeff thrust his hand out, making an announcement of his full name. Surprisingly thick, ungainly fingers for a slender man.

Mr. Khanna’s smile diminished as he shook Jeff’s hand, perhaps offended by the aggressive forthrightness. We got into Jeff’s business and Khanna boasted, correctly, “You won’t find a market like this anywhere in the world. People have spending power now,” and to which Jeff replied with an uninspired description of biometrics before tossing in a strange detail—someone had considered mapping the body’s unique blood vessel patterns as a form of identification. He held up a hand—he relied on something simpler.

His firm had a remarkable facial recognition system in the pipeline—imagine the uses—I added, then worried I’d overstepped my bounds. Mr. Khanna cocked his head, intrigued. “Facial recognition? A machine will be able to tell us who we are?” Jeff smiled, concurring, but not before noting he had debated a long time whether to enter India or China first, then decided why not both. I gave a small laugh. In the car he’d mentioned he was coming from an industrial city in China where he’d signed a deal to produce his fingerprint scanner, and I wondered if the confidential news was meant to foretell what he had in store for me.

“You’ve got a fine counterpart in Vinay,” said Mr. Khanna, clapping my arm as turned away. My head warmed at the word—counterpart. I had no official connection to Secure Systems, Inc. as yet. I’d met Jeff for the first time half an hour back when I picked him up at his hotel. Last year, I’d met two of his senior people, apparently garnering their approval. Without a local partner, no foreign company could operate in India, and from what Jeff’s people intimated, I was the primary candidate on their short list. It was up to me, then, to establish a rapport with Jeff and persuade him I was worthy.

As soon as we took our seats, the window giving us a view straight down the emerald fairway of the 18th hole, I explained to Jeff about R.K. Khanna, “He was very close to Rajiv. His Cabinet Secretary.” Jeff’s expression didn’t change so I realized I had to clarify—“Rajiv Gandhi”—who we still remembered affectionately by his first name. Jeff nodded and inquired, “Is that like a Chief of Staff?”

“It’s the most powerful bureaucrat in India,” I declared. “The Prime Minister’s right-hand man.” Nothing could have better illustrated my connections to the right people than this chance meeting with Mr. Khanna.

At home we were too excited by the possibilities. Night and day my father and I debated the best way to obtain a letter of intent from Jeff during his three-day visit. Before a contract could be hammered out, a one-page letter naming me his joint venture partner would authorize me to represent Secure Systems at the Commerce Ministry, Reserve Bank, and any other government agency from whom we required approvals to establish a manufacturing business. Some evenings at home, we behaved as if the letter were already in my possession and I was on solid ground again, my father and I arguing over how to raise our share of the capital, who to tap as investors, whether or not to do a public offering when the time came. If my daughter, Aditi, happened to be in the TV room with us, watching her cartoons or some Hindi serial of my mother’s, she’d press her hands over her ears and cry out for quiet. If my mother interjected a cautionary remark, applying the brakes on my plans as usual, we’d dismiss her as short-sighted.

My fiancé Bindiya would observe us tussle without a word, still shy to assert her opinions in front of my parents, though she’d sometimes gently flick her head at me to say, “Let it go.” One night, as I was dropping her off at her mother’s flat, she pulled away from my embrace in the car and gave me a skeptical look, her kajal-darkened eyes crinkling up. “You’re living and breathing this project all the time,” she said as if it disturbed her. I hadn’t fully realized until then that I could make anything a passion if I had enough need for it, letting it consume me when I saw everything it could be. People called me carefree, because I kept a smile on my face. I kept one throughout the whispering about my divorce. Everyone thought they knew me, since I belonged to the right family, the smart crowd.

A thin fellow in uniform, his brass-buttoned coat hanging on him, was passing nearby and I shot my arm in the air. “Bearer!” I called, a little imperiously. The fellow came over with his empty tray, clearing away the untidy sprawl of soiled plates and glasses. I asked Jeff if he’d like a beer and he leaned back, looking surprised. I gave the bearer our order, adding a couple of plates of snacks—we had to come to know one another, to become friends, before we plunged into discussions of a 51:49 joint venture. A potential $12 million collaboration.

“You know what kind of bar we have at the office?” Jeff said. “A juice bar. That’s California for you. And, here, you’ve got people smoking inside.” He shook his head, amused. He had thick wheat-colored hair and sleek, rectangular gold-rimmed eyeglasses that created an impression of youth, though he was in his mid-forties, I’d been told, five or six years my senior.

I laughed, glad to see him relax a bit. “It’s okay, you’re in India now. Beer before lunch is an old tradition.” I left my cigarette pack in my jacket pocket.

“Beer and cigarettes is more like where I grew up. My dad smoked two packs a day.”

“Where did you grow up? Not in California?”

He shook his head. “I’m from the South—a small town outside Atlanta. I was just there for Christmas. I hadn’t been back in seven years, since my Dad died,” he confessed. “I grew up out in the country—some of it’s still nice, around the lake. But a lot of it is built up now. Pretty much unrecognizable, but there’s still not a whole lot to do out there.”

I was taken aback. He came from a posh background, I’d assumed—a Stanford graduate. But he seemed to be saying he didn’t quite fit the polished image he presented in his expensive black jacket and blue shirt with a rich sheen. “I can hear the ‘git’s’ creeping up on me after a week back. Going out to California, I had to change the way I talked. You can’t sound like you’re a country boy and get people out there to listen. Righton was the only one who did.” Righton was his wife, they’d been together in the master’s program in computer science. He’d stayed on at Stanford to do his PhD while she went to Intel, like Arun, a classmate of theirs. Arun, our mutual friend, who had studied with me at IIT before leaving India, knew of Jeff’s desire to expand into Asia. He immediately connected us, following a visit to Delhi two years back when he saw the state I was in after my factory caught fire.

Eight months back, Bob Shamamian, and Pamela, Jeff’s head of finance, stopped in Delhi to meet me during an exploratory trip to Asia. Pamela was chic, sharp, and quick to offer a critical judgment, making it clear she was used to a better world. Her room in a five-star hotel exuded “a musty smell” and two wine bottles I’d ordered at the hotel restaurant had to be sent back because the wine tasted spoiled, “like the cork is mildewed,” she pronounced. By contrast, Bob was easygoing, a jovial, broad-chested man as talkative as an Indian, the two of us staying late at the hotel bar on his second night discussing everything under the sun. He’d been divorced a few years before me and bore his regrets about ending his marriage as I bore mine.

Over the months, he gave me a sense of belonging to Secure Systems’ network, since I’d been referred by a friend of Jeff’s, not a consultant. I couriered him all sorts of information he requested, relying on me as a resource for the electronics security market in India, which he said I had a better grasp of than IT firms he’d spoken to. I’d turned myself into his resource, studying everything I could find on the field and meeting real experts. The dates of Jeff’s visit were constantly postponed. Then, a couple of weeks back, I got a call saying Jeff was coming.

“It’s a shame Pamela couldn’t join us,” I said. She was traveling with him, and though she’d made me uneasy during her first visit, her absence was now more unsettling. What was the reason for her visit to their solicitors’ office? I’d only learned of her change in plans when I arrived at their hotel a little while ago.

“What I would have loved to see is the Taj Mahal,” Jeff said when I asked if I could arrange some sightseeing for them, “but I can’t take a weekend off to travel with the girls at home. It’s our only time together.”

“We went to see the Taj by moonlight once,” I recalled. “It was out of this world, the way the dome glowed under the full moon as if the marble was a piece of the moon itself.” An impression of its silvery curves against the deep-blue darkness came back to me. Sujata and I had stood in awe, gazing at the Taj as if were an image from a dream, her giggles tinkling in my ear. I’d picked her up off the ground, despite her laughing protests—No, Vinay! You’ll drop me!—not caring about the other tourists scattered in the dark, mad with love for her. It was a time before Aditi was born and Sujata’s addictions had not yet announced themselves, a time when she might take one drink too many, or smoke hash in our room like a naughty college girl.

“Next time,” Jeff said about the Taj.

I smiled at the suggestion of his return.

The thin-faced bearer in the large maroon coat brought a tall bottle of Kingfisher dripping with moisture, tipping each glass to pour the beer, the froth slowly rising. I pressed a plate of paneer pakoras toward Jeff, asking the age of his daughters. His youngest was seven, which made me smile. “My daughter’s also seven,” I said eagerly. “It’s a good age, isn’t it? They start to show their own personality.”

A diffuse light came through the window, the straw chicks rolled halfway up the glass. Patches of mist hung over the lawn and fairways, blurring the edges of the thorn trees, and beneath them, a crumbling pink sandstone structure with a domed roof. You could see peacocks walking around there sometimes, I told Jeff, gesturing out the window, they lived in the trees. You’re kidding? He laughed. I laughed, telling him you never knew when one might saunter out on the course. It had to be like this between us, a personal relationship before it could become a partnership. Everything was personal in the end—he had to have faith in me.

Jeff’s gaze remained on the course, a golfer taking a putter from his caddy at the last hole. “Do you play?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I run in the mornings, that’s about it. I did caddy one summer in high school at a country club in Atlanta.”

The golfer jostled his hips, settling into his stance. I fixed my eyes on him, trying not to betray my surprise at the image of Jeff standing at the edge of a parking lot, like the caddies here, poor men crowding together and waiting for a sahib to choose them.

“My dad worked there for many years,” Jeff said. “It was the job he liked best. He spent most of the day outdoors. He got close to some of the members, too, advising them on the side about a subject he had a lot of expertise in—Civil War armaments, collectibles.”

I nodded, too startled to make any comment. He was a self-made man, I understood that. What kind of position would have allowed his father to spend his time outside? A gardener? Groundskeeper? In India what we couldn’t boast about, we kept hidden.

Amid the low roar of voices in the dining room sometime later, as the sun reached through the last shreds of mist to brighten our table, we spooned rice, dal, and a rich, meaty-smelling rogan josh onto our plates. Jeff seemed to like everything he tasted. I asked the bearer to bring tandoori rotis, a club specialty, wanting Jeff to try one. He put his hands up, saying we had plenty. As we ate, I couldn’t hold back any longer. “There’s a lot of money to be made in India, Jeff. A lot of money. There’s no one, absolutely no one, in this sector here as yet. Electronic security is virtually unknown except for some CCTVs a few small importers are bringing in from Singapore and Hong Kong.” His subdued expression caused me to lower my voice. Perhaps he was concerned we’d be overheard or perhaps he was simply taking it all in— his first day in the country. “Your timing would be impeccable—that’s a big advantage. You know, mine was the first factory to manufacture telephones in Delhi when they loosened restrictions in ’86. I jumped in and got the lion’s share of the market. Till then government made all the equipment. In the same way, you’d be the first one bringing in a fingerprint scanner here. Ultimately, I think, the market for biometric technology will be bigger in India than the States, going far beyond server rooms and desktop security.”

Jeff smiled, saying something about how he liked bringing people a product they’d never seen and watching it make an impact no one expected.

“Absolutely. Each and every person’s life in this country can be changed by this technology.” I waited, surprised he didn’t ask what I meant. Even right here, at this moment, I was prepared to tell him I’d commissioned a study of the market and the findings were mind-blowing. I could set the report in front of him at the factory, I kept a copy there under lock and key.

Jeff took a tandoori roti from the bearer and still had no questions. He was a technical man, the fingerprint scanner his “baby,” developed over a number of years with another engineer. It was Bob’s inquiry about the scope for the product in India that drove me to engage two top-notch academics in a market research study, taking a gamble that the substantial investment I made would yield information that would elevate me above other potential partners. “If you have numbers,” Jeff said, gingerly tearing his nicely charred roti, “I’m sure Pam would love to see them.”

I nodded. I had many numbers. I’d sent them over to Bob. Though I hadn’t sent him the most stunning number in the study: one billion. They didn’t know the potential for their technology here, nor had I known initially. When Bob first disclosed that they expected to make an investment of ten to twelve million dollars, I was quietly thrilled. During my best years, when I dominated the city of Delhi in the production of telephone instruments, I hadn’t come close to a million-dollar valuation. Now I questioned whether twelve million dollars would establish a production capacity adequate to the enormous future demand for biometric devices in India. If Jeff wasn’t a man for numbers, then Pamela would surely seize on the potential financial bonanza promised by a forthcoming biometrics-based government project that would encompass the entire population of India. By the time we put up a factory in a couple of years’ time, the government would likely seek a company to supply biometric devices it could distribute across the breadth of the country. With one contract Secure Systems could increase its volume of sales many times over. What was luck but recognizing the right moment to act?

After lunch we strolled down the walkway along the back lawn, the course sprawling in long, slender fairways bounded by trees. A group of men trekked leisurely toward the 18th hole. My daughter had won a putting contest here, I told Jeff, at a children’s party. She’d boldly gone up and asked to take part though she was below the age of entry. He laughed, calling her a “champion in the making.” He’d removed his jacket and slung it over his arm as the sun spread its rays over us. In the shadows of a stand of thorn trees rose the stone monument with a blackened dome we’d seen from the bar. It made Jeff pause now. “What’s that? A shrine or something?”

Walking the course, you came across a number of monuments, I said. Most of them were tombs, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. We took these old structures for granted in India—they’re here, they were always here. The British had built the course on a Mughal ruin, that much I knew. A short distance further, Jeff stopped to look over a much larger monument along the fairway of the tenth hole. The outer wall of the arched gateway had disintegrated in patches, showing mud bricks underneath. “Have they ever found any relics on the course?”

“Relics?”

He used to accompany his father and his friends on digs at Civil War battlefields and camps when he was a boy, he said, as we walked straight toward a beautifully preserved red sandstone building with a tall, swelling dome. They would drive all over the South, taking their metal detector and shovels. He mostly found dropped coins and crushed soda cans, but once he dug up a button attached to a shred of cloth from a soldier’s uniform. In a battlefield in Mississippi, he ended up sifting through the dirt with his fingers and discovered an iron cuff and length of chain. A leg shackle, his father surmised. The shackle haunted him—who was held captive and who’d held him captive? After that he gave up digging, afraid of what he might find in the ground.

We walked around an iron picket fence enclosing the domed monument in the grass. Jeff peered through an open arch in the base of the monument into an empty, dark chamber. The wooden boards hanging from the fence, painted with rules for club members, baffled him. Why would the club degrade a historic site? The club in Atlanta had been discreet in every way—he muttered something about the general manager doing the bidding of the members. He seemed to be speaking about two members whom his father had helped over the years to build museum-quality collections of Civil War collectibles by calling upon all the sources he knew—his dealer friend in the mountains, people he met at hobby shows, small collectors in other states. The trouble arose around a prized flag his father had found for one of them, the last flag raise by the Confederacy, called the ‘Blood-Stained Flag.’ It was the most rare of the Confederate flags because it flew for only a month before the surrender. The design was chilling, Jeff said, a thick red band running down one side of the white banner to symbolize the spilled blood of Southerners. His father spent a few years trying to find one, spreading the word among all his contacts, and after he purchased it in South Carolina he offered it to the club member for double the price. Normally he charged a minimal commission, but this was a prize he believed he deserved to be rewarded for. He never should have bragged about it to the other member, who demanded to have it for twice what he was asking. The dispute ended with the member complaining to the club that his father was carrying on a racket in Civil War memorabilia, harassing members to buy relics of questionable origin from him. The other member remained silent. The way the general manager treated his father—Jeff shook his head. Wouldn’t even listen to his side of the story. So his father took that ‘Blood-Stained Flag,’ which he’d paid thousands for, spread it open on the driveway and poured a can of gas all over it, lighting it with matches. Jeff stood in the yard. It was shocking to watch him burn a Confederate flag, the most valuable collectible he’d ever found, and to slowly realize he was burning with it all his devotion to the past and his ancestors who’d fought in the war.

We headed to my factory in Noida in a thick stream of traffic, crossing the flat, gray Yamuna which I pointed out was the same river that flowed past the Taj Mahal in Agra. Jeff raised his eyes. Earlier, land across the Yamuna was considered the boondocks, I said, but now people were fleeing the congestion of South Delhi, building massive houses outside the city on farmland. I’d bought a plot long before it became fashionable, I said, but had to admit, no, when he inquired if I’d built a house. Jeff gazed out of the open window with a quiet curiosity, the roadway stretching between the brown banks of the river edged with low buildings on either side. I no longer felt the pressure to keep up a chatter. He’d let his guard down, telling of his father and his own shame at how his father had been treated, his admission sowing a trust between us.

In the quiet of the car, air rushing in through open windows, I wondered how it could be that once I had been ahead of all trends— locating my factory in Noida with the foresight that it would become a flourishing industrial zone with the best infrastructure, purchasing a large plot of farmland with the first wave of profits—and now lagged far behind, my business in the red, my land sitting empty. I’d give myself two years from the time the scanner plant went into production to save the money to build a house. I had to establish a separate residence from my parents so Aditi and Bindiya and I could become a family—the most important thing was that my daughter had a mother again.

Long stretches of parched brown earth separated walled factory compounds in Noida. A massive two-wheeler assembly plant impressed Jeff—a French collaboration, I told him. He squinted at me, recalling that Arun had mentioned my wife had a factory—what did she make? He must have noted a flash of bewilderment in my eyes. It took me a moment to form words— “My wife and I parted company a few years ago.” Arun must have been speaking of my mother, I said, she had a garment factory in Faridabad, an older industrial area. She made embroidered cotton clothing for Europe. He nodded. I failed to point out other collaborations we passed by.

By the time we reached my compound, I’d recovered myself, impatient to show him the market research report locked up in my office that would prove to him the magnitude of our opportunity. The chowkidar at the gate saluted, the groundskeeper had swept the dead leaves from the front of the compound, as I’d asked, leaving the yard tidy. The factory shed was new, the pitched metal roof gleaming. It surprised Jeff to see my workers were women. They sat quietly at their benches, six on each side, in their saris, assembling telephones on a thin belt. Shy glances were cast at the pale giant from another, richer world. “Who would have thought women on the assembly line in India?” Jeff said with a puzzled smile. “Is this the whole crew?”

“Women are the more responsible ones, isn’t it? A man might lay drunk on the footpath, but his wife will make sure the family is taken care of,” I said, ignoring the sting of “the whole crew.” I was conscious of how hollow the shed appeared, how empty—in another section, we watched a few men wielding blowtorches over motherboards. The part-time engineers I’d hired to test my telephones occupied a small partitioned room to the side, which I pointed out. “The fire was a big setback,” I said without conceding that if you can’t produce your product for almost two years your businesses vanishes. “I got into telecom at the perfect time,” I told him. Had I told him so earlier? “We went from a couple of hundred thousand telephones for a city of seven million people to two million working connections! My telephones were a modern design and came in several colors. I couldn’t make them fast enough to meet the demand.”

“How’d the fire start?” Jeff probed like a doctor examining a wound.

I’d had some rewiring done and one of the wires sparked at night, I told him. The chowkidar had dozed off and was woken by the smoke, the whole building in flames. “We should be back in the black by next year.”

“That’s terrible.” He gave me a look of genuine sympathy. Perhaps he could understand since his own struggles had been considerable, I’d heard, his company on shaky legs for the many years it took a new technology to gestate.

I led him through a back door into the groomed lawn behind, flower pots arranged around the walkway, ancient trees left in place across three acres. Jeff nodded, recognizing I had the space to accommodate another shed or even two, and maybe he understood without my saying that we could adapt my existing shed to manufacture his scanner, my telephone instruments business down to almost nothing, as he could see.

Back inside, Jeff occupied one of the three chairs in front of my desk and inquired about my past profitability. Assessing my track record, it seemed. The figures converted into dollars would sound like pennies to him, so I spoke in rupees. I opened a side drawer and pulled out some old balance sheets and auditors’ reports on Hind Telephones. I couldn’t disclose my financial devastation because my factory insurance had expired at the time of the fire. I wasn’t able to collect a single rupee. Neglecting to renew my policy had been sheer oversight on my part in those days when I’d been ensnared in the terrible process of filing for divorce. I couldn’t think properly at that time. I’d had a right-hand man, I could have delegated routine matters to him, but I’d always been a one-man show, juggling finance, logistics, production and marketing on my own. In another drawer I found a small-sized color booklet on the company and placed it in on the desk in front of Jeff.

He squinted at the booklet with a fleeting look of disapproval and set the document he’d been reading on top. “Good stuff,” he said in a thin voice. “Any thought of getting into cellular? Things seem to be going that way.” I smiled and shook my head—did he not know what I had thoughts about getting into? I was hoping we might touch on the terms of the deal—the timetable for opening the factory, the management structure, the board of directors, the percentage split of profits. Abruptly he announced that he had to be back at the hotel in half an hour. Could I arrange for a ride back? He was meeting up with Pamela. I looked at him—we had ample opportunity to talk about the collaboration and he wanted to push off? “You know, I haven’t had a chance to tell you as yet—” I began, “but last year I engaged some experts in IT market research. They’re attached to a management institute, very well-connected academics,” I told him. “They did a study for me on the market for the scanner.”

“Bob didn’t tell me you were doing that.” He was caught off guard, unable to hide the puzzlement in his eyes.

“He didn’t know about it. They just completed it last week and came up with some remarkable information.” In the steel cupboard behind Jeff, I kept a copy of the fifty-six page study under lock and key, the original at home. I didn’t tell Jeff the most valuable nugget of information was contained in two-and-a-half pages offered in strictest confidence since it had not been publicly revealed. For the first time, a billion Indians would be issued national identity cards. These would be digitized IDs using biometric markers: electronic fingerprints, iris scans and facial imagery. Jeff’s products aligned almost perfectly with the government’s requirements—his fingerprint device already on the market; a time-stamp system using fingerprint and face recognition technology in the pipeline and close to being launched, according to Bob. The professor who led the study had offered to put me in touch with the Planning Commission committee members overseeing the project. The ID card was an incredible long-term undertaking that would confer legitimacy on tens of millions of people who lived like shadows, sleeping on footpaths and foraging in rubbish heaps. It was thrilling to imagine a technology I could introduce to the country to make each individual known, no matter how destitute or neglected, known and perhaps able, in the future, to make claims for health and other services for their well-being.

“So, what did they find?” Jeff was clearly intrigued by my mention of “remarkable information.”

“A lot of scope for biometrics. A lot of money to be made. But we need proper time to go through it all.” I wasn’t going to give it away without reassurances from him. More than my government contacts, this study was the real gold I could offer. My mother, my sole financier, had fought me tooth and nail over it, finding the cost exorbitant—one lakh rupees. When she discovered I was running the company on overdrafts on our accounts, she’d threatened to cut my funds completely. “You’ll have to shut the factory down, Vinay,” she shouted at me one evening after one too many whiskey-sodas. I banged the door so hard walking out, I noticed a crack in it the next day.

“Let’s talk tonight—I need to get with Pam first,” Jeff said, standing, and I was relieved he still planned on coming to my place for dinner. “I’ll send my car for you both. Is eight o’ clock okay? Not too late?” My tone melted to ingratiating, as if I were his retainer not his host.

*

I reached home much later than expected in the evening. A truck had overturned and spilled iron rods across all four lanes of the bridge over the Yamuna, leaving traffic backed up deep into Noida. My father was nursing a drink in front of the Hindi news broadcast when I went into the TV room looking for Aditi. He was dressed for the evening in a printed silk shirt and sweater vest. “Better get dressed,” he urged. “Go.” The tone of command had become his habit as head of Northern Railways, a vast bureaucracy laboring under him once. He searched my face, his eyes disappearing worriedly under his thick brows, as if to ask, “Not good?” I pretended not to notice and told him I’d run into R. N. Khanna at the club. He’d greeted me very warmly— I might call on him if I needed help with any of the ministries. My father gave me a quivering smile, pleased. “Do that, yes, yes. Give him a call,” he exhorted me.

“Where’s Aditi?” I said.

“Sleeping,” he replied. “Mummy went up and saw her. She’s not feeling well.”

“What happened? She was fine this morning.” She’d raced me down the stairs, taking wild jumps to each landing.

I climbed the steps heavily to the third floor, aware of my exhaustion. Sujata had once fallen down these stairs in spindle heels, drunk, forgetting there was no need to carry a two-and- a-half year old child. Aditi struck her head on a stone step and suffered a concussion. So many accidents, diagnoses, relapses. Maybe there was no shame in giving up the care of your wife in such circumstances, no shame in sending her aunt a monthly check for her expenses and sudden hospitalizations.

There were just two rooms on the third story, our little family suite within my parents’ house. Aditi’s room was dark, the blower rumbling quietly in a corner. I went to turn it down in the faint light falling through the gaps between the curtains. Aditi lay diagonally across the bed under a twisted heap of bedding, her face pushed into the mattress. Her hair was still caught in the plait she wore to school. “Aditi?” I murmured. “Not feeling well, sweetheart?” I sat down by the side of her bed. I asked her to turn over so I could feel her forehead but she wouldn’t. She was a little warm around her neck. The Americans were coming for dinner, I reminded her, I wanted her to meet them. Could she dress up and come downstairs for a few minutes? They ought to know me as I was, with a fiancé and daughter. Sujata’s presence a void in the room.

“She didn’t say I was her daughter,” Aditi murmured as I stood to leave. It took me a moment to understand she was still thinking of that incident at the children’s Christmas party at the club. How Bindiya had shrieked and clapped when she won the final round of putting. Later, as Bindiya was guiding Aditi along the outdoor buffet table, a woman clutching a small boy’s hand came rushing over to tell Bindiya, “What a splendid little golfer your daughter is! Where did she learn?”

Bindiya glanced back at me, a few paces behind them, and said in a faltering voice, “She’s Vinay’s daughter, actually.”

“After we get married, you’ll be her daughter also,” I spoke quietly into the dark. Since our engagement I’d been telling her Bindiya would become a second mother to her. “Then you can call her ‘Mummy’.”

“Nobody has two Mummies.”

“Some children do, Aditi.”

“Who?” Her challenge rose in a thin, hurtful voice.

I sat in the chair opposite her bed, not wanting to disturb her by coming closer. A picture of her hung on the wall beside the chair. She’d begged my mother to frame the drawing her mother had made of her, wanting a clear view of it from her bed. It was a faint, tender sketch of Aditi as she looked a few years ago, in two plaits, the pencil line extremely shaky as if Sujata’s hand had been trembling as she drew. “Who?” Aditi repeated. Of course, I couldn’t name any child I knew who had a stepmother. “Lord Krishna had two mothers,” it occurred to me. “His real mother was put in jail by a demon, so his father passed him on to another lady. Yashoda was his foster mother.”

“What’s a ‘foster mother’?”

“The mother who stays with you and looks after you every day.”

“Hmmph.” She sounded hoarse, angry that she couldn’t believe in such a mother.

When I returned downstairs after a bath and shave, in my blue sport coat, my mother was arranging small silver bowls of nuts and crisps on the various end tables. Silver platters had been laid on the dining table, and lamps lit here and there, creating a tranquil atmosphere. “I’ve asked him to make the chops,” she confirmed requesting the cook’s best dish tonight. She looked up, her eyes sagging in puffy folds of skin. She’d powdered over her dark circles, put a pink lipstick on her mouth, applying the usual cosmetic mask over her usual creased look of exhaustion or distraction. “Did you show them your report?” She turned a silk pillow on its point to make a diamond on the sofa. We hadn’t gotten to that stage as yet, I replied quickly, we were talking in general terms about the market. Jeff should be made aware of the trouble and expense I’d gone to, she asserted. Although she’d refused to foot the bill for the research, she seemed even more concerned about the investment since I’d paid for it out of my own shrunken savings.

Bindiya arrived at quarter to eight, fetched by my mother’s driver. “Wow,” I said and she grinned. A slim cream kurta showed her long torso and she wore it with flared turquoise silk pants. Her hair was pulled up in a bun and splashy gold earrings dangled in tiered kite shapes. Gold bangles hung around her wrists. “It’s all Prem Massi’s,” she said, meaning the jewelry on loan and the outfit designed by my mother’s younger sister, whose boutique she managed in Haus Khas Village. My father brought her a Campari-soda. Everyone in the family adored Bindiya, spoiled her. They were grateful to her for saving me, giving me the chance to become a husband and family man again. When I told her Aditi wasn’t well, she wanted to go upstairs right away but I said it was better to let her sleep.

“You’re looking very dapper.” Bindiya perched on the sofa arm next to me, brushing specs from my lapel, fiddling with my gold pocket square. I liked the hint of merriment I could always find in her eyes.

“Hopeful, yaar.” I gave her a wink. “Quite hopeful.”

When Jeff and Pamela arrived, I was proud to introduce Bindiya as my fiancé. She stepped forward, murmuring hello, tentatively shaking their outstretched hands, unused to such formalities. Pamela turned to me immediately in her ruffled black cape, “Hey, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to lunch!” I waved away the apology, telling her how glad I was she could come for dinner. She was a delicate, bony woman with a cap of brownish-red hair cut stylishly high at the back of her neck. Rough turquoise beads crowded her throat. Every time I saw her she appeared to be wearing the same short, black suit and black stockings—the cape she slipped off and handed to my waiting father. She put her handbag down on a side table and gave an appraising look around the drawing room. Jeff stood by her looking gangly, uncomfortable, gazing up at the ceiling that went up two stories.

My mother herself passed around a tray of seekh kebabs to welcome them. I wondered how Mummy appeared to Pamela’s sharp eye, an ageing lady of sixty-three lumbering around in shimmering double-shaded silk, her enormous hips ballooning at her sides like a physical disfigurement. But Pamela was taken with the house—“What a lovely home you have.” she told Mummy. My mother smiled distractedly, her mind consumed by financial worries. Everything in the house, the plan of the house itself, was of her design. She had chosen the stone tile for the floor, the wood paneling for the ceilings, the large canvases for the walls and earthenware jars converted into lamps. It was a modern layout divided into multiple levels and hard angles, each room a couple of steps up or down from another room. My mother had borne the full cost of construction during the heyday of her garment business, which she’d built with savings scraped from my father’s civil servant’s salary. “It’s got a California vibe,” Jeff quipped, looking my way.

We had drinks. My father held forth on the budget, just passed, going full steam ahead with reforms. Jeff offered a tight smile now and then, avoiding any mention of the word collaboration. Dinner was laid out buffet style. We served ourselves at the dining table and I led Jeff and Pamela down to the long sofa that faced a monumental painting of a woman huddled on the ground. She was concealed inside the wrappings of her shabby sari, her head dropped to her chest. It was only after observing her a moment, the blurred figures in motion behind her, that you realized a child was buried in her lap, its arm twisting up from under a ragged black cloth as startling as a shriek. Pamela cried, “Wow, that’s India!” My mother gave her a weary glance and said India was more than that.

My father, on his second or third Scotch, began to lose command over his tongue— “Jeff, we’ve-we’ve-we’ve-we’ve been hearing a lot about your-your company—so, what are your plans for India?”

It turned out they needed a partner who knew the technology and could implement it for clients. They’d met a guy from Delhi out in San Jose last month through their consultant and the situation had changed pretty quickly. The company was a “great fit” for them, Pam said. I set my drink down hard on the table. “What’s going on?” I turned to them.

I was aware of their movements as Bindiya and my mother got up, drifting out of the room with their plates to allow us some privacy. My father remained in his corner chair, diligently eating, as though absenting himself from the room with his attention to his food. This other party was an IT services firm, according to Jeff, a systems integrator, had an established client base of banks, companies, call centers. I couldn’t catch all that followed, my mind tight and hot, shutting things out. “What is his manufacturing experience like?” I argued, my voice rising. “You’re wanting to set up a factory, isn’t it? I’ve spent fifteen years running a manufacturing unit.”

They acknowledged Bob’s support of me. Arun’s praise. Pamela appreciated all the work I’d put into the project, all the information I’d sent Bob, she said, leaning over to look at me with forced warmth in her gray eyes. I’d commissioned a market research study, I reminded Jeff, which contained tremendous information about a government scheme. It would be the biggest identity documentation project in the world, requiring the full range of biometric technology. Secure Systems could provide most of it. We could draft a letter of intent tomorrow. I felt them draw back, Pam shifting away from me on the sofa.

My study listed pages of other potential clients, I pointed out. I’d spent a lakh of rupees on it. I’d gone to the top experts in IT market research. I wanted solid information so we could develop the right marketing strategy from the start. “A lakh is a lot of money in India—” I cried.

A hundred thousand rupees. Two thousand dollars—a drop in the bucket for them. They would cover it, Jeff said. They’d pay the cost, they knew I’d done the spade work in good faith. “There’s still a role for you in this, if you’re interested,” he said. “I think it plays to your strengths.” I gave him a stare and let him talk. He proposed I act as his representative with government ministries and agencies, guiding the IT firm through the approvals process. I nodded, astonished. So I could be his errand boy, his lackey in Delhi, calling on all my contacts. Putting them to good use for him. My father uttered a dismissive grunt. I shot him a look. I didn’t say ‘No.’ I sipped my drink, took a moment to gather my thoughts, then told them in a neutral tone of voice, “Just give me a few minutes, will you? I have to check up on my daughter. She’s not feeling well.”

I went around the long staircase, angry at myself for not taking Aditi’s temperature earlier. Was she really ill or had she fallen into one of her sad spells? I never knew what set off her fierce yearning for her mother. Sometimes, sitting in our midst in the TV room, she’d gaze off into space, a small girl with my cheeky, round face and the same forlorn stare as Sujata.

Someone made a rustling movement as I walked into Aditi’s black room. My mother might have sent the ayah up with food. “Who is it?” I said in Hindi.

“It’s me,” Bindiya answered. “I think she’s feeling better—no, Aditi? She was just tired today, she had a little headache.”

“Aditi?” I was relieved the room was cooler now. She could breathe more easily. I turned on a little table lamp next to the chair opposite her bed. Aditi groaned though the light was dim. Bindiya was sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard. Aditi’s head was pulled onto her lap, her bangles clinking as she stroked her forehead.

“All right, Aditi?” I was anxious.

Aditi murmured something and shifted, turning her face in Bindiya’s lap. Bindiya said they were fine up here together, I could go back to the Americans. I didn’t approach Aditi, leaving her burrowing in Bindiya’s body, finding comfort.

My head was remarkably clear as I went down the steps. I felt no anxiety in acknowledging that my factory was in its last gasps; it was a matter of time before I shuttered it. Sold it off. What would I do after that? I pressed my hand against the wall, pausing at the landing. I’d blurted out the contents of my study, which no research company could have provided them. I’d told them it cost me a lakh—two thousand dollars. I’d given valuable intelligence away for nothing. Confidential information no one else had. I’d laid it in front of Jeff and sold it for a song, my blood-stained flag. I could have negotiated a top price for the report—I could have charged him fifty thousand dollars. It would have been an investment in information that could give him access to a lucrative project ahead of his competitors. Hell, I could have set the price at a hundred thousand dollars. I stood with my hand against the wall, swaying a little as if I was drunk, knowing Jeff expected that I’d take his offer, that I’d sell him my report at cost, that I would do whatever errands he required in the hopes it would lead to a bigger role for me. He knew I would be available to him because I would be forever hopeful of something better coming my way.