Chapter 8: Hrithik

# Chapter 8: Hrithik

## The Cat

Hrithik's apartment in Kothrud was a one-bedroom on the third floor of an old building on Paud Road — the kind of building that Pune's real estate agents described as "vintage" when they meant "the lift doesn't work" and "character" when they meant "the plumbing dates from the Nehru era." The building was called Sai Krupa, because approximately 40 percent of residential buildings in Pune were called Sai Krupa, the name being less an identification and more a statistical probability.

The apartment was small, clean, and organised with the precision that defined everything Hrithik touched. His books were arranged by subject, then by author, then by publication date. His kitchen contained exactly the utensils he used and nothing else — no decorative items, no gadgets bought in optimistic moments and abandoned in realistic ones, no junk drawer. His wardrobe was twelve shirts (seven checked, three plain, two formal), six trousers, one suit (black, worn twice, both times to weddings), and the collection of steel-toed boots that occupied a rack by the door like soldiers standing at attention.

The only element of chaos in the apartment was Momo.

Momo was a cat. Specifically, Momo was a grey-and-white street cat who had appeared on Hrithik's windowsill fourteen months ago during a monsoon storm — wet, furious, and weighing approximately 1.2 kilograms — and who had, through a campaign of persistent residence and strategic vulnerability, converted from a temporary guest to a permanent inhabitant. Hrithik had named her Momo because she had arrived during a dinner of steamed momos from the Tibetan stall on FC Road, and because the alternative name — "Cat" — lacked the specificity that his temperament demanded.

Momo had opinions about everything and expressed them through a vocabulary of sounds that ranged from a quiet chirp (contentment, food-related) to a full-throated yowl (displeasure, existential) to a sustained purr that vibrated at a frequency Hrithik had measured at 26 Hz, which was within the range that veterinary science associated with healing. Whether Momo was healing herself or healing Hrithik was a question that neither science nor the cat had definitively answered.

This evening, Hrithik sat on his sofa with the project file on his lap and Momo on his chest, her grey-and-white body arranged in the loaf position — paws tucked, tail wrapped, eyes half-closed in the expression of a creature that had achieved maximum comfort and intended to defend it against all disturbances, including gravity, phone calls, and her human's need to breathe.

His phone rang. His mother.

"Hrithik. Have you eaten?"

"Yes, Aai."

"What did you eat?"

"Dal rice."

"From where?"

"I made it."

A pause. The maternal pause that communicated scepticism more effectively than any words. "Your dal rice is water with turmeric. You need to eat properly. Come home on Sunday. I'll make pithla bhakri."

"I'll come."

"And bring your dirty clothes. I know you're not washing properly. The machine doesn't get the collar stains."

"Aai, I'm twenty-eight. I can wash my own clothes."

"You can wash them. You cannot wash them well. There is a difference. Your father's shirts had the same problem until I started doing them. It's a Paranjpe genetic deficiency. The men in this family cannot remove collar stains."

Hrithik did not argue. Arguing with Sunanda Paranjpe about laundry was like arguing with a structural engineer about load calculations — technically possible, practically futile, and guaranteed to end in the expert's favour.

"How is the Balewadi project?" she asked, shifting topics with the seamlessness of a woman who conducted conversations the way her husband conducted construction projects: multiple workstreams, parallel processing, seamless transitions.

"On schedule. We finished the demolition and the rewiring. Framing starts Monday."

"Your father says the client's daughter went to your school."

"Yes."

"Is she nice?"

"She's a client, Aai."

"Clients can be nice. Your father's client in Deccan — Mrs. Bhagat — she was very nice. She brought us Diwali faral every year. She was also a client."

"Mrs. Bhagat was seventy-three."

"Age is not the point. The point is niceness. Is the girl nice?"

"She threw a geometry box at me in standard six."

Silence. The specific silence of a mother processing information that did not fit her matchmaking algorithm.

"Why?"

"I corrected her maths in front of the class."

"Hrithik." The tone shifted — from maternal inquiry to maternal exasperation, the tonal equivalent of a traffic signal changing from green to amber. "You corrected a girl's maths in front of thirty children. What did you expect? A thank-you card?"

"I expected accuracy."

"You expected accuracy from a twelve-year-old whose pride you just demolished in public. Beta, I love you, but your social intelligence at twelve was the social intelligence of a calculator. Zero. Absolute zero."

"It's improved."

"Has it? Your father says you quoted the budget contingency to this girl within the first hour of meeting her. A contingency. At a first meeting. This is not how human beings build relationships, Hrithik. This is how actuaries build risk models."

Momo shifted on his chest, resettling with the boneless flexibility of a creature that understood comfort at a molecular level. Her purr intensified — 26 Hz, healing frequency, possibly attempting to repair the damage to Hrithik's ego that his mother was inflicting with the precision of a neurosurgeon.

"I'm managing the project professionally, Aai. That's all."

"That's all. Of course. And your voice doesn't change when you talk about her. And you didn't spend three days on a proposal that normally takes you one. And you didn't absorb ₹70,000 in labour costs that your father nearly had a cardiac event over. These are all unrelated facts."

"Baba told you about the labour costs?"

"Your father tells me everything. This is not because he wants to. This is because I ask, and he has learned, after thirty-two years of marriage, that answering my questions is easier than avoiding them."

Hrithik closed his eyes. Momo's purr vibrated through his ribs. The ceiling of his Kothrud apartment had a water stain in the shape of Maharashtra — he had noticed this on the day he moved in and had been unable to un-notice it since, the way certain observations, once made, become permanent features of your perceptual landscape.

"She makes Shrewsbury biscuits," he said. "With a cardamom technique that her grandmother invented. The cardamom is on the tray, not in the dough. The heat releases the oils from below. The taste is in the smell."

His mother was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed — softer, warmer, the voice she used when she was not interrogating but understanding.

"Your ajoba used to do something similar. When he made puran poli, he would heat ghee in the tawa with a pinch of saffron before laying the poli. The saffron wasn't in the filling. It was in the air. He said the best flavours were the ones you couldn't find."

"I remember."

"Of course you remember. You remember everything. That's your gift and your curse." A breath. "Go slowly, Hrithik. Don't calculate this one. Don't optimise it. Don't build a system for it. Some things — the important things — they don't follow systems. They follow their own timing. Like your ajoba's saffron. Like this girl's cardamom. The flavour is in the air, not in the formula."

"That's very philosophical for a Tuesday evening."

"It's Wednesday."

"Wednesday, then."

"Come on Sunday. Bring the clothes. And bring the cat. She needs deworming — I can hear her purring, which means she's comfortable, which means she hasn't been dewormed recently."

"How can you diagnose deworming status from purring frequency?"

"I'm a mother. We diagnose everything from everything. Goodnight, beta."

She hung up. Hrithik lay on the sofa with Momo on his chest and the project file forgotten on his lap and the sound of his mother's voice fading into the apartment's evening silence — the distant traffic on Paud Road, a pressure cooker whistle from the floor below, the melodic call to prayer from the mosque three streets away, the accumulated soundtrack of a Pune evening that was as familiar as his own breathing.

Go slowly. Don't calculate this one.

He thought about Mrinmayee. About the flour on her apron and the way she laughed — sudden, full, as if the laugh surprised her as much as it surprised him. About the biscuits and the cardamom and the way she had said "Come for the coffee" with a casualness that was, he was beginning to understand, the opposite of casual.

He thought about the geometry box. The Natraj compass. The crescent-moon bruise on his twelve-year-old shoulder. And he thought about the fact that the woman who had thrown it was now the woman whose biscuits he could taste in his sleep, and that the trajectory from projectile to pastry was the strangest and most wonderful arc his life had ever traced.

Momo purred. 26 Hz. Healing frequency.

He was going to need it.