Chapter 1: Kadak Chai Aur Kuch Zyada

## Chapter 1: Kadak Chai Aur Kuch Zyada

OMKAR

When my alarm goes off at 5:47 AM, not 5:45, not 5:50, but 5:47, because that's the mathematically optimal time to wake up given my morning routine, commute distance, and the exact minute the chai at Rustom's reaches the perfect temperature. I find Gauri already sitting on my chest.

Gauri is my cat. A grey tabby with amber eyes and a white patch on her chest shaped like the state of Maharashtra, which I choose to interpret as patriotism rather than coincidence. She weighs exactly 4.2 kilograms (I weigh her monthly; it's in the spreadsheet) and she has been performing this morning lockdown ritual since the day I brought her home from Katraj.

She places one paw on my forehead. Not aggressively; with the measured precision of a surgeon confirming a patient's consciousness. She keeps it there until I open my eyes, look at her, and say, "Good morning, Gauri." Then and only then does she remove it.

I once tested the theory that she waits for my alarm. I woke up forty minutes early and found her already on the bed, sitting upright, watching my face with the unblinking focus of a CCTV camera. I'm fairly certain she was counting my breaths.

I give her the required three minutes of chin scratching, she has a precise spot, two centimetres below the left ear, where the purring reaches maximum amplitude, and then my second alarm sounds. The GET OUT OF BED alarm. I obey it the way one obeys the laws of thermodynamics: not because I want to, but because the universe collapses if I don't.

Bathroom: two minutes for necessities, four for shaving (I use the same Godrej shaving cream my father used, and his father before him; it smells of sandalwood and hereditary obligation), two for brushing, nine for showering (I have calculated the optimal water temperature for each month; October is 38.2°C), two for towelling. I emerge nineteen minutes later. I dress in my standard rotation, light blue shirt, grey trousers, the combination that requires zero decision-making energy — and check my watch.

Twenty-five minutes since I got out of bed. Exactly.

Gauri knows this too. She stretches, the long, yogic stretch after occupying my warm spot for precisely twenty-five minutes; hops down, and waits by the door.

We eat breakfast together. Mine is two idlis with coconut chutney and sambar from the steel dabba in the fridge (meal-prepped on Sunday, as always). Hers is the measured portion of Whiskas that she receives with the quiet dignity of a bureaucrat accepting her pension.

After breakfast, I practise Gauri's tricks. She sits on command. She gives high-fives. Though "gives" is generous; she permits her paw to be touched by my hand, which is not the same thing but which I have learned to accept. She jumps through a hoop I make with my arms, though she does it with an expression that clearly communicates she could also choose not to.

I glance around my flat. One bedroom, Kothrud, third floor, a view of the neighbour's coconut palm and the satellite dishes of a building that hasn't been painted since liberalisation. It has always been the right size for Gauri and me.

So why has it been feeling, lately, like someone is missing?

"Okay, I have to go to work," I tell Gauri. "No running across the kitchen counter. The smell of cumin seeds crackling in ghee drifted from the stove, sharp and warm. No attacking the money plant. When I get home, we'll go for a walk."

She blinks. The slow blink. Terms heard. Compliance selective and will comply with the ones she finds reasonable.

---

I drive my Activa through Pune traffic, which is not driving so much as it is a philosophical negotiation with chaos; park outside the office compound, and walk two hundred metres down Fergusson College Road to Rustom's.

Rustom's is not a cafe. Calling it a cafe would be like calling the Ganges a river, technically accurate but emotionally insufficient. Rustom's is an institution. It occupies the ground floor of a 1940s building with stone walls and arched windows and a ceiling so high that the fans hang from rods long enough to be classified as structural elements. The wooden tables are scarred with decades of rings from chai glasses. The walls are lined with framed photographs — Rustom Irani, the founder, shaking hands with people whose faces are too faded to identify but whose importance is conveyed by the formality of their posture.

The counter is dark teak, polished by a million elbows. Behind it, a brass samovar the size of a small car produces chai with the consistency of a natural phenomenon: always the same temperature, always the same colour, always the same ratio of elaichi to adrak that has been perfected over three generations and is guarded with the secrecy of a nuclear code.

The shelves behind the counter hold glass jars of Parsi biscuit, nankhatai, khari, the shrewsbury biscuits that are Rustom's signature: and in the centre, the round wooden clock with Roman numerals that has been telling the wrong time since 1987 and which nobody has corrected because the wrong time has become, through repetition, the right time.

Nisha is taking orders. And Zara is making them.

Three people are ahead of me, which gives me time.

Zara.

She is, I am going to attempt to describe this objectively, as an accountant should, though objectivity has never been tested so severely; she is the reason I've been coming to Rustom's every morning for the past eighteen months instead of making chai at home, which I am perfectly capable of doing and which would save me approximately ₹12,775 per year (I've calculated).

She's twenty-four. Curly hair, not the disciplined curls of someone who owns a straightener, but the anarchic curls of someone who has made peace with the fundamental disorder of keratin. She wears it up, always, in a bun that looks like it was assembled by a cheerful tornado. Her earrings are different every day — today they're tiny clay chai cups, hand-painted, that swing when she moves. She makes them herself. I know this because she told me, four months ago, while making my chai, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

Her smile is, it's not one smile. It's a category of smiles. She has the customer smile (warm, professional), the co-worker smile (conspiratorial, quick), the someone-just-told-a-terrible-joke smile (wide, involuntary), and the smile she gives me, which I have analysed extensively and which falls into a category I cannot quite classify, which bothers me because I classify everything.

The queue moves. I reach the counter.

"One masala chai, please," I tell Nisha.

Nisha picks up a glass, the thick, cut-glass tumbler that is the standard vessel for Rustom's chai, and writes my name on the order slip. Zara picks it up and draws a smiley face in the O of Omkar, the way she always does, whether she's taking my order or making it.

Then she looks up. Her eyes, dark brown, the colour of strong chai held up to the light: meet mine.

"Omkar-ji," she says. She calls everyone "-ji." It should be generic. It isn't. "What do you think about trying something different today? I've been experimenting with a kesar-elaichi blend. Saffron from Kashmir, the real stuff."

"Different?" The word comes out like I've been asked to consider a new religion.

"I think you'll love it."

I nod. Because if Zara thinks I'll love it, then I trust her. I trust her the way I trust the Reserve Bank of India's monetary policy: not because I've audited the evidence, but because the institution has earned my faith.

She works behind the brass samovar, the practised movements of someone who measures with instinct rather than instruments, which should horrify me (I measure everything) but instead fascinates me. The saffron goes in, three strands, I count — and the chai turns the colour of an October sunset, gold bleeding into amber.

"You look extra smart today," Zara says, glancing at me. "Meeting with a client? Interview?"

I look down at my light blue shirt and grey trousers. This is not different from any other day. "No. But I was thinking about applying—" I stop. "I look smart?"

"I mean, you always look smart. But today there's something extra. Like someone ironed your confidence along with your shirt."

Someone ironed my confidence along with my shirt. I am going to write this in my personal journal tonight. I am going to write it in capital letters.

She hands me the chai. The glass is warm; the specific warmth that travels through cut glass, different from ceramic, different from steel, the warmth of Rustom's.

"I hope you love it," she says.

I take the glass and my laptop bag and go to my usual table, the one by the window, with a view of the counter where Zara works. Usually I bring a book. I'm currently reading a biography of Jamsetji Tata, because accountants find comfort in men who understood the relationship between capital and vision. But today, Zara's comment about looking smart has made me think about the spreadsheet on my laptop.

The spreadsheet is titled PROS AND CONS OF APPLYING FOR RISK MANAGEMENT POSITION. It has thirty-seven entries, colour-coded by category (Professional Development: blue; Financial Impact: green; Emotional/Psychological: yellow; Unknown Variables: red). The red column is the longest.

I take a sip of chai.

My eyebrows, both of them, simultaneously, which is unusual because I typically have excellent eyebrow control, rise.

The saffron hits first. Not the fake saffron of wedding sweets, not the chemical approximation of cheap restaurants, but real saffron, the kind that costs ₹3,00,000 per kilo, the kind that carries within it the labour of hands that picked each strand from a crocus in a Kashmiri field. It blooms in the chai like a sunrise — warm, golden, spreading through the elaichi and adrak and the deep tannin base of the tea with the authority of something that knows it belongs.

I look at the counter. Zara is making someone else's drink, but her eyes are on me. I smile. I give her a thumbs up. She grins, the smile I can't classify, the one that doesn't fit any of my categories; and something in my chest does something that I would need to consult a cardiologist about if it didn't feel so unreasonably good.

I think, for the thousandth time, about asking her on a date.

I take another sip. The chai is extraordinary. The spreadsheet is open on my laptop. And Zara is twenty feet away, making someone else's chai with the same smile she gave me, because she gives everyone that smile, because she is a person whose natural state is warmth and I am a person whose natural state is a spreadsheet, and the distance between warmth and spreadsheets is not something that can be bridged by a man who is afraid to deviate from his morning routine.

My alarm vibrates. 8:15. Time to go to work. I close my laptop, pick up my glass (empty. I drank the entire thing without noticing, which never happens; I always leave exactly one centimetre at the bottom because the last sip of chai is always the most concentrated and therefore the most bitter), and stand.

Zara, who has some kind of internal clock that rivals mine — turns from whatever she's doing and calls out, "Bye, Omkar-ji! Tell Gauri I said hello!"

She knows my cat's name. She knows my cat's name because I told her, because we talk every morning while she makes my chai, and because these five-minute conversations are, I am going to admit this to myself even though it makes the spreadsheet in my head flash red: the best part of my day.

I walk to work with a spring in my step. Down FC Road, past the bookstores and the photocopying shops and the students walking to college with their bags slung over one shoulder in that specific Pune way that suggests both urgency and complete indifference to time. Past the construction site where the old Irani restaurant is being converted into something modern and probably terrible. Into the office building. Elevator. Third floor.

Before I reach my department, I see Tanmay Patwardhan.

Tanmay is, I will be diplomatic; a colleague. He has the build of someone who played cricket in school and never recovered from the attention it brought him. His shirts are always one size too tight, his hair is always one shade too gelled, and his confidence is always three standard deviations above what his competence warrants.

"Arre, Omkar!" Tanmay appears at the corridor junction with the timing of a toll booth. "Guess what, yaar? You know the Shekhawat account you wanted? They specifically asked for me. By name."

He performs a facial expression that is meant to convey sympathy but conveys the same thing as a cat knocking a glass off a table: deliberate satisfaction disguised as accident.

"I feel bad for you, yaar. Really I do."

I open my mouth. The perfect retort, the one that will arrive at 2 AM while I'm staring at the ceiling — is not yet available.

"Oh, wait—" Tanmay reaches toward my shirt, pointing. "You've got something—"

I look down. He flicks my nose.

"Got you!" He laughs. The laugh of someone who peaked in Class 10 and has been coasting on the inertia ever since.

I close my eyes. I will not let Tanmay dismantle the edifice of the morning. Zara said I looked smart. Zara's saffron chai was transcendent. These facts are load-bearing. Tanmay is not.

I sit at my desk. Arrange my things: calculator, highlighters, pencil, eraser, the steel ruler that I use as a paperweight and occasionally as a meditation object. I am logging into my computer when my boss, Rajvardhan, walks in.

His name was Raju. Everyone called him Raju. When he became team lead, he decided Raju lacked "gravitas." But since everyone was used to Raju, he went with Rajvardhan, the same name, technically, but stretched to fill a larger suit.

He stops at Tanmay's desk. They do their handshake, a multi-step production involving a fist bump, a palm slap, and what I can only describe as a finger wiggle, and laugh. They laugh the way people laugh who have mistaken familiarity for talent.

Rajvardhan's expression changes as he turns to me. He walks to my desk and half-sits on the edge, crinkling my papers, displacing my highlighters, establishing dominance over my workspace with casual territorial marking, because Rajvardhan believes desks, like conversations, belong to whoever sits on them first.

"Omkar," he says. "You're not going to like this, but I wanted you to hear it from me. I know you've been thinking about applying for the Risk Management position. Tanmay has applied, and I've decided to endorse him."

The words land like a dropped file. Heavy, scattered, requiring effort to pick up.

"He may not have your qualifications," Rajvardhan continues, making a vague gesture with his hand, as if qualifications are smoke that can be waved away, "but there's a... confidence quality he has that you lack."

He pats my shoulder. Twice. Two pats. Physical contact substituting for fairness.

"Cheer up, Omkar. Sometimes these things just don't work out."

He leaves.

I stare at my spreadsheet. The PROS AND CONS of applying for a position that my boss has just told me I don't deserve.

The irony is precise: the man who is afraid to take risks wants to work in Risk Management. The man whose boss says he lacks confidence wants a job that requires confidence. The man who cannot ask a barista on a date wants to ask an interview panel to believe in him.

I close the spreadsheet.

I wish life were more like accounting. In accounting, there is one answer. Only one number is right. There are no opinions, no politics, no Tanmays. You work the problem and get the exact right answer.

Life is not accounting.

Life is a balance sheet that doesn't balance, and I can't find the error.