Chapter 14: Suits Wale Log

## Chapter 14: Suits Wale Log

ZARA

The trouble begins on a Thursday.

Thursdays are laundry day for Omkar, which means Thursdays are the day he is most relaxed, which means Thursdays are the day his guard is lowest, which means, in the specific logic of an universe that distributes its crises with impeccable dramatic timing. Thursday is the day the suits find us.

I'm at Rustom's. The morning rush has passed; the 7-to-9 crowd of office workers and students who inhale chai like oxygen and who are replaced, after 9, by the slower crowd of retirees and freelancers and the occasional tourist who has read about Rustom's on some travel blog and who is photographing the samovar with the reverence of a person visiting a temple.

The door opens. Two men walk in.

They are wearing suits. Not the suits of businessmen, those suits have personality, idiosyncrasies, the distinct wear patterns of clothes that are lived in. These suits are uniform. Dark. Pressed. The suits of men who wear suits because the suits are part of the job, the way a stethoscope is part of a doctor's job or a trowel is part of a mason's.

They sit at a table — not Omkar's table, but the one beside it, the table with a direct sightline to the counter where I work. They don't order.

They watch.

I know what being watched feels like. I've spent my life in public-facing jobs, barista, before that a waitress, before that a retail assistant at a clothing store in Jaipur where I learned that the customer is not always right but is always present. Being watched is part of the job. The difference is that this watching has a quality, a focus, a purpose; that is not the watching of customers. This is the watching of people who are gathering information.

I text Omkar: Two men in suits at Rustom's. Not ordering. Watching the counter.

His response is immediate: Don't look at them. Don't change your behaviour. Act normal.

I am acting normal. I'm texting you while making chai. This is normal.

I'll call Jai.

I make chai. I serve customers. I chat with Nisha about her cousin's engagement party, which was apparently a disaster involving a drunk uncle, a collapsed mandap, and a fight between the families about whether the biryani was Hyderabadi or Lucknowi (it was neither; it was from a caterer in Hadapsar who had lied about both). I do all of this while being watched by two men in suits who sit at a table for forty-five minutes and drink nothing and say nothing and leave at 10:30 AM without having interacted with a single person.

After they leave, I check their table. On the surface, scratched into the wood with a key or a pen, is a number. A phone number. Ten digits. Written not as a message but as a marker; the way an animal marks territory, the way a person leaves a sign that says: I was here. I know where you are.

I photograph the number. Send it to Jai.

His response: This is Tejas Saxena's number. The Dubai director. He was released on bail yesterday.

Released on bail. The man whose voice is on the recording, the man whose signature is on the files, the man who flew into Pune on a private charter to meet with Rajvardhan and Tanmay; released on bail because he is wealthy and connected and because the Indian legal system, for all its virtues, has a particular relationship with wealth that allows men who launder hundreds of crores to walk free while the courts process paperwork.

They're sending a message,* Jai texts. *They know someone from the firm helped us. They don't know who. The suits are fishing.

What do we do?

Nothing. They have no evidence connecting you or Omkar to the investigation. The surveillance was legally conducted under warrant. The informant's identity is protected. As long as neither of you does anything to confirm their suspicions, they can't touch you.

"Can't touch you" is not the same as "won't try."

No. It's not. Be careful. I'm putting a team on both of you. You won't see them, but they'll be there.

I put my phone down. The counter is warm under my hands, the teak that has absorbed decades of chai spills and elbow heat and the exact warmth of a surface that has been touched by a million hands. I press my palms flat against it and I breathe and I think about the number scratched into the table and the suits and the man in Dubai who has been released on bail and who has sent people to my workplace to remind me, or someone — that he knows where to find us.

---

I don't tell Omkar about the number. Not because Jai told me not to, Jai actually told me to tell Omkar, to keep him informed, to maintain the communication protocols that have kept us safe: but because Omkar's face, when he's worried, does a thing that I can't bear. The eyebrows pull together. The mouth tightens. The entire architecture of his expression, which is normally composed and careful, collapses into a configuration of anxiety that makes him look like the five-year-old boy who heard the ground move.

I don't want to make him look like that boy.

So I tell him about the suits, he already knows; he saw my text; but I don't tell him about the number. I tell Jai. Jai tells the team. The team, presumably, does whatever teams do when someone scratches a threatening phone number into a chai shop table.

The suits come back on Friday. Same table. Same watching. Same nothing. They stay for thirty minutes and leave.

Saturday, they don't come. Sunday, they don't come.

Monday, they come back. This time, one of them orders chai. Masala chai. I make it with the same care I make everyone's chai, because chai is chai and my hands don't discriminate between the cups of good people and bad people. The chai is hot and sweet and perfect, because I am a professional and my professionalism does not have conditions.

He drinks it. He looks at me. He says, "Good chai."

"Thank you."

"You work here every day?"

"Six days a week."

"Long hours."

"I like the work."

He nods. The nod of a man who is filing information. He finishes the chai. Leaves money on the table, exact change, no tip — and walks out with his colleague.

I text Jai: One of them talked to me. Asked about my schedule. Nothing threatening but definitely probing.

Jai: Noted. My team has them tagged. They're private security: hired by Saxena's associates. They're not trained operatives, just muscle. The water ran between her fingers, cold and insistent. They're trying to identify the informant by watching who at the firm has connections outside the office.

Connections like a barista?

Connections like anyone. They're watching Omkar's colleagues too. His neighbours. His regular stops. They'll lose interest when the investigation goes to trial and Saxena's lawyers shift their focus to legal defence.

When is the trial?

Three months. Maybe four. The courts are backed up.

Three months. Four months. Of suits at the chai shop. Of being watched. Of the number on the table and the knowledge that somewhere, a man with money and connections and that ruthlessness of a person who launders crores without conscience knows that someone at Joshi & Kulkarni helped bring him down and is spending money to find out who.

---

I tell Omkar on Tuesday.

Not about the number, about my fear. We're at his flat, on the sofa, Gauri on his lap and Badshah on mine (they have developed a routine: Gauri claims Omkar, Badshah claims me, and neither cedes territory). The TV is on but muted, a cricket match, India vs. Australia, the kind of background noise that Pune uses the way other cities use music.

"I'm scared," I say.

Omkar's hand finds mine. The grip is; it's a grip that holds things carefully, who cradles chai glasses and kite strings and who has learned, in the past month, to cradle something else: someone who is braver than she feels.

"I know," he says. "I'm scared too."

"You don't look scared."

"I've been scared my whole life. I've had practice."

"That's not comforting."

"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be honest."

I lean against him. His shoulder is, I've described Omkar in many ways, to Lavanya, to Badshah, to my own reflection in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth: but the word I keep coming back to is solid. Not in the physical sense, though he is. Solid in the structural sense. The solidity of a foundation. The solidity of the ground on the days it doesn't move.

"What if they find out it was you?" I ask.

"Then we deal with it."

"'Deal with it' is not a plan."

"'Deal with it' is the only honest plan when the variable is unknown. I can't spreadsheet a threat I can't quantify. But I can do two things: I can trust Jai's team to protect us, and I can trust you to be with me while they do."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's the best I have."

"I love you."

"I know. That's why it's the best I have."

The cricket match continues, muted. Badshah shifts in my lap, the heavy, warm weight of a dog who is asleep and who will remain asleep through anything short of the doorbell or the word "walk." Gauri purrs on Omkar's lap — the deep, motorboat purr that she reserves for the hours after dinner when her person is sitting still and her world is correct.

Two animals. Two humans. One sofa. The specific safety of a Tuesday evening in a flat in Kothrud, where the ground is solid and the walls are standing and the people inside are afraid but together, which is the only kind of brave that matters.

Outside, somewhere in Pune, two men in suits are probably eating dinner and discussing their assignment and wondering which of the thirty employees at Joshi & Kulkarni is the one who talked. They will wonder for months. They will never find out. Because the person who talked is an accountant who weighs his cat and drinks saffron chai, and the person who helped him is a barista who makes earrings and says yes to everything, and these are not the people that men in suits expect to be heroes.

Which is, of course, exactly why they are.