The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 1

 

The Price of Time

ACT ONE

The Rain and the Woman

Chapter 1: Bandra, June. The Monsoon Arrives Without Warning.

 

Bandra West, Mumbai — June 2019

 

The monsoon came to Mumbai the way it always came: not as a warning but as a verdict.

Arjun Malhotra was twenty years old and soaking wet on the third floor of a glass building in Bandra Kurla Complex, holding fourteen rolls of architectural fabric samples that had become, in the last four minutes, fourteen rolls of wet rags. He had run the wrong direction from the taxi, which was a mistake he would have avoided if he had been paying any attention at all to the sky, which he had not been, because he had been reading on his phone.

He pushed into the lobby of Iyer & Associates, Architects. The security guard looked at him the way security guards in glass buildings look at wet young men carrying soggy fabric rolls: with professional disgust.

Security Guard: "Delivery boys go to the service entrance. Side gate, go."

Arjun opened his mouth to explain — he was not a delivery boy, he was his father's son, doing his father's errand, which was worse in every way — and then he heard a voice from across the marble lobby.

The Voice: "Ramesh-ji ne bheja hai? Let him come up. He's expected."

The woman who had spoken was standing at the lift, holding a coffee cup and a rolled blueprint and a phone, all in two hands, with the efficiency of someone who had been carrying too many things for so long that her hands had adapted. She was perhaps his mother's age, or a little older. Silver threads in black hair cut straight above the collar. She wore a dark linen kurta and had the kind of face that had moved past prettiness into something that required more specific words: precise, composed, weathered by intelligence.

She looked at him once, assessed the situation, and looked back at the guard.

Meera Iyer: "Rajesh, he's fine. Ramesh Malhotra's son. I'll sign him in."

He followed her into the lift. The doors closed. He was dripping on the marble floor of the lift and she was reading something on her phone and the silence between them was the silence of two strangers in a small box with nothing to say.

Arjun: "Thank you. I wasn't expecting the rain to—"

Meera: "No one ever is. That's what Mumbai depends on."

The lift opened on the eighth floor and she walked out without looking back and he followed, holding his wet fabric rolls, and that was how Arjun Malhotra met Meera Iyer.

He would not forget the lift. Not the rain, not the lobby, not the guard's contemptuous face. The lift. The way she had said 'that's what Mumbai depends on' as if it were the most obvious and important thing in the world, and then immediately moved on to something else, without waiting to see if he had understood.

He had understood.

 

~ ~ ~

 

His father's firm supplied premium fabric to architects for interior finishing — curtains, upholstery, acoustic panelling. Ramesh Malhotra had built this business from a single stall in Ulhasnagar in 1993 to a showroom in Bandra and clients across South Bombay. He spoke of this the way other men spoke of war: often, with pride, and with the implication that softness was treason.

Ramesh: "Iyer Madam is a good client. Smart woman, goes to IIT Bombay alumna meetings, very respected. Don't embarrass me. Talk less, listen more. Show the samples, get the selection, come back."

Arjun had nodded, which was what he did when his father spoke in imperatives. He had been nodding since he was twelve and he was very good at it.

What his father did not know — what no one in the Malhotra household knew — was that Arjun did not want to sell fabric. He wanted to write. He had been writing since he was fifteen, quietly, in notebooks that he kept in a box under his bed, and he had recently, in a private act of extraordinary courage, submitted a short story to a literary magazine. He had not told anyone. The submission itself felt like a secret identity, the kind that heroes in comics had and which required, at all times, the maintenance of the public self.

His public self delivered fabric samples to architects in Bandra.

His private self was afraid all the time.

 

~ ~ ~

 

The second meeting happened three weeks later, when Meera Iyer came to the showroom to see the full fabric range in person. Arjun was at the counter, alone — his father was at a supplier meeting in Dharavi — and he managed the visit without embarrassing himself or his father, which by the Malhotra household's standards qualified as excellence.

She moved through the showroom with the architect's habit of touching materials rather than only looking at them, running her palm along lengths of fabric, holding swatches up to the light.

Meera: "Your father said you're studying commerce."

Arjun: "I was. I finished. I'm working here now."

Meera: "Working, or waiting?"

He looked at her.

Arjun: "What's the difference?"

Meera: "Working means you've decided this is it. Waiting means you're here because you haven't figured out what comes next. One is a choice. The other is just time passing."

He was quiet for a moment.

Arjun: "Waiting, then. If I'm being honest."

She nodded, as if this was the correct answer.

Meera: "Good. At least you know."

She selected four fabrics, left her card for the invoice, and was gone in forty minutes. He stood at the counter after she left and thought about what she had said, which was something she had done to him twice now: asked a question that cracked open something he had been keeping sealed.

He was not used to being read that quickly by anyone.