The Kazakh Factory Inspectors’ Union, however, disagreed. They said that when the inspector’s body was found in his apartment the next morning there was a distinct wound on the side of his head. In the shape of a spanner head.

The Kazakh government reacted without delay. Mishra’s plant was shut down and his licence to do business in the country revoked. His bank accounts were frozen and his passport confiscated.

Unfortunately the Kazakh operations account for 65 per cent of the Mishra Group’s profits. This means that the company hardly has any money left for anything. Least of all to pay Dufresne for a high-value deep-dive consulting product.

Santanam then told us that after the ‘Spanner Murderer Mishra’ incident, as the Kazakh media puts it, other eastern European countries were also thinking of inspecting or sealing MishraSteel facilities. That would kill cash flow further.

This meant that the university project would most probably be put on the back burner for now. Poor Santanam had tried desperately to sell an extension for Dufresne but Mishra’s people didn’t want to incur any more costs till the Kazakh crisis blew over.

All of us in the meeting room were very upset of course. Except Tony. He still doesn’t seem to give a fuck! Amazing.

Nothing could screw up a performance evaluation like a project that didn’t get an extension. The Dufresne evaluation committee didn’t care if MishraSteel was implicated in an international case of manslaughter. If a project didn’t lead to more work then everyone assigned to it had obviously screwed up.

Yetch, Rajni and I looked at each other in panic. This would adversely affect our race to become associate by March. If I were a less confident man I would have actually given up hope completely. But I still had another five or six months. I just had to put Panchatantra behind me.

Santanam said that we all had to make one final attempt at salvaging Panchatantra before our final client meeting. He asked each one of us to prepare a strategy deck. I had to make one on global titanium strategy. Rajni had to work on nickel and chrome, Yetch on copper and Tony on global factory safety regulations.

The idea was that each of us would present these decks to the client team after the university presentation. Hopefully they would feel like hiring us to make at least a strategy white paper on one of those topics. Which would be just two weeks of work. But we would have something to show Dufresne management later.

Santanam reminded us that this was life or death. If we didn’t sell something or the other then no one from this team would make associate and his chances of making partner would also disappear. And he told us that if he didn’t make partner then he would consider our team personally responsible for it.

Yetch, Rajni and I ran to make our pitches right after the meeting. Tony went down to Subway for lunch. Santanam disappeared into his cabin.