We walked up to the CEO after the meeting, shook his hand and expressed our deepest sympathies. Prasad phoned him from outside and, after confirming that there were no employee problems, came back in. We quietly went to our operations room, closed the door behind us, and then someone made this hilarious joke about Hiphopper being a better name for a rabbit than a dog. I thought it was a very insensitive joke at a time like this. Nevertheless I laughed along loudly in order to be a team player.

An hour or so later Prasad asked me to go to the CEO’s cabin to pick up some reports.

When I entered I saw the man, looking very upset, aimlessly flipping through photos of what I immediately recognized as a dog. I politely asked him for the reports and he pointed to a pile on his table. As I picked them and left I reiterated my deep condolences at his loss. I also added, just for impact, that I once had a pet dog myself that I lost many years ago and I knew exactly how it felt. It seemed like the sort of thing that would make him feel a little better.

The CEO immediately asked me to sit down and tell him all about my dog. I told him that it was too long ago, when I was very small, and I didn’t remember the details any more. He told me that no dog lover could every really forget a pet.

A nimble mind was needed in this situation and I immediately unleashed my on-the-feet thinking abilities, the secret behind my meteoric rise at Dufresne Partners.

For the next half hour I told him stories, instantly made up of course, about my imaginary half-Labrador half-bulldog Copernicus. He asked me if we bought him, like Hiphopper, from a breeder. Of course I did not see the point in making up this entire story if it did not give me an opportunity to impress the CEO. I told him that I found Copernicus, one day many years ago, stuck on the roof of an abandoned house overlooking the temple pond near my house as I was walking back home from my weekly Kathakali class. I tried to coax Copernicus down with some gestures, whistling noises and some biscuits but to no avail. The puppy looked petrified, clinging to the ancient, crumbling tiles, its little paws slipping and sliding on the film of moss and algae that covered everything. Copernicus was too scared to even whimper. One false step, one little misjudgement in paw placement and he’d go tumbling into the temple pond below. Only murky, green death awaited him there. Seeing that the puppy had little chance of survival if it stayed on the roof I, against all better judgement, went into the abandoned house. It was like a death zone, a succession of rooms and passages booby-trapped by nature’s corruption of brick and wood and steel. After twenty minutes of ducking, climbing and scrambling through dangerous, unstable debris I made my way upstairs and to the roof.