An hour before the examination was supposed to end Tripathi received a note from the controller of examinations, R.P. Yadav, asking to see him before he left for the day. Yadav and Tripathi were not the best of friends. They never acknowledged each other’s presence unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

The door to Yadav’s room was open. He sat behind an oval table, his elbows resting on the green felt, his flunkies ranged around the table’s edges like fielders on the boundary line. ‘Come, come, Tripathiji,’ said Yadav, pointing to an empty chair. He turned his swivel chair around so that it faced the open windows of his office and fixed his gaze quite deliberately on a neem tree in the grounds outside. The flunkies had fallen silent.

Yadav pulled out a rolled-up sheet of paper from a drawer in his desk. He removed the rubber band and handed it to Tripathi. It was his daughter’s answer script. A diagonal red line bisected the front page into two symmetric triangles. A small note scribbled on the bottom left corner of the page said: ‘Caught using unfair means’.

Tripathi walked slowly towards the scooter stand. His daughter was supposed to meet him there but was nowhere to be seen. Tripathi handed the attendant his parking token, slipped on his helmet and headed off in the direction of Civil Lines. He was furious with Yadav. That low caste bastard targeting his daughter like this. He remembered Yadav showing him the crib sheets that had been recovered from Jyoti. ‘This is the cheating material which I am going to attach to this script as evidence. The rest is up to the committee,’ Yadav had said, gesticulating in the direction of the ceiling.

On reaching Civil Lines the first thing Tripathi did was to stop at his bank. He filled in a pink slip and queued up at window number 2. The cashier looked up for a second when Tripathi handed him the slip—the amount was far more than Tripathi usually withdrew.

Tripathi stood to the side of the window and counted the amount. He did not arrange the money in his wallet but stuffed it in the front pockets of his trousers. Leaving the scooter in the bank’s parking lot, he headed off towards El Chico, the most expensive restaurant in town. In his youth he would often come here on winter evenings for a cup of coffee. Back in the ’seventies, it had been the first in town to acquire an espresso machine.

Tripathi spent a long time reading the three menus—Chinese, Continental and Mughlai. The waiter approached him for the order but he waved him away impatiently. He wasn’t ready yet. He still had to make up his mind. When he had finally decided he piled up the menus neatly, one on top of the other. He raised his left hand in the air like an eager schoolboy desperate to answer a question.