‘No, no, that’s not what I mean.’ I chewed my zucchini stick thoughtfully, wanting to explain it properly. Both of them were really nice, and had been going out of their way to show me how things worked since my first bumbling day at the offi ce. ‘She’s always going off about some new idea or event or something,

you know, just—’ I gestured with my hands, miming something blowing up.

‘Pataka!’

‘That’s someone who is—’

I laughed, cutting off Kiran. ‘A dynamo. Yes. Exactly. She’s a total dynamo. And hey, I know what a pataka is, okay?’

Ritika laughed too as she gathered up the little steel bowls carrying her lunch of vegetables and rotis and yoghurt. ‘No you don’t, you firang.’

You’d never be able to tell from the brusque way she treated her (though to be fair, that was DK’s general manner), but I strongly suspected that Ritika was her favourite employee. She was on a mission to teach us how to become the kind of strong, independent woman she herself seemed to be, and Ritika was her best student, a teacher’s pet who escaped ridicule and resentment because of the sheer sincerity with which she operated. She was easily the hardest worker at Fig Tree and was saving up to pay for an MBA, all the while placating her orthodox Punjabi family and convincing them to let her have a job instead of a husband by waking up at four in the morning to cook and clean the house before changing two metros during her ninety-minute commute to work.

I admired her in the dubious way that people do when faced with someone who makes them feel grateful for the relative comforts of their own lives. Especially because despite what seemed to me like a harrowing schedule, she maintained both a sunny disposition and the kind of effi ciency that made me wonder whether she actually lived in an alternate universe with about forty hours in the day.

She grinned and tsk’d when I posited this theory to her, gesturing to the well-worn blue notebook that was her constant companion.

‘Everything gets done if you make lists and tick tick tick all through the day. You will start hating it when you miss a tick, and bas, all your work will get done.’

Her words came back to haunt me within a week, and I cursed myself for not taking her advice to heart.

SalT, an old favourite amongst Khan Market regulars, was reopening after being shut for a season (they said renovations, DK heard health violations). I had put off calling the numbers on the press list till the last minute, and as I woke to unexpected torrents of November rain on the morning of the opening, I knew I was screwed.