It was the first event that DK had entrusted me to oversee entirely on my own, and I was going to ruin it and disappoint her. I had to fix it somehow and there was pretty much only one way I could think of to do it. Panicking and on the verge of tears, I went and knocked on the side of Ritika’s cubicle. She hesitated for a moment, much less than I thought she would, but as soon as I asked her what she thought DK would say when the owners of SalT called to complain that not one newspaper had carried a single mention of the reopening, she relented and started making calls. The long-standing media relationships that she had cultivated over her three years at Fig Tree saved my hide, but it also meant that we had to switch our events for the day. It was risky manoeuvre, even though DK was out of town and unlikely to find out. I was suitably nervous as Ritika went to SalT to meet her contacts and do damage control, and sent me off to oversee her event.

It was a far grander affair than anything I could have handled, and as I walked through the familiar environs of the plush hotel (it housed the best sushi restaurant in town) and into the large room allocated for the book launch of a mildly famous, well-reviewed author, I found out why she had seemed so at ease letting me handle her event. Unlike all the haphazard little events I had been organizing as I wobbled about trying to find my feet, Ritika’s launch party had been planned down to the tee, her careful attention to detail ensuring that anything I could think to look into had been checked and double-checked till everything was set to run smooth as jazz. I barely had anything to do, so I situated myself by one of the two sets of forty-foot doors at the entrance, smiling and ushering in guests as they arrived.

It was a pleasantly mindless occupation, and I started to relax as people trickled in. A few of them nodded an acknowledgement, though most didn’t even seem to notice that there was a fellow human being saying hello to them as they swept themselves into the thickening crowd. I didn’t entirely mind their rudeness because it let me space off into my own thoughts, but I was jerked out of them as I saw a familiar face and started to beam a greeting at it. I landed up smiling idiotically at the back of her dress as she brushed past the lowly employee standing at the door.

I’d met Mrs Lodhi many times, at many parties and weddings I had unwillingly attended with my parents. She had always been so nice, so interested in my life and full of questions about what I was studying in school.