Eram looked blank.

She tilted her head towards the leader board. ‘You get a little back.’

The information displayed on the Plasmatron screen slowly pierced the fog in Eram’s head. Gehna was right. Because of an oddity in the way the tournament rules were drawn up, if two players were simultaneously eliminated on the bubble, they shared the cash prize for the 176th place. Eram had been so intent on the action at his own table that he hadn’t noticed that there had been an all-in and a call at another. The minimum cash prize set aside for the 176th place, which was two lakhs, would be split equally between Eram and the player who busted out across the room at the same time.

‘See?’ said Gehna. ‘You and that other dude go halfsies. So stop moping and come meet my new friends.’

Her new friends were sons of second-generation Indian immigrants to the United States. In their late twenties, they were all successful IT programmers settled in the Bay Area of San Francisco, who had decided to finally visit the country their forefathers belonged to—or, at least, that part of the country that was awash with sunburned tourists and cheap beer. Unfortunately, having grown up on the western seaboard, they had found themselves a bit underwhelmed by the beach life Goa offered. They had decided instead to hit the gaming tables for some live poker action, but the Delta Queen, another much-touted attraction, was hosting the tournament. So far for them, the most charming thing about India had been Gehna, and by the time they encountered her in the ship’s bar they were starved of entertainment.

The four arrived at the hotel, by prior arrangement, just after 10 p.m. that night.

Gehna had taken care of everything. Eram had told her that all you needed to play poker was a-chip-and-a-chair, but she had privately dismissed that notion as nonsense. She had booked a conference room, which came with a dedicated steward to fetch drinks and snacks. She had snooped around on the Delta Queen and hired one of their off-duty dealers for the night. She had even, with some difficulty, located a shop run by illegal Russian expats, which stocked black-market premium cigars. None of this stuff came cheap, but Gehna figured that it was worth it to restore Eram’s shattered confidence.

The game was No Limit Texas Hold’em with a cash buy-in of one lakh rupees. The four Indian-American boys were disappointed that Gehna wouldn’t be joining them—‘too rich for my blood,’ she had said before signalling the steward to bring around glasses of Glenlivet—but they were there to play, and the game swallowed them whole as soon as the first hand was dealt. They had learnt to play in the dorms of their university at $1–$2 stakes, and had tight, solid ranges that lasted about as long as it took Eram to give each of them a bad beat. He cracked their pocket aces with hands like queen-three, or gambled on long odds to make backdoor flushes. The four tourists were outraged. They were steamed. They cursed Eram’s luck, they drank more whisky, they threw money into the pot holding any two cards, and they exchanged dollars for buy-in chips again and again and again.