Eram looked around the cafe again, trying to see what Gehna was seeing. Most of the customers in the place were by themselves. Instead of socializing, they had laptops or notebooks open in front of them and were listening to music through earphones. Even when they were seated in groups of two or more, they appeared to be talking shop.

‘They’re not here to drink coffee?’ Eram guessed.

‘Nope. The coffee is icing, not the cake. Now, look.’ Gehna borrowed a pen from a passing server, snatched up a handful of napkins, and over the next two hours sketched out her idea. It was a conversation, but only in the sense that Eram was there and he had a pulse. He didn’t mind being Gehna’s sounding board; while she spoke and wrote at a furious pace, he watched her hands. How they danced wildly through the air, every bit as crucial in the expression of her thoughts as her tongue. He watched the frown lines that appeared between her eyebrows whenever she was thinking hard. He watched the practiced smoothness with which she pulled her hair up on her head and stuck a chopstick through it. Her bare shoulders, the warmth and smell of her skin, turned any coherent thought Eram might have had into mush.

‘So, that’s the plan. What do you think?’ Gehna asked.

‘It’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Though, honestly, if you’d been reading insurance policies out loud for the past two hours, I would have been equally captivated.’

Gehna laughed. ‘True. We need to pitch this to someone with a keen business mind. Someone who’s not quite so easily impressed by me.’

The offices where Ajay Rai worked looked nothing like what Eram had imagined a land development company would. In his mind, it was part construction site with people walking around in orange hard hats and part government department with old files piled up all around. In reality, it looked more like a high-end firm of architects. People either stood at drawing boards or mapped blueprints on their computers. In one conference room that Eram peeked into, a presentation was being made. In another, a variety of labelled stone and marble tiles were displayed under powerful LED lamps.

Ajay Rai was in the biggest corner office. His assistant, a nervous-looking young woman, showed Gehna and Eram in.

‘Hi, Dad.’ Gehna took a seat across her father’s desk and briskly crossed her legs. ‘What up.’

‘Gehna? Is everything all right?’ Ajay asked. He looked from his daughter to Eram, and back again.

‘Peachy. Why?’

‘Because this is only the second time you’ve visited my office in your life, and the first time was when Varun told you you were adopted.’ Ajay smiled at Eram. ‘She was seven years old and utterly devastated. Do you guys want anything? Coke, coffee?’

‘No, thanks. What I want is for you to listen to my business plan.’ Gehna fished out the napkins she’d been scribbling on from her tote bag. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, about being financially independent and stuff, and this is what I want to do. I want to build workspaces for digital nomads. There’s this huge population of, like, freelancers, right? Writers, graphic designers, photographers, whatever. Plus, expats who travel a lot but their companies are too small to have offices here, so they end up working from their hotel rooms. Or Airbnb’s, if they can’t afford a decent hotel, and sometimes the Airbnb’s don’t have basic things like Wi-Fi because you’re choosing them online and . . . What?’