“What time’s Sinha-Roy’s dinner?” asked Mr. Gupta, glassyeyed, scratching his stubble as he cruised that morning down Marine Drive. In the office, he referred to Sinha-Roy as “sir” or “Mr. Sinha-Roy,” but in private he derived a careless, imperious pleasure from dropping the awed monosyllabic whisper of the first word or the ingratiating, lisping two syllables of the “Mr.” This was one of the small freedoms of “company life”: that, however it may have ingrained itself into you as a religion, you did not have to practise it at home. Driving down Marine Drive, Mr. Gupta was a free man; though only in a sense, because the car on whose steering wheel his hands rested was an accessory of the company’s, both a free-moving object that gave him the illusion of ownership and control, and an accomplice to employment.

“Seven-thirty,” said Mrs. Arati Gupta, brushing aside the filigree of hair that had blown across her face with the breeze. She was the less sharp but the more pragmatic, even the wiser, of the two. In a sense, she was the one behind the wheel, always had been, always would be, while he made the protestations and clamour of the engine. “But eight o’clock would be all right, don’t you think?” always seeking his agreement, if not permission, at the end of a suggestion.

The palm trees of Marine Drive rushed in the opposite direction, like a crowd that was running to meet someone. Only recently, Mrs. Gandhi had waved a wand—or was it a cane?—and nationalised all the banks, and substantially reduced foreign shareholdings in “private sector” companies. This was true of the private sector company, which manufactured paint, where Mr. Gupta worked, which recently had been made more “Indian” or true-blooded but whose status derived from the fact that it had once, not long ago, had the word “British” in its name (the word had now, with dignity, been dispensed with). The private sector found itself uneasily on the cusp of a world that had been left behind and which Mrs. Gandhi, reportedly, had set about changing.

“Yes, eight o’clock; I don’t want to go too early,” he said, taking a bend. Mrs. Gupta said, as if the thought had just come to her: “Should we take something for them?” There were, of course, no rules on this matter, of visiting your superior’s house on what was after all a social and civilised visit, no rules except when you realised that every form of interaction was permeated by company law, not the sort of company law that Mr. Gupta had studied laboriously what seemed not many years ago, but the kind that Arati Gupta had become an avid student of.