When his attention returned to his letter, he would frequently find that he had forgotten what he had intended to say. His face would cloud over and his tone would grow sharp as if to imply that the interruption was somehow Neel’s fault: ‘Achha, so then read the whole thing to me – from the beginning.’

The arrival of the mid-morning samosa and chai was the signal for Neel to leave the daftar. From then on the Seth’s attention would be claimed by a procession of other employees – shroffs, khazanadars, accountants, and the like. Neel, in the meanwhile, would repair to his tiny, smoky cubicle, beside the kitchen, to make a start on the job of turning the Seth’s thoughts and reflections into coherent prose – in Hindusthani or English as the case demanded. Although frequently difficult and always time-consuming, the process was rarely tedious: often, while copying out the finished compositions in his best nastaliq or Roman hand, Neel would be struck by how strangely challenging Bahram’s correspondence was. In the Seth’s letters, there were none of the flourishes, formulae and routine expressions that had played so large a part in his own correspondence, back when he was himself the master of a daftar; Bahram’s concerns were all about the here and now; whether prices would rise or fall, and and what it would mean for his business.

And yet, what exactly was this business? The strange thing was that despite all the time he spent with Bahram and all the letters he wrote for him, Neel had only a hazy idea of how his enterprise functioned. That most of his profits came from opium was clear enough, but exactly how much of it he traded, who he sold it to and where it went – all this was a mystery to Neel, for Bahram’s letters rarely made any reference to such matters. Could it be that unbeknownst to Neel, there were certain code words in the letters? Or could it be that he filled in some details in his own hand, in Gujarati, on the margins of the sheets that Neel handed to him? Or was it that certain letters were written for him by his other daftardars, men who were better acquainted with the functioning of the business? The last seemed the likeliest possibility, but somehow Neel was not persuaded of it: it seemed to him, rather, that all of Bahram’s employees – with the possible exception of Vico – knew only as much as they needed to and no more. Bahram’s daftardars were like the parts of a watch, each doing what was required of him but unaware of the functioning of the whole: only the Seth himself knew how the ensemble was put together, and for what purpose. And nor was this an accident: it was rather a function of some inborn skill that enabled him to manage his subordinates in such a way that they each worked efficiently within their own spheres while he alone was responsible for the whole.