The accommodation problem had been running as a background process since my arrival.
Bangalore's rental market in the corridors near the tech parks was well-supplied but not cheap, and more relevantly, not designed for a single person requiring something at short notice on a budget that had not been supplemented by the kind of signing bonus that would have required a different entry into this company. A proper apartment meant brokers and deposits and rental agreements and a minimum of a month's lead time that I did not have. PG accommodations - the paying guest houses that serve the city's enormous migrant professional population - were plentiful but variable in quality and, in the neighborhoods closest to the office, priced at a level that was beyond my means.
I had spent three evenings looking and found nothing that suited me. On the fourth evening, expanding the search radius in the direction that led away from the tech corridor rather than toward it, I found a hand-lettered notice on the gate of a house that was set back from the road behind a garden that was clearly tended by someone who took it seriously.
The notice said: Single room available. Suitable for working professional. No loud music. References preferred.
The house was a single-storey bungalow of the kind that Bangalore used to be full of before the towers came. Whitewashed walls, a red oxide floor visible through the open front door, ceiling fans moving the warm evening air. The garden had a mature jackfruit tree and several rose bushes that were currently winning their argument with the available sunlight.
I rang the bell.
The man who answered it was in his late sixties, upright in the military way that does not loosen with retirement and does not need announcing, with close-cropped white hair and a physique that spoke of decades of regimented training and physical habits maintained for function rather than for appearance. He looked me over with the frank efficiency of someone accustomed to assessing people quickly and accurately.
"Colonel Suresh Pillai," he said, by way of introduction, and extended his hand.
I shook it. "Samayak Das."
His grip established the expected things about its owner, then released.
"You're a big fellow," he observed, "The room is up top. Come and look at it."
The room was accessed by an external staircase at the side of the house, the kind that had originally served a terrace and had at some point been enclosed to make a usable space. It was small and the ceiling followed the pitch of the roof, which meant standing at full height was limited to the central section. There was a single bed, a study desk with a chair, a narrow wardrobe and a window that looked out over the garden and the street and, beyond the street, the tops of several trees that had survived the locality's gradual development.
The bathroom was shared with a small second room that was currently unoccupied.
The rent was reasonable to the point of being slightly surprising.
"References?" Colonel Pillai asked.
I gave him Abhijit's name and contact at the company and my previous landlord's number in the other city. He looked at neither immediately. He was looking at me.
"Ever been in the Army?" he asked.
"No sir. Software company."
He nodded, as if this confirmed something he had been thinking. "You carry yourself like a soldier. The eyes mostly. What you do in the company?"
"Data analysis."
Another nod. "Supper is at eight if you want it. I cook for myself in any case and the pot is big. It would be extra. You don't have to. No obligation either way. Breakfast is your problem."
"The supper arrangement sounds good, sir," I said. "If it's not an inconvenience."
"If it was an inconvenience I wouldn't have mentioned it." He looked at me for another moment with those quick, accurate eyes. "One month deposit. No loud music. No drugs. You have people over, you tell me in advance. No women staying over." A brief pause, then: "Unless it's serious."
"Understood," I said.
"Right," said Colonel Pillai. "You'll want to move your things in tomorrow I suppose."
I moved my things in the next morning. They filled one corner of the room without difficulty.
The second week began as the first had ended, with the difference that the reading material was now exhausted and I was mapping territory that my access level showed me but that I had not yet found a systematic way to annotate. I began building a personal documentation framework instead—a structured map of the system architecture as I understood it, its connections and dependencies and the gaps that my access level left dark. It was the kind of work that has no deliverable and no deadline and no audience, and was therefore exactly the kind of work that nobody could take from me or use against me.
Simran I watched with the attention I gave to complex systems whose behavior I needed to understand before I could predict it. She was, aside from the hostility that was currently her primary mode with respect to me, clearly very good. The team organized itself around her in the way that teams organize around people who have earned that centrality through consistent quality rather than through seniority or volume. She thought precisely and quickly and had, from what I could observe of her interactions with colleagues, a specific talent for identifying the exact question that needed answering before anyone else in the room had fully formulated it.
She was also still angry about Delhi and Abhijit's intervention. And she was angry about the three-problem email I had sent on Friday evening, which I could see from the quality of her silence on Monday morning had landed in a way that did not improve her feelings about the situation.
Nobody mentioned the email. Nobody mentioned the three problems or their fixes. The floor continued its collective performance of my non-existence.
Colonel Pillai, on the other hand, was excellent company. The suppers were simple, good and punctual. We ate at a wooden table in a kitchen that had been organized by someone who believed in function over display, and talked about things that had nothing to do with either of our working lives. He had opinions about cricket, about the current state of the city's trees, about the biography of a general he was reading, about the best method for growing roses in Bangalore's specific soil. He asked me no questions about my work and seemed to understand, without being told, that this was a subject I was not in a position to discuss freely.
On the fourth evening he looked at me over his plate and said, without preamble, "Trouble at the office?"
"First posting in a new role," I said. "Still finding my feet."
He served himself more rice and then asked calmly. "Finding your feet or being made to find them the hard way?"
I looked at him.
"You come home tired but not the kind of tired that comes from working hard," he said. "That kind looks satisfied even when it's exhausted. The tired you come home with is the other kind."
"The other kind," I agreed.
Colonel Pillai ate in silence for a moment. Then he said, "I was adjutant to a Brigadier once who told me that the appropriate response to an enemy's full frontal assault was an orderly defense followed by patient pressure on their flanks. He was a brilliant man and correct in most things. But his advice worked only if the enemy was another army." He looked at me mildly. "People are different. People need to be shown a different thing entirely."
"What thing?" I asked.
"That you are not going anywhere," he said. "Nothing unsettles a person who expects you to fail or leave quite like the realization that you intend to do neither."
He said nothing further on the subject that evening or any other.
But he was right. And I had already arrived, independently, at the same conclusion.
I was not going anywhere.
By the end of the second week, Abhijit sent me a message. It said: Good catch on the three items. Especially the join logic. Nobody had noticed that one. Come see me Monday morning, nine sharp.
I read it twice. Then I put my phone face-down on the desk in the northwest corner, behind the pillar, and looked at the motivational poster on the partition in front of me.
Data is the new oil.
I was starting, cautiously, to believe it.