The weekend arrived and I had two objectives. The first was practical: find a gym. The second was identical to the first. Everything else could wait.
The Colonel's neighborhood had several options. I did a circuit of them on Saturday morning like a man inspecting apartments. The first was a modest setup in a commercial basement with one functional squat rack and a lot of optimism. The second had decent cardio machines and a laminated poster of a bodybuilder on the wall. The third had a sign outside that said: Ladies Special Classes and I kept walking.
The fourth was three streets further, set back behind a car park with tinted glass frontage that caught the morning sun. I saw the ceiling height through the glass before I even opened the door. High enough for rope climbs. That alone was worth investigating.
Inside, it was the kind of gym that understood what gyms were for. No mirrors on every wall. No tinny pop music at a volume designed to prevent thinking. The main floor had heavy rack stations with proper collars and bumper plates, not the flimsy chrome sets that buckle under anything serious. There was a dedicated functional training bay along the north wall; pull-up rigs, battle ropes, a sled track, kettlebells ranked in order of weight. At the far end, behind a half-wall, was a boxing area. Heavy bags, speed bags, a double-end bag, floor-to-ceiling mirror on one wall and a proper canvas mat on the floor. Two boxing rings. Clean. Well-maintained. The smell of the place was honest effort, chalk and leather, the kind of smell that a gym earns.
The trainers were a different species from the type I had last encountered. One of them, a lean man in his thirties with the economical build of someone who actually trains for function, came over and introduced himself without the usual sales approach. He asked what I was training for. Not what I wanted to look like. What I was training for.
I told him. He nodded, showed me around, answered my questions without trying to upsell me on a personal training package and left me to it.
I signed up for six months on the spot.
That afternoon I came back and trained for three hours. Legs and posterior chain first, heavy and deliberate. Then the boxing bay. I worked the heavy bag until my shoulders burned and the thoughts in my head got quieter, and then I worked it some more until they went away entirely. By the time I walked back to the Colonel's house I was carrying nothing but physical exhaustion, which is the only kind worth having.
Supper that evening. The Colonel served rice and a fish curry from the coast, made from a recipe he had picked up during a posting in Kerala forty years back and apparently not changed since. We ate and talked about nothing that mattered and I slept for nine hours without dreaming.
The gym became the fixed point that the week turned around. Morning run at four-thirty. Office by nine. The nonsense of the day, whatever shape it took. Evening gym session at seven. The Colonel's table at eight. Sleep by ten. Repeat.
It is remarkable how much you can absorb when you have somewhere to put the excess.
Monday morning I was at Abhijit's door at nine sharp. He was already behind his desk with three monitors running and a half-eaten paratha beside the keyboard. He waved me to the chair across from him without looking up.
Then he pushed back from the desk, looked at me, and said without preamble: Tell me what you've been doing for two weeks.
It was a quiz. I recognized the format. He wanted to know whether I had spent the fortnight stewing in my own resentment or actually working, and he wanted the answer delivered in a way that would tell him which kind of person I was without my having to say it directly.
I told him what I had done. The reading list, completed and extended into adjacent areas. The three problems I had documented. And the mapping; the architecture as I understood it, the three service lines, the data flows, the governance structure, the access thresholds I had found and what they implied about the sensitivity of what lay behind them.
He let me speak without interrupting. His eyebrows did their characteristic work as I went on, rising steadily with each layer I described. By the time I got to the classified service line and its client profile his eyebrows had reached a height that suggested I had said something either very impressive or very alarming.
"You got all of that from your current access level?";
"The architecture implies it," I said. "I didn't access anything I wasn't cleared for. I just read what the structure was pointing at".
He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, "Right", in the way that people say it when they mean something more than right.
What followed was a different kind of conversation. He stopped testing me and started talking to me as if I were already a member of the team rather than a liability imported from sales. I had enough sense to listen more than I spoke.
The Business Intelligence division, he explained, was not what its name implied to anyone who heard it from the outside. The name was deliberately uninspiring. Boring names are protective. The global headquarters of the division was in Helsinki, Finland; the result of an acquisition made fourteen years ago, when the parent company had bought a small Finnish data security firm and, discovering what the Finns had actually built, had quietly reorganized their entire data function around it. The Helsinki team numbered forty-three people. They had four PhDs in mathematics, two in computer science, one in cryptography, and a former researcher from a European signals intelligence agency whose name Abhijit did not mention and which I did not ask for.
The division worked at the frontier of data science and artificial intelligence in the precise sense of the word frontier: the territory just past the edge of published research, where the problems were not yet solved and the tools to solve them were being built alongside the solutions. The classified service line I had inferred from the architecture was real and it was significant. The clients it served required capabilities that were not commercially available anywhere else. Some of the division's work had implications that extended well past the company, past the clients, into the kind of territory that does not appear in annual reports.
Abhijit said all of this with the passion of a kid who is just learning about deep space. The eccentricity was still there; he interrupted himself twice to make notes on a completely different subject and once to eat the cold paratha; but underneath it was the seriousness of a man who understood exactly what he was running and deeply excited about it.
"The three problems you found," he said, returning to the subject. "The join logic mismatch. How long did that take you to identify?"
"About an hour to spot. Another two to confirm it wasn't intentional."
"It's been sitting there for nineteen months," he said. He did not say it with any particular emotion. It was just a fact he was sharing with me. "Simran's team did a pipeline audit in December. Didn't find it."
I said nothing to that. There was nothing useful to say.
Abhijit looked at me. "Have you been introduced to the team properly?"
"No."
Something shifted in his expression. It was brief. "Wait here," he said.
He picked up his phone and called Simran.
They filed in over the next five minutes. Eight people. Simran came first and stood to one side with the expression of someone receiving unexpected dental work. The others arranged themselves in the available space with the shuffling self-consciousness of people summoned without warning.
Abhijit gestured at me. "Simran, please introduce the team properly. Das should know who he's working with."
Simran executed the introductions with the efficient pleasantness of someone determined to be impeccable in front of her boss and not one degree warmer.
Vikram Chauhan she introduced first. He was built for it; tall, broad across the shoulders, two or three years older than me. From Jodhpur originally, though the Bangalore years had softened the Rajasthani edges of his speech. He had the kind of physical presence that expects a room to rearrange itself around it and had presumably been the most physically imposing person in any room he had entered since approximately the age of eighteen. He looked at me the way men of that type look at other men of that type: with the careful, flat appraisal of someone taking a measurement. His handshake was firm and deliberate. His "welcome to the team" was delivered to a point three inches above my left shoulder.
Dr. Priya Venkataraman was next. Thirty-four, Chennai by way of IIT Madras and a PhD in mathematical statistics from the University of Edinburgh. Small and precise in her movements, with the kind of composure that comes from years of being the most technically rigorous person in most rooms she occupied. She smiled at me with genuine professional neutrality, which was more than most of the others managed.
The two younger ones came together. Arjun Nair, twenty-three, from Thrissur, Kerala; a boy who looked nineteen and had apparently written three research papers by the time he was twenty-one. Faisal Khan, twenty-four, from Lucknow, who had the fast-blinking energy of someone whose brain runs several processes in parallel at all times and finds the speed of normal conversation mildly frustrating. Both of them looked at me with unfiltered curiosity, which I found more honest than the careful neutrality around them.
Dr. Rajiv Dhingra was forty-four, Delhi by birth and disposition. PhD in computer science from IIT Delhi followed by seven years in industry before joining the division. He wore his credentials with the ease of someone who stopped needing to announce them a long time ago. He nodded at me and asked a single question: "Do you drink coffee?" When I said yes, he nodded again as if this confirmed something important and said nothing further.
Dr. Cyrus Irani was forty-seven. Mumbai Parsi, with the unhurried manner and dry humor of that particular community at its best. He had a PhD in cryptography from ETH Zurich and had worked at two European research institutions before returning to India. He looked me over with an appraising but not unkind eye and said, "I heard about the join logic. Simple but nineteen months." He said it without accusation. Just acknowledgment.
Sudha Balasubramanian was fifty-two. Bangalore born and educated, which made her a rarity in a division that had imported most of its talent from elsewhere. She had been with the company for eleven years, longer than anyone else in the room including Abhijit. She looked at me with the measured patience of someone who has seen enough new arrivals to know that most situations resolve themselves if you give them time.
Eight people. Seven of them making a collective effort to appear unaffected by my presence while being visibly affected by my presence. Abhijit watched all of it from behind his monitors with his characteristic air of a man who notices everything and finds most of it mildly interesting.
"Starting tomorrow, Das joins the morning scrums," he said. "Simran, I want a rotation schedule by end of day. Each team member spends time with Das over the next two weeks; bring him up to speed on what you're working on, where the division sits currently, what the priorities are. Make it thorough."
There was a pause of approximately two seconds that contained a significant amount of information.
"Of course," Simran said.
Abhijit waved his hand. They left.
The rotation schedule arrived at four-fifty-eight that afternoon, two minutes before Simran would have been in breach of Abhijit's end-of-day instruction. It was thorough in the way that a document can be thorough while simultaneously conveying that its author found the entire exercise beneath them.
It was a difficult week. I will not pretend otherwise.
The morning scrums began at eight-thirty. The team gathered around a standing table in one of the glass-walled meeting rooms, each person reporting on their current project status and blockers. I stood at the far end and listened. Nobody addressed me on the first morning. Nobody addressed me on the second. On the third, Vikram Chauhan, without looking at me, said into the room: "Since we're all here, maybe our newest member can tell us what he knows about homomorphic encryption. Given that it's relevant to half the projects on this board."
The room got the slightly sharper quality of a space where something is being tested.
I told him what I knew about homomorphic encryption. It was not nothing. The reading list had included two papers by researchers whose work in this area was foundational, and the adjacent reading I had done on my own had covered the current state of practical implementation. I was not going to convince Dr. Irani that I was his peer in cryptography. But I was also not going to stare blankly at the wall.
Vikram listened to my answer with his arms folded. "What about its limitations in real-time data processing at scale?"
I addressed that too.
There was a silence. Not a comfortable one, but not the hostile variety either. Something in the middle; the silence of people recalibrating from 'zero' to 'not bad'.
Arjun Nair broke it by asking a follow-up question that was genuinely curious rather than adversarial, and the scrum moved on.
The one-on-ones were where the real work happened. Each team member had been assigned a morning slot with me over the two-week rotation. The approach varied by person.
Dr. Dhingra started our session by placing a tablet in front of me with a database schema diagram on it and asking me to identify the three most significant design decisions and explain what constraints had probably driven them. He said nothing further for twenty minutes while I worked through it. At the end he took the tablet back, said "Not bad," and spent the rest of the time explaining the division's data governance framework in detail that was genuinely useful.
Dr. Venkataraman opened her laptop, showed me a half-built statistical model for anomaly detection in transactional data streams, and asked me to identify what was missing. I found two things. She had expected me to find one or none. She covered the third thing herself without comment and then walked me through the full model for the rest of the hour. She was an excellent teacher when she chose to be.
Faisal Khan arrived five minutes early to our session and opened by asking me six questions in rapid succession on distributed systems architecture, barely pausing for my answers before moving to the next. By the fourth question I had stopped hesitating before responding and by the sixth he had slowed down. "You're faster than I expected," he said, not unkindly. Then he pulled up the project he was working on and showed me everything about it without being asked to.
Vikram Chauhan's session was on a Thursday afternoon. He sat across from me, pulled up nothing on his laptop, folded his hands on the desk and said: "So what are you actually here for?"
I looked at him. "Same as everyone else. To work."
"You came in on the back of a compliance issue that made this team look incompetent in front of senior management. You have no research background, no relevant postgraduate qualification and no prior BI experience. You've been placed on this team by a process that bypassed our standard recruitment. And you expect us to treat that as normal."
He said it evenly. No anger in it. Just the statements, laid out.
"No," I said. "I don't expect that. I expect you to treat it as a problem. Which is what it is. And I expect that the way I handle myself over the next few months will either make the problem smaller or bigger. I'm trying to make it smaller."
He held my gaze for a few seconds. Then he opened his laptop and showed me the project he was running. He walked me through it at a pace that assumed I was following, which I was, and answered my questions with the same evenness he had used to challenge me. At the end of the hour he closed his laptop and said nothing further.
It was not friendship. It was not warmth. But it was a different kind of silence from the one before.
Sudha Balasubramanian was last on the schedule. She came in with two cups of filter coffee, set one in front of me without asking, and said: "You look tired."
"It's been a full week," I said.
"It always is, the first month," she said. "Drink the coffee. I'm going to tell you how the division actually runs, which is different from how it officially runs, and you're going to need the caffeine."
She spent ninety minutes giving me a complete and unsentimental account of the team's informal structure, the projects that had political weight, the ones that had genuine impact, who deferred to whom on which kinds of decisions and why. She had been watching the division for eleven years. She missed very little.
When she left I sat for a moment with my empty coffee cup and thought that this team, hostile or not, was the most concentrated assembly of competence I had been around in my professional life. That was either an opportunity or a long and punishing lesson in humility. Possibly both.
I gathered my things and went to the gym.
The gym worked. That is the only way I know to say it. Whatever the day had done to my head, two hours of deliberate physical effort undid most of it. The heavy rack first, always. Then the smaller machines. Then the boxing bay. The combinations I had been drilling since I was a teenager in Calcutta came back without effort, muscle memory is the most loyal kind and the heavy bag absorbed everything I had.
By the end of the first week the trainers had stopped treating me like a new member and started treating me like someone they were professionally curious about. One of them, the lean man who had shown me around on day one, Karthik, asked if I had trained in boxing formally. I said yes and gave him the short version. He nodded and invited me to spar with one of his intermediate students. I accepted. The intermediate student lasted 3 minutes before conceding defeat and looking at me with wide eyes.
"Where did you train?" Karthik asked.
"Kolkata originally. Then wherever I could find decent coaching."
He looked at my hands and then at the bag I had been working before the spar. "Come earlier tomorrow. I want to watch you on the bag properly."
The attention started in the second week. I was not looking for it and did not particularly want it, but it is difficult to avoid attention in a gym when you are the size I am and train the way I train. Other members began angling for the equipment near the boxing bay when I was there. The regulars, mostly men, watched with the candid evaluation of people who understand physical capability and are measuring it. I ignored this without effort.
The other kind of attention I also ignored, though it required slightly more effort. There were three women who trained in the evenings at overlapping times with mine. One was a bratty but pretty girl who came in with earphones and trained entirely in her own world. One was a lawyer, I guessed from the suit she always arrived in before changing, who was working on her first triathlon and needed no distractions from it. Both of them seemed not to be watching but were always around me. The third made less effort to pretend she was not watching.
I kept my headphones in and my eyes on the work. I had enough complications.
Colonel Pillai noticed the change in me by the end of the second week. He did not remark on it directly. He simply served a slightly better cut of fish at Friday supper and poured me a small whisky from a bottle he produced from somewhere in the back of the kitchen cabinet.
"Settling in," he observed. It was not a question.
"Beginning to," I said.
He accepted this as sufficient and we talked about his roses instead. But I had the impression that the whisky was a kind of marker. The Colonel was a man who measured progress in practical terms and recognized it in the same way.
I did not call Anjali. I did not message her. Each day that passed without doing so was its own small act of controlled demolition, dismantling something deliberately, piece by piece, because the alternative was to let it collapse on its own and make a worse kind of mess.
I slept. I worked. I hit the bag until my hands were sore and my mind was empty.
Monday morning I was at my desk in the northwest corner at eight twenty-five. The scrum was at eight-thirty. I had a second cup of the Colonel's filter coffee. He had started leaving a flask out for me in the morning. And I waited for whatever the week was going to bring.
The data was the new oil.
I intended to become very good at drilling for it.