He looked at Raju's counter. He thought about the line he had deleted in the stairwell. He thought about the dal from Kapil's mother's container, the plaster on his eyebrow, the one night in the dark of the safehouse when they had talked for two hours and it had been, in the middle of everything that was difficult, the most genuine conversation he had had in years.
"The professional thing to say," he said carefully, "is that I'll recuse myself from any future assignments involving your family and that the relationship between us is free to be whatever it is because there's no professional conflict anymore."
"That's the professional thing," she said.
"The honest thing," he said, "is that I've been trying not to think about you for twelve days and I've been completely unsuccessful." He looked at her directly. "Which tells me something."
She looked at him for a moment. Then: "Raju's coffee is good, but I make better chai. You can confirm this from repeated personal experience." She picked up her cup. "Come to the office Friday. I'll make chai and you can look at the ward seven analysis and tell me whether I need to strengthen the correlation before the committee presentation."
"That's a very specific reason to invite me somewhere," he said.
"I'm a very specific person," she said. "You've noticed."
"Yes," he said. "I've noticed." A pause. "Friday."
"Friday." She smiled — not the corner-of-the-mouth thing he had been cataloguing, the actual smile, the full one, the one she apparently didn't distribute commonly. It was, he thought, worth waiting for. "And bring better biscuits. The ones from downstairs are from 2019."
"How do you know?"
"I read the packaging on everything," she said. "I work with data."
He thought about a woman who read every label and mapped water distribution inequity and compiled evidence of fraud alone for six weeks and held her hands steady when she cleaned an eyebrow cut and made chai at one AM in a safehouse and was going to reform, methodically and completely, the ward-level maintenance allocation of three South Delhi municipal zones. He thought about what the correct professional description of that was. Then he decided not to bother with the description.
Remarkable woman, he had written. Remarkable was the word. And he was going to bring better biscuits on Friday and review the ward seven analysis and tell her what he thought about the correlation, and whatever came after that was going to be honest and specific and entirely worth the patience it had taken to arrive at it.
