The office was on the third floor of a building in Vasant Vihar that was mostly residential — a ground-floor chemist, a second-floor tutoring centre. The name on the door said: Priya Malhotra Urban Consulting — Ring Bell, Please. The "please" was handwritten on a sticky note, in neat, assured handwriting that told you something about the person who had written it.
Arjun did not ring the bell. He stood in the corridor and listened — two voices inside, a conversation about municipal water infrastructure, specific and technical. He heard her voice before he saw her face: clear, confident, the kind of voice that moved through a conversation like it knew where it was going.
He knocked. Footsteps. The door opened.
He had looked at her photograph in the file. The photograph had been taken at an event — formal, posed, the careful composure of someone who had grown up knowing how to face a camera. The woman in the doorway was the same person and completely different. She was wearing a plain kurta, ink-stained near the left cuff, her hair pulled back with either a pencil or a pen. She had a file under one arm and a phone in her other hand and was looking at him with the expression of someone whose afternoon had been interrupted and who was deciding in real time how to feel about it.
