The offer letter had said US hours, premium pay, structured growth path, which was how every BPO in Bangalore described night shift work, and which meant: we will pay you thirty percent more than the day shift to sit in a building from eleven PM to seven AM while your body argues with your brain about whether this is real life or a very long dream.
Meera Pillai was twenty-four years old, three weeks out of her MBA, and had taken the job at Zenith Solutions because the premium pay would finish her education loan in eighteen months instead of four years, which was a calculation she had run seventeen times on different spreadsheets to make sure it was correct. It was correct. The math was good. She had committed to the math.
The building was in Whitefield, in the stretch where the tech parks clustered together like animals that needed each other's warmth — glass and metal, lit from inside, the specific fluorescence of spaces designed to be occupied at hours when humans were historically asleep. Zenith Solutions occupied floors six through nine of a tower called Technomark Pinnacle, which was the kind of name that a building got when the people naming it were very earnest and not quite fluent in the aesthetics of understatement.
