The election was in thirty-one days. Both parties needed the flat. Both parties had filed for immediate possession. Both parties had sent their candidates to court in person, which was unusual and which told him something about how important both parties considered this particular flat in this particular constituency in this particular election.
He had been looking at both candidates for the past forty minutes while their lawyers argued. He had formed views about both of them. He was a man who formed views quickly and was usually right about them, which was either a virtue or a fault depending on whom you asked.
The BJP candidate was Aditya Malhotra. He sat on the right side of the aisle with the contained, precise stillness of a man who had been in rooms like this many times and had learned that the way you held your body communicated something and had therefore made his body communicate: I am patient and I am winning and I know it. He was thirty-four, well-dressed in the specific way of political men who understood that clothing was communication — not flashy, not casual, exactly right. He had the kind of face that camera lenses loved — defined, certain, the face of someone who had been told since childhood that he was going to be important and had decided to believe it. His father, the former minister, sat two rows behind him. The father was watching the son the way men watched investments they had made and were monitoring.
The Samajwadi Alliance candidate was Zara Siddiqui. She sat on the left side of the aisle with the quality of a woman who was not performing patience because she did not need to perform it — she was actually thinking, actually working through something, her pen moving occasionally across a notepad on her knee in the specific motion of a person who processes things by writing them down. She was thirty-one, in a salwar kameez the colour of deep teal that was either a deliberate political colour choice or simply what she had put on, and he suspected it was both. She had the face of someone who had argued cases in courts and won them — alert, quick, the specific readiness of a person who listened to everything and filed it. She had come to court alone, without family support, which told him she had done everything else in her career alone and saw no reason to change that now.
