The Emerald Greens Annual Day was held in the main grounds, with plastic chairs arranged in rows and a small stage constructed from the same folding platform sections that appeared every year and were stored in the parking shed for the other fifty-one weeks. The string lights were the old incandescent kind that the younger residents kept suggesting should be replaced with LEDs and that the older residents kept failing to replace because they looked exactly right in the October evening.
The Zumba class was the second item in the cultural programme, after the children's classical dance and before the Block B aunties' antakshri group. There were, Vikram calculated as he stood in the wings with the group, approximately eighty people in the audience. He had built bridges that had to bear loads of several thousand tonnes. He had presented projects to government committees and corporate boards. He was, by the assessment of everyone who knew him professionally, a person who did not rattle.
His hands were damp.
Nirmala was standing beside him. She was in a deep blue kurta over fitted trousers — not the teal yoga pants, which she had decided were for morning class, not performance — and she looked, he thought, entirely composed. He knew, because he had learned to read her expressions over two months of bench conversations, that she was not entirely composed. There was a particular quality of stillness about her that she produced under pressure — the teacher's composure, the professional control — and behind it was the same thing he was feeling.
