The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education occupied a large building in Shivaji Nagar that had the quality of all large government education buildings — slightly too much space in the corridors, slightly too little space in the offices, a permanent smell of files and institutional chai, and the specific slow certainty of bureaucratic machinery that was, when it worked, actually very effective because it had been designed with the specific intention of being hard to corrupt.
Karthik had made an appointment with the ombudsman's office directly — using his legal credentials and the specific language of documentary evidence of institutional examination fraud to reach above the regular administrative chain. The ombudsman's office had been created specifically to handle complaints that could not go through normal channels without risk of institutional interference.
They arrived at ten AM: Kavitha, Karthik, Naina, and — because two student witness statements would strengthen the primary documentary complaint — Rohan and Dev, both of whom had had conversations with their parents over the weekend and both of whose parents had, after those conversations, taken their children to the Board offices themselves with their own statements about what their children had told them.
The ombudsman was a woman in her fifties named Mrs. Desai, who had the quality of someone who had seen a great deal of institutional malfeasance over a long career and had developed a very precise instrument for distinguishing the genuine from the fabricated. She received the complaint with a stillness that was not disinterest but the specific containment of someone processing something they were taking seriously.
Kavitha's testimony took ninety minutes. She was specific, sequential, and precise — Naina could see the three weeks of preparation in how she organised the account, distinguishing between what she had observed directly, what she had inferred, and what the documentary evidence supported. Mrs. Desai's team made notes.
The documentary evidence — the spreadsheet, the original mark sheets, the letter from the drawer — had been submitted as a formal exhibit before the testimony began. Mrs. Desai had reviewed it and asked two very specific questions about the methodology Kavitha had used to compare the digital and paper records. Kavitha's answers were correct and complete. Mrs. Desai had nodded once, which was — Karthik told Naina in a whispered aside — the ombudsman equivalent of being impressed.
