Bharat pushed his barstool back so loudly, a few patrons of the half-full bar actually looked up from their tables. “You know what? I don’t have to take shit from you. I’m leaving.”
“No,” Shiv said. “You’re not.”
“Why the fuck not?” Bharat snarled. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t beat the crap out of you for mocking me right now.”
“Because I have a weak heart and can’t handle it,” Shiv answered promptly, shamelessly bringing up his HCM.
Bharat swore. “Motherfuck!”
Shiv smiled softly. “I love you, Bharat. Like I love Kit,” he said simply. “So, I’m going to return the favor you did me and help you.”
Bharat’s hands fisted and his eyes burned in unshed agony. “Nothing can help this situation. She’s gone. Sophia’s gone for good.”
Shiv resisted sighing. He had to tread carefully now. He’d managed to pull Bharat back from the spiral. Now, he had to give him purpose till he could figure out a way to ‘fix’ Nakul Kulashreshtha.
“But I wasn’t talking about Sophia,” he said blandly.
Bharat’s eyes sharpened, some of the sorrow cloaking him evaporated. “Then?”
“You said you wanted to fix Caliban. Reshape it, didn’t you?” Shiv asked slowly.
Bharat nodded. “I did.”
“What did you have in mind?” Shiv asked him.
~~~~~
“Caliban has purpose,” Bharat said to a Boardroom full of people, three days later. “Caliban’s purpose has been recalibrated just the tiniest bit.”
The new investors, Greenhound Capital and his partners Henry, Thierron, and, Donald were staring at his nose and the black eye he sported while pretending to have an interest in the agenda of the meeting.
“Why?” Henry demanded once again.
Bharat pointed at the white board behind him which had an impressive graph on it. He’d worked hard with the finance people to get the numbers right.
“I have been trying to answer an important question for a very long time. Can tech help make the world a better place? With Caliban, I got the answer. Automation means less menial jobs. People do not have to settle at their skill level anymore. And that’s great, right? We are changing the world using tech.”
Bharat smiled even though his teeth hurt. Everything hurt. It hadn’t really stopped hurting since Nakul Kulashreshtha had walked into a Sydney hotel room and ruined his future.
“But, I realized that I was asking the wrong question,” he said quietly. “The question was not whether tech can help make the world a better place. But in what way could tech do so? Could it create jobs?”
He clicked and a chart appeared. Jobs creation in agriculture. In manufacturing. Skilling universities that would need to be opened in order to get people familiar with the technology. All of it leading to a wealth of knowledge and new jobs that could be scaled up slowly.
Subsidies could be given to emerging governments, in order to allow them better opportunities. Governments like his own. India.
“Could the tech evolve on its own enough that people could focus on things that are important to them?” Bharat spoke confidently. “Like holding down more than a minimum wage job? Go to university…learn things? Could this all be done using tech? Can tech really change the world?”
Bharat stopped clicking on the presentation. “I think so. I think Caliban has the potential to change the way tech merges with regular jobs and ups the scale in favor of the people, the employees,” he said simply. “Instead of the bottom-line, we focus on the creation of revenue and trickle it down to the employees. Help make their lives better in order to make the world a better place.”
“Enterprises are not going to buy this,” the Greenhound rep commented. And not for the first time.
Bharat shrugged. “They will, once they realize their competitors are going to.”
“And why would their competitors do so?”
Bharat smiled again, and this one made him feel slightly better. Not so devastated. “Because the more people come online, the more data there is available in the world, which can be mined for personalized marketing at a micro level which is just beginning to be understood right now. And Caliban thinks. She isn’t just an algorithm written for specific use cases. She thinks about everything.”
“Caliban can provide jobs to newer employees while learning about their online habits, their digital footprints and utilize that data to create unique user profiles that can be used to take native advertising to a different level.”
The downside of using Caliban to mine user profiles was the invasion of user privacy, as demonstrated by Facebook and Google, but he had a long-term goal that would eliminate data mining in a year, tops. Not that he was about to tell these people that.
His ultimate goal was on a need-to-know basis and only Shiv needed to know.
Henry frowned “But this was not part of the original program.”
“I wrote it over the last two days,” Bharat said. “I understand businesses mean profits and the bottom-line. And I appreciate the faith your firm has shown in us. But, I think, this is what Caliban should stand for. A merging of the past and the future.”
“And you’ve started testing this?”
He nodded. “I am already deploying this with the tyre manufacturing company. And they have tentatively agreed to let me parse the data. In a week’s time, we will know the eating, breathing, walking and spending habits of every single employee that works there. We will also be able to categorize them into different buckets and target for the same.”
“A week?”
“Yeah. A week. I’ll have a deck up and running for you guys next week. But the agency I spoke to was ecstatic about the data they were going to get their hands on. They are ready to come onboard as strategic knowledge partners.”
“For money?”
“For money.” He named a figure. It was not the scale of what the first deal would have fetched them but it was a healthy sum, nonetheless. “The term sheet they have sent over is part of your packets. You can all discuss it and let me know what you think.”
Henry grunted but Bharat could see the reluctant admiration in the old man’s eyes. Henry was finally waking up to the fact that Bharat was not the lost lonely addict who’d come to America six years ago. He was smart. He was confident.
He knew his shit.
And he held all the cards.
“It seems you’ve thought of everything. This is very impressive work in a very short period of time.”
“I haven’t slept in three days,” he deadpanned.
Only, he wasn’t kidding, even as the room burst into chuckles.
~~~~~
The meeting droned on, as the Board conducted a bit of homework. Welcomed the new members and they talked cap terms and runway and how the new pivot could affect branding.
Bharat tuned out, loosened the hundred-dollar tie he was wearing in deference to the meeting. Since his undignified ouster, he’d been scrupulous about maintaining appearances and professionalism when it came to work meetings.
He gazed out of the twenty-second floor of a posh building in Menlo Park, startup country. Caliban LLC was renting a floor with twenty seats at the moment. And most of them were engineers. Bharat figured they would want to add on to the sales team now. But he wanted to see if he could reverse engineer lead generation.
Caliban was fast. She could think about it, could she not?
Maybe Caliban could find a cure for heartbreak.
Bharat sat up straight. Pushed his chair back so it creaked and stood up. Everyone stopped talking.
He gestured awkwardly. “I think my work is done here, gentlemen? I’d like to go back to the terminal. Those codes don’t write themselves.”
Thierron looked concerned. But the Board was high on the idea of making revenue while coming across as a ‘do-gooder’ brand so they actually let him go.
Bharat jerked off his tie and stuffed it in his pocket in the elevator b
ack to the fourth floor. Where his office was.
How the mighty hath fallen.
For some bizarre reason, he remembered the last time he’d seen Rajeev Kulashreshtha. The old man had been desperate to talk to him. Desperate enough to run after him in the middle of a Board meeting. The anguish on his face had been only matched by the one Bharat had inflicted on his mentor’s daughter. On his mentor’s son.
I hope you forgive me, Sophia.
Because the thought was unproductive and he was exhausted as it was and so liable to do something extremely foolish and reckless like call her, he thumbed open his phone to check email. Saw fifteen missed calls from an unknown number.
Sophia. It was his first foolish thought. But then he remembered the way she had looked when he’d seen her. The awful, demeaning, terrible things she had said. The hurt of betrayal, of knowing that everything he cherished and wanted so badly had just been…could be reduced to zeroes on a check. No. it wasn’t her. It could not be her.
She did not want him.
He contemplated answering the calls but then thought: Fuck it. The elevator opened with a small ping and he stepped out. Still glancing through his emails.
“Hello, Bharat,” Nakul Kulashreshtha said. “You’re a fucking hard man to find.”
Bharat looked up at the voice.
Nakul stood before him. Disheveled. Out of breath. Faintly stinking too, actually. He looked like crap.
“Hello Nakul,” Bharat said evenly, while his gut churned.
Sophia! Was all he could think.
Something had happened to Sophia.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nakul felt like a total asshole when he saw Bharat’s black eye and the white plaster on his nose.
The other man had done absolutely nothing to deserve this wrath he carried inside of him. Like some sort of special poison flooding his system.
“I realize you have absolutely no reason to talk to me…you can actually throw me out but I was hoping we could talk.”
Bharat swallowed. “Is…” his voice was serrated. “Is everything okay? Is everyone okay?”
“Huh?” Nakul’s brows furrowed. “Yeah. Everything is fine. Everyone is okay.” He frowned harder. “Who is everyone?”
Bharat simply stared at him. Nakul’s frown cleared. “Oh. Yeah. Sophia is fine. I mean… I think she is fine. I haven’t seen her since Sydney.”
“Alright. Alright, then.” Bharat put his hands in his pockets and the tie fell out. “Come in to the office then. You can rest for a bit. You look like shit.”
Nakul made a strange sort of sound. A half snort. “I’d like that. Thank you.”
They made their way into Caliban’s office.
It wasn’t some fancy-schmancy affair. The cubicles were functional as were the people, bent over the terminals. The amenities were utilitarian. And the AC hummed efficiently.
Bharat’s cubicle was like everyone else’s. Except it was embarrassingly bare of any personal mementos. Save one thing - an ugly orange hair tie.
Sophia’s, Nakul surmised.
Bharat snatched it and put it in his pocket. “Let’s go to the meeting room?” he suggested.
“Sure.” Nakul followed the other man thoughtfully to a small meeting room like structure which had a table, a white board and harsh lighting.
In the new light, Bharat looked worse than ever. His eyes were shadowed and the beard he sported did not help his looks. He looked like Devdas on a bender.
Nakul frowned. But decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt.
Nakul laid the check on the table before Bharat could say anything else. “I can’t accept this.”
Bharat frowned. Looked at it. Did not pick it up. “Why not?”
“It’s too much. And I know…Sophia would not have…”
“She did. She asked me for it. Said I should pay your dad what I owed him for his investment in JoyXS.”
Nakul winced. Ran a trembling hand through his hair. “She did not mean it.”
“Oh, she meant it,” Bharat countered him quietly. “She meant everything she said. Your sister is a very smart woman, Nakul. Let’s not make her dumb.”
“She isn’t the dumb one, I am.” Nakul said simply.
Bharat leveled a quiet gaze at him. “If you’re here to apologize…”
Nakul put his hands up. “I am not. I am not here to apologize. I understand if you never want to see me. I understand I am the last person you want to see. But I had to come here and give this back to you. My sister doesn’t deserve this. So, please take it back.”
It physically hurt to say ‘please’ but Nakul knew Sophia deserved it. She deserved so much. The exact opposite of what he’d done to her.
~~~~~~
Bharat closed his eyes. He was so fucking tired. But sleep wouldn’t come.
For the first time in a long, long time, he contemplated having a drink. The drink would let him sleep. Wouldn’t it?
“I don’t want to talk about this, Nakul. I can’t accept the check. It’s yours. It’s what should have been yours a long time ago. And I am…I am sorry for everything. For everything I put your family through.”
He pushed the check back toward Nakul, his fingers aching. This check was the last thing Sophia had touched. She had held this in her hand and told him she never wanted to see him again. But that she wasn’t sorry she had met him. Her face haunted him every time he closed his eyes.
It was unbearable.
“Look,” Nakul began desperately. “I don’t know exactly what happened between the two of you but I have never seen Sophia look like that. That…devastated. So, if there is a small chance you guys can work things out I think you should take it. And you can’t work things out if I cash this check.”
Bharat felt an alien hot spurt behind his eyes. God. Was it tears? FUCK. “Your sister made her feelings for me extremely clear before she left to find you, Nakul. She made her choice. Like I said, Sophia is not dumb.”
“It wasn’t her fault…all the stuff she said. I…”
“No.” Bharat shook his head. “I don’t want to discuss this anymore. I want her to be happy. And you too. Even if you don’t believe this. Take the check, don’t take it. I don’t honestly give a shit. But we can’t talk about Sophia anymore. There is nothing more to say.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” And Bharat could not help the rusted sound his voice made when he thought about Sophia. The woman who had looked at him and found him wanting.
“She doesn’t love me more than you, Nakul. You’re her family. I am not. And I am not…I deserve to be loved like that. Right? Even if I am a complete bastard.”
~~~~~
Nakul closed his eyes as the full extent of the havoc he had wreaked became clear to him.
“Bharat,” he said softly. “I am so sorry. I am so damn sorry.”
Bharat stood up, and held out a hand. “You’re a great money man. Let me know if you want a job around here sometime. We could use a guy with your head for numbers here. Caliban needs all the help she can get.”
“Is there anything I could say that could convince you to talk to my sister?” he asked desperately. “Would it help if I begged?”
Bharat didn’t answer. Just kept holding his hand out. Nakul shook it. It was a firm, manly grip.
Too late, he realized that the man he’d been blaming for all his life, did not exist. There was a phantom who had been responsible for everything that went south in his life. But that phantom was not his father. And it wasn’t Bharat.
It was his own failed expectations of himself.
And he wanted it gone. So he could start living his life for himself. Like he should have done all this time.
“You know what?” he said slowly, as the germ of an idea began to take root in his head. “I think I am going to take that check after all.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
One Month Later
Delhi, India
Sophia brushed the hair
off her father’s forehead tenderly. His skin was flaky, itchy to the touch. A surge of affection swelled in her, something she’d not allowed herself to feel in years.
“Hey dad,” she said. “Want to hear about my day?”
Her father didn’t answer. The steady beep of the heart and O2sat monitors answered for her. He lay as still as ever, covered to the chest with a light chenille blanket that had belonged to her mom.
Rationally, she knew that her father was not there. He hadn’t been there for a long, long time. Long before he took a gun and tried to take his life.
But it didn’t change how she felt. The whirr-whirr of the ceiling fan coupled with the monitors and the slightly medicinal smell of the cream the night nurse used to clean his bed sores combined to make her feel…feel like her father was still here. In a diminished capacity, perhaps, but still here.
That was nice.
“I woke up at seven am. Before my alarm went off, actually. Did a half an hour of yoga. Had the andaa curry and toast that Kimi maashi made. I’m still not used to such heavy breakfasts.” Sophia grinned as she straightened the blanket on his chest. Carefully moving his lifeless hand above and positioning it just right. “Then I figured out the menu of the day with maashi and went out for my morning walk. And it’s still only ten am.”
She brushed his hair away again. “Being unemployed is boring, daddy.”
Sophia thought of the million and one tasks that needed prioritizing. Things like updating her resume. Reaching out to people to find out what was what on the cruise ship job circuit. Start applying. Start taking the next steps to see where she was going.
Instead, last night she had spent three hours on the extremely bad Wifi at home reading up on the communications program at IGNOU.
She was reasonably sure she didn’t qualify for it - first with never having completed her degree. Secondly, she was hopelessly, laughably outdated. Lastly, she was too old, almost thirty.
No one went back to school at that age. Did they? Not in India.
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