VOLUME ONE — AWAKENING
CHAPTER TWELVE
New Delhi — June 10–28, 2002
College started on June 10, which was a Monday, which was three days after everything else had started.
He had the admission letter. He had known since June 7 which building the college occupied, which gate was the correct one for the commerce faculty, which floor the first-year lectures were on. He had not visited the campus beforehand — there was no need, and the time had been required elsewhere — but he walked into the building on June 10 with the orientation of someone who had been there before, which in a way he had.
B.Com Year 1. Commerce faculty. Delhi University affiliated college in South Delhi. 180 students in the intake, divided into three sections of sixty. He had been assigned to Section B, which met in Room 14 on the second floor, which had a ceiling fan that did not align properly with its housing and therefore wobbled slightly at full speed, which he noticed within the first four minutes of being in the room and then did not think about again.
He sat in the third row from the back, near the window on the right side.
Not the last row — the last row was where people sat who wanted to be seen not listening, which was a different thing from actually not listening. The third from the back was where you could see everything, be seen by almost no one, and leave without obstruction. He had chosen this position the way he chose all positions: for what it allowed rather than what it looked like.
—
The first lecture was Principles of Accounting, taught by a professor named Dr. V.K. Sharma, who had been teaching this course for approximately nineteen years and had the manner of someone who had long ago made his peace with the fact that the majority of his students were not interested in accounting principles and had calibrated his expectations accordingly.
He wrote the fundamental accounting equation on the blackboard. Assets equals Liabilities plus Equity. He underlined it twice. He turned to the class and asked if anyone could tell him what this meant.
Silence. The particular silence of sixty people who had each individually decided that answering first was not in their interest.
Aman did not answer. He knew the answer. He knew the seventeen applications of the answer, the historical context of its development, the three major accounting frameworks that derived from it, and the specific exam questions Dr. V.K. Sharma had been known to set based on it in previous years. He looked out the window.
Dr. Sharma eventually called on a student in the front row who provided a partial answer which was gently corrected and then expanded into the lecture proper. The lecture was competent. The material was basic. Aman spent forty minutes looking mostly out the window and retained everything without effort, which was either a gift or a form of restlessness that had not yet found its correct outlet, and which at this particular moment in his life amounted to the same thing.
—
The second lecture was Business Communication, taught by Prof. Rekha Nair.
She arrived two minutes late, which was unusual for a professor and which she acknowledged without apology — she said: I was on a phone call, we'll run three minutes over to compensate — and which immediately established something about how she ran a room. Not informally. With a different kind of precision: the kind that accounted for reality rather than demanding reality conform to the schedule.
She was in her early forties. She had the manner of someone who had spent years teaching people to communicate and had noticed that the most common problem was not the absence of things to say but the inability to decide what not to say. Her lectures, as Aman would come to understand over the following months, were structured around this problem. She taught by subtraction rather than addition — not what to include, but what to leave out.
On June 10 she began with a single question written on the board: What is the difference between information and communication?
She waited.
Several students offered answers. Information is data. Communication is the transfer of meaning. Communication requires a receiver. The answers accumulated in the way classroom answers accumulated — each one partly right, none of them sufficient, the class as a collective circling the point without landing on it.
Then she said: information exists whether or not anyone receives it. Communication only exists in the receiving. You can transmit perfectly and communicate nothing. This happens constantly. This is what I will spend this semester trying to prevent.
The room was quiet for a moment in the way rooms were quiet when something had been said that required a moment to settle.
Aman turned from the window and looked at her.
He had not planned to take this course seriously, he thought. He revised this assessment in the following three seconds and filed it.
—
He noticed the young man three seats to his left on the first day and did not think about him again for two weeks.
This was not unusual. Aman did not think about most people he encountered until there was a reason to think about them, and in the first week of college there was very little reason to think about anyone in particular — the room was full of strangers all in the process of becoming slightly less strange to each other, and this process did not require his participation beyond the minimum.
The young man's name he learned from the attendance roll on June 12: Rajan Verma. He was slightly built, with the careful posture of someone who had been told that posture mattered and had taken this seriously in a way that made it look deliberate rather than natural. He had a girlfriend — this Aman inferred from the conversation with the woman who came to find him after the second lecture on June 11, who touched his arm when she spoke and who he introduced to nobody and who left before the third lecture began. The woman's name Aman did not hear. He did not need it yet.
Rajan Verma answered questions in class when called upon and not otherwise. His answers were correct but slightly longer than they needed to be — not because he did not know the material but because he was uncertain whether the correct answer would be sufficient and added words around it as cushioning. This was a habit Aman recognised from his previous life as the habit of someone who had been right before and had not been believed, and who had learned to over-explain as a defence against that experience.
He noted this and returned to the window.
—
The attendance strategy he had worked out on June 8 and confirmed on June 10 after seeing the college's examination eligibility rules posted on the notice board outside the administrative office.
Seventy-five percent minimum attendance required for examination eligibility. The academic year ran from June to March — approximately 180 teaching days across two semesters. Seventy-five percent of 180 was 135 days. Which meant he could be absent for 45 days across the year without losing examination eligibility.
He allocated these 45 days with the precision he applied to everything else. Eleven days in June — the college had barely started, his presence was not yet tracked consistently, and the café setup required mornings. Eight days in July as NetEdge found its rhythm and his physical presence at the shop became less essential. The remaining 26 distributed across the year with emphasis on the weeks when supplier negotiations, bank meetings, or other business requirements would make a full college day impractical.
The result: he would attend approximately 78 percent of the time in the first semester, 72 percent in the second, averaging just above the threshold across the year. The examination results would be clean — he would pass all papers in the first attempt without making his performance visible enough to attract academic attention, which would attract a different kind of attention he did not want.
The college existed in his schedule the way the apartment existed — as a fixed cost to be managed rather than an experience to be pursued. The B.Com degree was a credential he needed for the business registration processes he had planned for 2004. It was not optional. It was also not interesting, with one exception.
Prof. Rekha Nair, he noted. Attend all her lectures.
He wrote this in the notebook that evening in the shorthand that was legible only to him and moved on.
—
The first two weeks of college established what the next four years would look like.
He arrived at the correct time. He sat in the third row from the back, right side, near the window. He did not raise his hand. He did not contribute to discussions unless called upon, which the professors stopped doing after approximately the third week because his answers, when given, were consistently correct and occasionally more advanced than the syllabus required, which created a slightly uncomfortable dynamic that none of the professors actively sought to repeat.
He ate lunch alone in the canteen on the four days per week he was present for the lunch break. He ate quickly, read whatever he had brought, and left before the social arrangements of the canteen had time to require a response from him. He was not unfriendly — he returned greetings, acknowledged people who spoke to him, and was capable of brief, unremarkable conversations about the weather and the canteen food and the difficulty of the previous lecture. He was simply not available for anything longer than that, and people, after a few attempts, generally sensed this and adjusted.
There was one exception.
Tarun.
Tarun Gupta, his flatmate, was in the same college. Different sections — Section A — but the same year, the same faculty, and the same canteen at the same lunch hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had known this since June 7 and had not mentioned it, and Tarun had discovered it on June 11 with the gleeful surprise of someone for whom coincidences were personal gifts from the universe rather than mathematical inevitabilities.
He said: bhai, you're here also? Why didn't you say?
Aman said: I knew you were here.
Tarun said: and you didn't say?
Aman said: I thought you knew I was here.
Tarun looked at him for a moment with the expression of a man encountering a logic he did not entirely follow but could not immediately challenge. Then he sat down across from him and began eating, apparently deciding that the explanation was less important than the fact that they were both here, which was good, which was enough.
After that, Tuesday and Thursday lunches were Tarun's. Not by agreement — by the simple accumulation of occurrences. Tarun arrived at the canteen at the same time, sat at the same table, and talked about whatever had happened in his Section A morning with the same energy he brought to cricket and Maggi noodles, which was considerable. Aman ate and listened and occasionally said something that moved the conversation forward without requiring him to contribute any of his own content.
He did not find this unpleasant. Tarun's company was, in its particular way, restful — it required almost nothing of him while filling the space around it completely, which was its own kind of value.
—
On June 17, the second Monday, he arrived at college after stopping at the bank.
Mr. Pathak had called the previous Friday at six in the evening, just inside the window Aman had stated in the bank application as his available hours. He had said: the loan committee has reviewed your application. We've approved the loan of Rs. 4,00,000. You can come in on Monday to sign the final documents.
Aman had said: thank you. I'll be there at nine-fifteen.
He had put the phone down and sat for a moment. Not with satisfaction, which was what the moment probably called for. With the quiet internal recalibration of a sequence that had been planned in two stages — loan application and loan approval — reaching its second stage on schedule. The satisfaction, if it was there, was indistinguishable from the ordinary feeling of a thing going as planned, which was not excitement but its own quieter version of it.
He had signed the documents at nine-thirty on June 17. Mr. Pathak had been efficient and professional. The Rs. 4,00,000 would be disbursed to the business account within two working days.
He had arrived at college at ten-forty, twelve minutes before the second lecture. He had not told anyone about the loan. There was nobody to tell.
—
In the last week of June he attended college for two days.
The hardware was being installed on June 19 and 20. The BSNL engineer came on June 20. Priya was in the shop from June 24. The opening was June 28. Against these requirements, college on the days they conflicted was simply not the most important thing, and he had planned for exactly this.
On the two days he did attend — June 25 and June 26 — he sat in his usual position and observed what two weeks of college had established. The social geography of the room was already partially fixed: who sat where, who talked to whom before the lecture began, who was visibly paying attention and who was visibly not. These things settled quickly in rooms where the same people sat in the same places every day, which they did within the first week whether or not a seating arrangement was formally imposed.
Rajan Verma still sat three seats to his left. The girlfriend had come to find him twice more in the corridor outside. Aman had noticed, on the second occasion, that Rajan's posture when she appeared was slightly different from his posture in the lecture room — less deliberate, softer in some way that was difficult to precisely describe. He filed this observation under things that were not currently relevant and returned his attention to the board.
Prof. Nair's lecture on June 26 was about the gap between what a speaker intends and what a listener receives. She said: most failed communication is not dishonest. It is imprecise. The speaker knows what they mean. The listener receives something adjacent to what was meant. The gap between the two is where misunderstanding lives, and misunderstanding compounds. She paused. She said: the only solution is to say the specific thing. Not the approximate thing. Not the thing you think the listener wants to hear. The specific thing.
Aman wrote two words in the margin of his notebook — his college notebook, the one that was actually for lectures, not the one he kept on his desk at home. He wrote: Priya does this.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he turned the page and listened to the rest of the lecture.
—
On June 28, NetEdge opened.
He had attended college that morning for the first lecture — Dr. V.K. Sharma, accounts, the depreciation chapter — and had left at eleven, telling no one he was leaving, which was the correct amount of explanation for a departure that did not require permission. He had walked to GK-1. He had arrived at the shop at eleven-forty-five, eighteen minutes before Priya put the rate card on the counter and the shutter went all the way up.
He had sat at the second-row desk and opened his college notebook to a clean page.
He had written: June 28. Two things began today.
He looked at the line for a moment.
Then he crossed it out. It was the kind of thing that felt worth writing and then, once written, felt like the kind of thing that only needed to be written once and had already served its purpose.
The day began. The customers arrived. The numbers added up.
College would continue on Monday. The café would continue every day. Both sequences were now running simultaneously, which was the point, which was what the plan had always required.
He had three weeks before the first college examination. He would pass it without studying. He would return to the shop the same afternoon. This was not a choice between two things. It was two things, each in its correct place, each running at the speed it required.
One thing at a time, he told himself. But the time is shared.
He closed the college notebook.
He opened the business.
Outside, the strip was running.
End of Chapter Twelve
Next: Chapter Thirteen — The First Thirty Days