Exchange Rate

CHAPTER ONE Spot Rate

The monsoon arrived in Mumbai the way most bad news did: all at once, and without apology.

By eight-forty that morning, Fort had become a drowned city of black umbrellas and shrieking taxi horns, and Meera Rao stood at the first-floor window of Rao Forex & Remittance with a cup of ginger chai going cold in her hand. She watched the water sheet off the carved stone cornice of the building opposite. Fifty years her father's name had hung over the doorway below in flaking gold letters. Fifty years, and she had never once been late to open it.

"He is here," said Nalini, appearing in the doorway with the expression of a woman who had worked the cash counter since 1991 and held firm opinions on everything.

"He is early," Meera said, glancing at the wall clock. "Investors' boys are never early."

"He is standing downstairs in the rain like a wet cat, refusing to come up until exactly nine. The guard offered him a chair. He said no thank you, he'll wait."

Meera set down her cup.

She doesn't look like a corporate employee. Not anymore. After these many days post marriage, she only managed to wear a saree instead of a corporate outfit. Her boobs often bust up as she never found a proper choli fitting her. And those rarely fit her. She prefers deep necks, at least there is a lot of aeration.

Somewhere beneath her irritation, something small and unwilling stirred with interest. A man who waited in the rain to be punctual was either very disciplined or very well rehearsed, and she had learned, over twenty years of dealing with men who wanted things from her, that the two often looked identical.
Halden Capital had bought thirty-one percent of her family's business two years ago, when her father's death and a badly timed branch expansion had left the books bleeding. The money had saved them. It had also bought Halden a seat at her table, and now, apparently, a consultant. A turnaround specialist, the email had said. As if Rao Forex were a patient on a trolley and not the oldest independent currency house south of Crawford Market.

"Send him up at nine," she said.

"Not one minute before."

"And if he asks for tea?"

"He gets tea. We are not animals."

She smoothed the pleats of her saree, a maroon silk-cotton with a narrow gold border that she wore on days when she wanted to feel armoured, and went down to check the counters.

The ground floor was the part of the business she loved without ever saying so. Four glass-fronted counters, brass grilles polished by decades of elbows, and a queue already forming despite the flood: a Gujarati diamond trader counting rupees with the tenderness of a man handling eggs, two Korean tourists comparing rates on their phones with visible confusion, a stooped woman in a faded cotton saree sliding a passport across the counter to send money to a son in Toronto. Meera stopped beside her and asked after the son's new job. The woman told her, at length. Meera listened to all of it.

Every rate on the board above the counters was hers. She set them each morning by hand, from a mix of screens and instinct, a fraction tighter than the big banks and a fraction more generous than the airport kiosks. Nobody who worked for Halden understood why. She had stopped explaining.

At one minute to nine she climbed the stairs again, her bangles chiming against the wooden banister, and sat down behind her father's old teak desk to wait.

❦

Arjun Mehra checked his watch for the fourth time and reminded himself that being early was not the same as being eager.

He stood inside the arched doorway of the building with his umbrella dripping on the stone, his shirt clinging unpleasantly to his shoulder blades, and read the message on his phone one more time.