The lie settled over the Patel household like a fine layer of dust. It was everywhere, invisible but unmistakable, altering the taste of the food and the quality of the silence. His mother, Leela, embraced it with a desperate, hopeful fervor. She began referring to his "students in Malabar Hill" in her prayers, her voice swelling with pride when she mentioned it to the neighbors. The scooter, once a object of terror, was now a shrine to her son's intellect and ambition, meticulously wiped clean each evening.
His father, Ramnik, was a different story. The lie didn't settle on him; it hung between them, a specter at the dinner table. He never mentioned the tutoring again, but his eyes, when they rested on Harsh, held a new, weary calculation. He watched his son's hands, still faintly stained with solder resin, and the disconnect between the story of a scholarly tutor and the reality of a street-hardened repairman was a gap too wide for him to cross. He chose silence, a tense, watchful quiet that was more accusing than any direct question.
Harsh lived in the gulf between their reactions. His mother's pride was a balm and a torture. His father's silence was a constant, low-grade accusation. The weight of the deception was a new kind of tax, more draining than any payment to Malvankar.
It forced him to become a master of compartmentalization. His life split into two meticulously guarded halves.
The first half was "Arun Patel," the dutiful son and brilliant tutor. This persona left the house every morning with a stack of old textbooks under his arm—a prop for his parents' benefit. He would circle the block on his scooter, then stash the books in a locked compartment and become someone else entirely.
The second half was "Harsh Bhai," the nascent kingpin of Bhuleshwar's grey market. This persona navigated a world of whispered deals and hard currency. He met with Shetty's men in noisy dockyard cafes, the air thick with the smell of fish and diesel. He haggled with Prakash Rao over railway scrap, his voice taking on a harder, street-wise edge. He managed his team, his authority now unquestioned, his commands delivered with a quiet efficiency that brooked no dissent.
The two worlds were oil and water, and he was the fragile membrane keeping them separate. He developed routines, rituals of deception. He kept a change of clothes—a simple, ink-stained shirt and trousers—at the alcove. Before returning home, he would scrub his hands raw at a public tap, trying to erase the scent of solder and the grime of the market. He became hyper-vigilant about his speech, carefully editing any stories from his day to fit the tutoring narrative.
The financial duality was the most complex. The large, illicit profits from Shetty's goods were funneled into the New Bharat Bank, into the account of the fictional "Arun Patel's" import business. But he needed a stream of clean, explainable cash for home. So, he invented a payday.
Every second Friday, he would stage a performance. He'd come home, look tired but satisfied, and hand his mother a carefully counted sum of money—two hundred rupees. It was a significant amount, enough to be impressive but not so large as to be unbelievable for a tutor.
"For the house, Ma," he'd say, forcing a smile. "From the Kapoor family. Their son got an A on his maths exam."
His mother's eyes would well up. She'd take the money as if it were a sacred offering, her faith in the lie reinforced. She'd use a portion of it to buy his favorite sweets, a tangible reward for his fictitious labor.
His father would watch the exchange, his expression unreadable. He never refused the money—the household needed it—but he never thanked him for it either. The cash became another layer of the unspoken tension, a monument to the thing they all knew but would not say.
One evening, the strain of the double life manifested in a near-disaster. Harsh was at home, absently tracing a circuit diagram on the edge of a newspaper while his mother talked about a potential match for a cousin. His mind was elsewhere, calculating the profit margin on a new shipment of Japanese transistors.
"…so the boy is a clerk in a government office, very stable, but his family is asking for a larger dowry than we can…" his mother was saying.
Harsh, without thinking, muttered, "Not a problem. I can cover fifteen thousand. The margins on the last batch can easily…"
He stopped. The words had left his mouth before his brain could censor them.
The room went silent.
His mother stared at him, her sentence hanging unfinished. "Fifteen… thousand? Margins? Harsh, what are you talking about?"
His father looked up from his plate, his eyes sharp and focused for the first time in weeks.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through Harsh. He had almost blown everything.
"The… the tutoring margins," he stammered, his mind racing for a plausible explanation. "Mr. Kapoor… he owns a shipping business. He talks about profit margins all the time. He said a good tutor improves his son's value, his… margin for getting into a good college." The lie was absurd, desperate.
His mother's confusion slowly cleared, replaced by a dawning awe at the casual mention of such large sums by her son's wealthy employer. "Oh," she said, a little breathlessly. "I see."
But his father's gaze didn't waver. It held Harsh's for a long, silent moment. In his eyes, Harsh didn't see belief. He saw a deep, sad understanding. His father knew. He knew the story was nonsense. But he also saw the money for the dowry, the relief on his wife's face, the new scooter outside. He saw the practical benefits of the lie.
Ramnik Patel gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. It wasn't acceptance. It was capitulation. He was choosing the comfort of the fiction over the harshness of the truth. He looked back down at his plate, the subject closed.
Harsh's heart hammered against his ribs. He had gotten away with it. Again. But the victory felt like a defeat. The wall between him and his father was now complete and permanent, built not of anger, but of a silent, mutual understanding of the deception.
He had lied to survive, to protect them, to build his empire. But as he sat at the table, the taste of his mother's sweet payasam turning to ash in his mouth, he realized the true cost. He was becoming a stranger in his own home. The boy they had raised was fading, replaced by a shrewd, lonely young man who spoke in a language of margins and deals they could not understand. The most dangerous corner he'd been in yet wasn't an alley; it was his family's kitchen, and he had trapped himself there with his own cunning.