[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 44: How the Audit Began

People in the office would later say the audit came out of nowhere. That Rahul had simply been unlucky, that some routine compliance sweep from the Mumbai head office had happened to land on his desk the same month his personal life was coming apart.

It did not come out of nowhere. It came out of a Tuesday night in October, my laptop, and a question I should have asked a year earlier.

It was Fatima who made me ask it, though she did not know that at the time.

We had been going through the chronology for the custody petition in her chamber, page after page of dates, and she had stopped at a line I had written almost as an afterthought. January last year: client complaints begin. Contracts found to contain errors I did not make.

"Explain this," she said.

I told her. The clients who had called the reception when I was out. The contracts that had reached them with clauses missing, clauses I had personally negotiated over months. The boss calling me in. Rahul being appointed to approve my work before it went out. The promotion that slid out of my reach and into his.

Fatima listened without interrupting. When I finished she tapped the page with her pen.

"These contracts went out from your email ID," she said.

"Yes."

"With your signature block."

"Yes."

"And you did not write those versions."

"No."

She looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. "Ranjeet, either you are lying to me, or someone logged into your account and changed documents before they went out. The first is a professional problem for you. The second is a crime."

I had thought about it a hundred times at the time. Somehow I had never once thought about it like that.

"I assumed I had made mistakes," I said. "Everyone told me I had. My boss. Poroma. Even I started believing it."

"Your wife told you that you had made mistakes," Fatima repeated slowly, and wrote something in her notebook that she did not show me.

Our company runs its email on a corporate server. Every login is recorded: the time, the device, the network address. Nobody ever looks at those logs unless something goes very wrong. I did not have access to them. Rashmi did.

Not officially. But as my secretary she had been given administrative rights to my mailbox and calendar, to manage my schedule while I was on tour, and those rights came with a little screen called Account Activity that nobody in the office had ever bothered to open.

I asked her to open it on a Tuesday night in October, in the back of an Uber parked on Elgin Road, because she still did not trust the office.

She scrolled for a long time without speaking. The streetlights moved across her face.

"Ranjeet," she said finally. "Look at this."

The activity history only went back fourteen months. That was enough. On eleven separate dates in the January to March before the Holi party, my account had been accessed while I was physically somewhere else. Twice while I was on a flight to Delhi. Once while I was sitting in a client meeting in Salt Lake with three witnesses. Each time from the same device, a laptop registered on the company network under an asset number.

Rashmi typed the asset number into the IT inventory portal.

Asset KOL-LT-2291. Assigned to: Rahul Mehra, Sales.

Neither of us said anything for a while. The driver was playing Kishore Kumar softly on the radio.

"He sat at the reception flirting with the girls," I said at last. "That's what I was told. That he just happened to be there when my clients called."

"He was there because he knew they would call," Rashmi said quietly. "He had changed the contracts himself. He was waiting for the complaints he had created."

Eleven logins. A year of my life. A promotion I had worked three years for. And every evening of it I had come home to Poroma and she had told me that Rahul was only trying to help me.

Rashmi took screenshots of everything on her own phone, with the timestamps visible, and emailed nothing. Fatima had been very specific about that.

She also gave me something else that night, in a plain brown envelope. The letter that had come with the gift box of dresses and the ten thousand rupees in cash. The typed instructions: what she would be paid for a handjob in my office, a blowjob, full sex, as long as it happened inside the office and with no other employee present.

"I kept it," she said. "I don't know why. Maybe I knew."

"Who sent it?"

"The courier slip was from a shop in Gariahat. I went there. They remembered the customer because he paid cash and he was very tall and very good-looking and he asked the girl at the counter for her number." She gave a tired little smile. "Some men can't help themselves even when they're committing a crime."

The obvious person to take this to was Patel Sir. He was the senior Vice President for the eastern region, and he was the man who had brought Rahul from Delhi on his personal reference.

That was exactly why I did not go to him.

I had spent four months doing nothing but my job, my training, and my thinking, and somewhere in those months I had started noticing things. That Rahul's targets were always met, and the clients that met them always had something in common. That Patel Sir signed off on Rahul's expense claims personally, which he did for no one else. That nobody in Kolkata knew why Rahul had left Delhi in the middle of a financial year.

So I did something I had never done in ten years at the company. I wrote to the Ethics and Compliance helpline at head office in Mumbai. The one whose number is printed on the back of our ID cards, under a line nobody reads: Report concerns confidentially. Retaliation is prohibited.

I attached the login history. The asset number. The original contracts I had drafted, from my own sent folder, side by side with the altered versions the clients had received. And the honey-trap letter, with a two-line note: I believe this was intended to create a false misconduct case against me. I believe it was sent by the same person.

Then I did the second thing. I called Mr. Gupta.

Mr. Gupta of Gupta Productions had been my client for six years before Rahul took him. I had worked a whole year on the project he finally signed with Rahul. I had always liked him. He was a decent man from Burrabazar who had built a business from one sewing machine.

He agreed to meet me at the Calcutta Club on a Saturday afternoon. He was older than I remembered, and tired.

I did not tell him about Priyanka. I did not need to. I showed him the two versions of his own contract. The one I had drafted for him a year earlier with the price protection clause he had specifically asked for, and the one Rahul had sent him, without it.

He read both twice. Then he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

"Without this clause," he said, "my raw material costs this year have gone up by forty lakhs that I should not have paid."

"Yes, sir."

"And your company made forty lakhs more."

"And Rahul's quarterly bonus was calculated on it."

Mr. Gupta was quiet for a long time. On the lawn outside, a few old men in white were playing croquet very slowly.

"My wife insisted we sign with him," he said finally, very softly. "After New York. She was very insistent." He looked at me. "You know, don't you."

"I know nothing about your wife, sir. I only know about the contract."

He nodded slowly. He understood the kindness, and he did not thank me for it. That was the right response too.

"I will write to your Managing Director on Monday," he said. "As your company's largest client in the east. I will ask for a full review of my account." He stood up and shook my hand. "You should have been the one to sign with me, Ranjeet. I wanted it to be you."

That was how the audit began. Head office took a complaint from a junior sales executive seriously because, three days later, a letter arrived from a client worth eleven crores a year asking exactly the same questions.

That was why, on the morning my papers were served on Poroma, Rahul was sitting in a closed conference room with the internal audit committee. And that was why the two people he had never expected to see in the same room were sitting across the table from him. One was Mr. Gupta. The other was the head of Compliance from Mumbai, who had flown in specifically, and who had already pulled Patel Sir's approval history for every expense claim Rahul had submitted in fourteen months.

I was not in that room. I was at my desk two floors below, doing my job, exactly as Fatima had instructed.

But I knew what was happening up there, and for the first time since the night of the Holi party, I did not feel like the man things were being done to.

There is one more thing I should explain, because people have asked.

When the papers were served, I did not go home that evening.

Fatima had filed two things together. The divorce petition, and an urgent application for interim custody of Nupur and Rajiv, supported by the nanny-cam footage of the slap, the Aya's diary, the missed vaccination record from the clinic, and the written statements from Nupur's teacher and from Rashmi.

The family court judge, a grey-haired woman called Mrs. Chakraborty who Fatima said had raised four children of her own, watched the slap footage twice in her chamber. She did not watch it a third time. She granted interim custody to me the same afternoon, pending a full hearing, with supervised visitation for Poroma twice a week at a neutral place.

I had already signed a lease, three weeks earlier, on a two-bedroom flat in Ballygunge that I had found through a colleague's cousin. I had paid the deposit from my bonus and told nobody. That evening the Aya packed the children's things while Poroma sat at the kitchen table and watched her do it, and the uncle from downstairs drove them over in his old Maruti. Nupur chose the yellow curtains herself, from a shop on Gariahat, the following weekend.

Poroma stayed in the house. Alone.

I did not see her for nine days. I did not answer her calls. Every message I sent her went through Fatima.

I have been asked if it was cruel. Maybe it was. But I had watched her walk away from our crying daughter to straighten her blouse, and I did not trust myself to see her yet.

And somewhere in that house in those nine days, with the children's rooms empty and Rahul no longer answering his phone, Poroma began, for the first time, to understand what she had done.

She told me about those nine days much later. I will let her tell it.