The Hope Factory by Lavanya Sankaran Read Free Book Online Page A

article on politics or business. He rarely bothered to read the rest of the magazine unless he found himself awake at night. Then, the arts and books section was the perfect curative: subjects he had little interest in, instantly sedating; he could get drowsy within the first paragraph. There was one in particular, on the recovery of presumed-destroyed Babylonian artwork, that was his favorite in this regard. So sleep-inducing, even the very words
Bab-y-lon-ian-art-work
repeated slowly heralded visions of happy insensibility. “Babble,” he liked to say, “babble-onion, art-wuk.” And such repetition had borne strange fruit one day when someone was boring on at a dinner about the importance of preserving art against the tides of time and human agency, and bang on cue, Anand’s mouth had opened, he’d said, “Babbleonion art-wuk,” and had his wife not choked on her wine, it would undoubtedly have been a bit of a feather in his cap.
    But this was a night when neither
The Economist
nor the Doobie Brothers worked. He fiddled with his presentation for the following day, finally going to bed only to fight awkwardly with his pillow, plagued by specters of success and failure and fantastical what-ifs.
    His body came awake before his mind did. He felt it, a high-tension humming in his blood, an electric glow, a moment of untrammeled, endless possibility—and then his mind snapped to alertness, propelling him out of bed, instantly reengaging with plans, schemes, and to-do lists. The warm shower waters rinsed away the vestiges of the night. Vidya lay undisturbed, swathed and blanketed in the icy freeze of the air-conditioned bedroom as he stole past and ran downstairs to his car.
    In the early morning cool of an awakening world, through traffic as yet muted and desultory, the small sedan maneuvered its way toward the distant city outskirts. Forty-five minutes later, he appraised the approaching factory with a stern, clinical eye: the dust and distressed road yielding to a manicured strip of green grass; the glossy factory wall, freshly repainted the previous day, the large manufacturing sheds beyond.
    RIGHT ON THE APPOINTED hour, two cars pulled into the compound. Six people emerged; at quick scan, they seemed tocover all the races: two Japanese, two Europeans, a man from England of African parentage.
    Anand felt the usual awkwardness well up within him. He wished he could be at ease with foreigners; they were sometimes intimidating and frequently incomprehensible; he did not have the means within him to easily cross vast cultural divides. His management team stood behind him: Mrs. Padmavati’s oiled hair and silk saree glistening in the morning light; the HR man wearing a startlingly strong checked jacket for the occasion; Ananthamurthy’s tie looking narrow and uncomfortable, but all of them with smiles rich with expectation and nervous excitement. Anand dried his palms on a handkerchief, thankful that the gray jacket he wore covered the sweat that had soaked instantly through his shirt, and hastened forward to meet the visitors, pinning a warm smile of welcome to his face.
    THE DAY PASSED SURPRISINGLY SMOOTHLY . The visitors toured the factory and seemed interested and impressed. Mrs. Padmavati had had the foresight to make copies of Anand’s presentation; he was gratified to see the visitors scratching notes as he talked. The projector did not fail; the computer’s hard drive did not die halfway through. Ananthamurthy did not bring up his antediluvian notions on caste, worship, and vegetarianism but instead led the tour through the plant with the calm competence that came from knowing the location of every nut and bolt on the manufacturing floor and answered all the questions posed to him thoughtfully and capably. The lunch had been organized from a five-star hotel; the visitors appeared to enjoy the food, though Anand was too nervous to eat.
    In the late afternoon, the entire team collapsed in Anand’soffice. They