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

congratulated themselves. Everything had gone well, they agreed. They could not have planned anything better. They reviewed the questions that had been asked, trying to discern in them a measure of approval. As they talked, rehashing the various conversations of the day, Anand received an email from the liaison who had set up this visit.
    Alas, the excitement it generated was soon laid to rest; it was just a routine email of thanks for the visit. Any real indication on whether Cauvery Auto had passed muster would have to wait while the visitors toured other factories in the country and then returned to their own home offices and talked things through. The discussions, negotiations, and due diligence might take days, weeks to resolve.
    Ananthamurthy said he would redouble his prayers. Anand smiled automatically in response, already feeling the excitements of the day recede from his being, immediately replaced by everyday operational concerns.
    As though on cue, his cellphone rang.
    Anand hesitated before reluctantly touching his thumb to the screen of his iPhone.
    “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? I can’t hear you. Hello?” His father-in-law distrusted cellular technology and bellowed to compensate.
    “Hello,” said Anand.
    “It must be a bad line…. Right. You will be glad to know. I have organized it.” At Anand’s cautious silence, his father-in-law’s voice grew slightly more impatient. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
    “Organized it?” said Anand.
    “Yes. That is what I said…. The land you require for your factory…. I have set up some meetings. You come and meet me tomorrow—no, wait, I can’t tomorrow—fine, you meetme next week and I will brief you,” shouted his father-in-law before ringing off.
    The second window in his office faced the factory campus, and Anand frowned at the view. This two acres—bought so very proudly just four years before, two acres for which Anand had mortgaged all he owned (which admittedly had not been very much) and taken an additional bank loan—was now too small. Orders had flooded in; Anand and Ananthamurthy had built factory sheds to the very edges of the lot; there was no further room to grow unless one counted the flower beds, the watchman’s room, and the realms that existed between the earth and the holes in the ozone layer.
    “We are needing more land, sir,” Ananthamurthy had taken to saying on an almost daily basis, “especially if this Japan deal comes through and even,” he would say, “if not.”
    Buying industrial land outside the city was fraught with complications, very different from the relatively straightforward process of buying property within the city through real estate agents. This, instead, was a murky business, with dubious titles and complicated family ownership histories, influenced by different mafias and forever enmeshed with inscrutable political machinery and zoning laws.
    In the distance stood the neighboring property, with enormous warehouse walls, in disuse and covered with rusty metal sheets, built right up to the common compound wall, looming, entirely spoiling the vista. The factory gardener had planted an intervening hedge of bright pink bougainvillea, but this obscured only about three feet of the eyesore, which, if anything, seemed even uglier in contrast. Anand had approached his idiot neighbors, whose property stretched beyond the ugly warehouses for twenty acres, much of it in disuse and disrepair.
    He had heard that they were in trouble; a pair of quarreling brothers, one prone to drink and the other to whores; they might be willing to sell. They were—and proved their reputations as business failures by quoting a price so ridiculously high and greedy, even for this city, where escalating land prices seemed a way of life, that Anand glared in disgust at the rust on their encroaching warehouse walls. May it grow, bastards, this rust, until it filters and covers all parts of your life, from your dick to your drinking