CHETAN TALREJA had made his first crore at twenty-nine and lost his last at fifty-two. He sat in a marble hall at ten o'clock on the morning of the twenty-ninth of September 2016, waiting to ask a stranger for a job. It was the closest thing to a fortune he was ever likely to see.

He arrived at nine-fifty, because a man who is early is a man who is keen, and Chetan could no longer afford to be anything else. The girl at the desk showed him to a seat. Along the facing wall hung photographs of the buildings the firm owned, and out of old habit Chetan found his eye pricing them. He had watched the lift doors ever since, squaring and re-squaring the thin folder on his knee, rehearsing as he had never once had to in his life. In those days he walked into rooms, and the rooms arranged themselves around him.

He had three thousand and ten rupees in his account and a fortnight left on a flat in Bhandup that smelled of whatever the family below cooked. He would once have tossed this position to the man who fetched his cigarettes; the interview alone had cost him the last favour he had in the world. If the next half-hour went well, he would be, at fifty-two, a salaried employee. If it did not, he would be his father.

That was the thought he could not put down. Mohan Talreja had spent his whole life waiting — for a pension that came eighteen months too late, for a hundred shares in a typewriter company that never came good. He died with nothing. Every Sunday of the boy's childhood he told his son that patience was the only virtue that paid a dividend. Chetan buried him at nineteen and swore he would never wait for anything again; he would take the world by the throat and have his answer now, while he was still in the room to enjoy it. The world obliged him for more than twenty years, and then asked for all of it back at once.

He looked again at the brass plate on the wall opposite. MISTRY & CO. He felt, not for the first time that morning, a small itch at the back of his mind — the kind a man gets when he half-recognises a face in a crowd. He had known a Mistry once. He let it go — a common enough name. The past was a country Chetan had never seen the point of visiting; there was no money in it.

Ten o'clock came and went. At four minutes past, the girl told him Ms Mistry was running a little late, and offered him some chai. Chetan said no, thank you, because his hands would not hold quite steady, and he pressed them flat on his knees where she could not see. He went back to his rehearsing.

He would lead, he had decided, with Khusro House. A man selling himself leads with his best, and Khusro House was the best thing Chetan Talreja had ever done.

It was the monsoon of 1994, the hardest the property trade had known in a generation. While every other man in Nariman Point sat in his office waiting for the rains to pass, Chetan went out and bought the block. A Japanese bank, shutting its Bombay branch in a panic, had a slab of seventies offices on the edge of Nariman Point it was desperate to be rid of. Chetan knew three things: that the building was worth a hundred crore; that the bank would take sixty to be free of it before its year end; and that a fund he played squash with would pay ninety the moment the market recovered. Thirty crore, sitting in the gap. All he needed was the sixty, and the nerve to find it.

That was the difficulty, and the part he was proudest of. He ran through it now in the marble hall with a flicker of the old pleasure. His firm's money sat tied up; the banks were lending to no one; sixty crore in that monsoon was not a sum a man could whistle up by Friday. So Chetan went through the firm's holdings for everything dead he could turn into something live. A single afternoon's work freed the whole sixty — a forgotten ground rent here, a parcel of land there, all of it sold to men too pleased with the price to ask why. And then, because he could never resist tidying a balance sheet, he went looking for more, and found, near the bottom of a list nobody had updated in years, a freehold reversion on a building on Rampart Row.

The girl at the desk answered her telephone and said, "Of course — I'll send him up," and Chetan's stomach turned over. He was half out of his chair before she went back to her screen. The call was not for him. He sat down and picked up the thread again.

The reversion. He laughed out loud when he found it. The firm did not own the Rampart Row building — eight floors of grey stone and white balconies, full of art dealers. It owned only the right to take possession of the whole of it, for nothing, when the lease fell in. And the lease, granted in 1936 for eighty years, would not fall in until 2016. Two thousand and sixteen. Twenty-two years away, which was to say, as far as Chetan was concerned, never. Dead money. He took it to the board, because a freehold, even a forgotten one, was the one thing he could not shift on his own signature. He proposed they sell that too: bank the seventy-five lakh it stood at on the books and have done with it. The motion would have passed on the nod had not the firm's oldest partner, a relic named Rustom Mistry —

Chetan stopped.

He looked at the plate on the wall. MISTRY & CO. He looked at it for rather a long time, and something in him stirred and very nearly woke; but at that moment the lift doors opened, and a woman came out, and held out her hand, and said how very glad she was to meet him at last. Chetan got to his feet and took her hand, and whatever thought he had went out of his head. He had a living to win in the next half-hour, and no time for a name.

She took him up to an office on the fourth floor that looked down the whole length of Rampart Row. Across the road stood eight floors of grey stone and white balconies, art dealers at every window. Chetan priced the block at a glance — a good address, a firm that could pay a man what he was worth — and looked away.

"You'll forgive my keeping you," she said. "It's been rather a morning. We completed on something today that's been a long time coming." She smiled. "Now. Tell me about yourself, Mr Talreja."

So he told her. He told her about Khusro House, and the sixty crore by Friday, and the three things he had known when no one else knew anything. He told it as he always had, with himself filling the frame and the firm left out of it altogether — the firm was only ever the horse he happened to be riding. She listened, and for the first time in years he was Chetan Talreja again. She asked the right questions. She was perhaps forty-five, and she listened with a patience he could not place — unhurried, in no need of anything he had, letting him talk himself out.

"You held it fourteen months and sold it for ninety," she said. "That's a remarkable return."

"It was a remarkable building," said Chetan, who was beginning to enjoy himself. "Bought right, sold right. That's the whole of the trade, in the end — knowing the minute to buy and the minute to sell, and never, ever falling in love with the bricks. I've never held an asset longer than eighteen months in my life. The long term is just the short term for men who've lost their nerve."

For the first time all morning the fear went out of his hands, and he felt the half-hour turning his way — the old certainty, the room arranging itself around him as rooms once had.

He had used the line a hundred times, at a hundred lunches, and it never once failed to get a smile.

It did not get one now. She looked at him with a gentleness worse than any contempt. She reached up to the shelf behind her, and took down a photograph in a silver frame, and set it on the desk facing him.

"Do you know," she said, "I think you may have met my grandfather."

Chetan looked at the cheerful, patient face of Rustom Mistry, and the itch he had been refusing to scratch all morning became, quite suddenly, a cold hand laid flat against his chest.

"We were Cama Vakil in those days," she went on pleasantly. "It's Mistry & Co. now — the name changed after my grandfather died. And what the firm is today, Mr Talreja, it owes to a single decision he made in the monsoon of 1994, the last year of his life. He refused to sell a freehold reversion the rest of his board wanted rid of. They thought it dead money. There was a clever young man in particular, I'm told — the one who had found the thing in the first place, at the bottom of a list nobody had updated in years. He couldn't wait to be rid of it. He said, I believe, that it was a key to a door that wouldn't open for twenty-two years." She glanced out of the window, across the road, at eight floors of grey stone and white balconies. "It opened this morning. The lease fell in at last. We completed at nine o'clock. That's the something that's been a long time coming."

The office was very quiet. Somewhere below, on Rampart Row, an art dealer was raising his shutters.

"My grandfather always wished he could thank that young man," said Persis Mistry. "Grandfather had done no more than keep it, you see. The firm owes that ambitious man everything, and we don't know his name." She tilted her head, kindly, and looked at Chetan. He saw that she did not know — that she had not the faintest idea. "I don't suppose you were at Cama Vakil long enough to have known who he was?"

A silence fell — the kind that follows a remark a man cannot quite believe he has heard.

It was his for the claiming — the astonishment, the gratitude, perhaps even the job.

"No," said Chetan at last. "No, I don't think our paths ever crossed."

She was very kind to him after that. She let him finish what he had come to say, and told him, gently, that she did not think Mistry & Co. had a place for a man of his particular gifts. They were, she explained, a firm that took the long view now. They bought things that were worth more the longer you left them alone. Such things were rare, and they had learned to hold on to the ones they had. But she would, she said, be glad to keep his details on file, in case anything came up.

Chetan thanked her, and shook her hand, and rode the lift down to the marble hall, and walked out past the brass plate into Rampart Row. He stood for a moment on the pavement opposite the building — eight floors of grey stone and white balconies, full of art dealers. It had reverted to Mistry & Co. at nine o'clock that morning, an hour before he arrived, and went on the books at four hundred crore.

It was, as Chetan himself might once have said, a remarkable return on seventy-five lakh. His father would have called it a dividend.