Nitin Gharpure eases his Mercedes along the curb in the alley behind the warehouse. At the end of the alley, a semi is going beep-beep-beep, backing into a loading ramp, aligning a forty-foot container to the dock. And behind that, delicate tendrils of pink are forming over the distant Oakland hills.

 Since the warehouse does not have its own parking lot, he has to park on the street. He presses the lock button on his key fob and glances around, nervous. Among the cars parked along the curb, his stands out. If he is going to be stuck working here, he should downgrade his ride, to be safe.

It’s best not to dwell on the negatives—it’s his first day, and he’s lucky to have this job, or any job at all. He steels himself by whispering the mantra, “vakratunda mahakaya ...” under his breath. For eighteen months at the minimum security facility in Lompoc, it was only this prayer that saved him from despair and sustained him each day.

The crusty office manager who buzzes him in and the chirpy HR lady processing his paperwork seem decent enough, but he wonders if they know about his past. He knows that the CEO believes in rehabilitating ex-cons, so perhaps there were more of his kind here. But he still can’t overcome the feeling of being watched, of people smirking behind his back.

Settling into his new chair, he stops scrunching his nose at the burnt smell of the coffee and looks through the glass wall of his tiny mezzanine office, the office of the “Director of Operations.” Beyond the cubicles of customer service reps chatting on their phones, he sees warehouse workers scrambling like ants, studying their pick lists, grabbing boxes, stacking them in their carts, and maneuvering them through the aisles to various shipping stations. Nobody notices his presence at this office.

He briefly closes his eyes, trying to remember his last office from two years ago. It was a Bay-view corner office with a designer mahogany desk, a personal espresso machine and minibar, an executive assistant ...

He’s jolted out of his evanescent reverie by a big thump. Dave “Sledgehammer” McMurty, CEO of OLC, Inc., has just slapped a stack of envelopes of varying sizes on this desk. In contrast to his own formal blue dress shirt and silk tie, Sledgehammer stands tough in his tight-fitting Hawaiian shirt, muscles bulging all over the place, highlighted by multicolored tattoos. His buzz cut can’t hide a creeping gray.

“This is OLC, Mr. Ghar-pure-re. You are not in Club Fed anymore, you can’t be sleeping at six. Not if you want to still be employed here after lunch hour.”

Before Nitin can respond, Sledgehammer barks, “Open the envelopes.”

Nitin slides his chair forward and glances at the first envelope. It is addressed to OLC in a childish scrawl. He nervously wedges his finger behind the flap and rips the envelope open. A couple of quarters fall out and one of them bounces off the desk and clanks down on the parquet floor.

“Pick it up!” Sledgehammer barks again.

While Nitin is crawling on all fours, looking for the wayward quarter under his desk, he sees Sledgehammer’s feet leaving the office. “Never forget that we get our paychecks because our customers send us their hard-earned money. Deposit these checks by end of day.”

###

This much Nitin knows: OLC is a small logistics company that handles marketing, fulfillment, and order processing for a handful of companies in the collectibles space, shipping out plush toys and such. At the beginning of the millennium, when dot-coms were collapsing all along US-101 in San Francisco, OLC, on the East side of the bay, was thriving and having good year-over-year growth numbers, thanks to must-have-for-Christmas action figures. As soon as Nitin got out of Lompoc, an old venture capital connection, whose firm had invested in OLC, connected him to Sledgehammer. The interview was a mere formality; even the title of his position, “Director of Operations,” was made up on the fly during the interview. He really didn’t know what he was hired for, and the salary was a pittance, but what choice did he have?

For today, he has to open a few dozen envelopes, match them with online orders, mark them paid, and take the checks to the bank’s lockbox. Apparently, a few of the customers are kids, or folks with no access to credit cards, so they send payments in cash or cheque. His first day’s job description appears to be that of a low-level accounts receivable clerk.

Nitin quickly gets down to his task, occasionally looking away from his computer monitor to see the warehouse workers milling around the aisles. When Sledgehammer walks the floor, the workers move faster, otherwise they seem to have a good time. They are a motley crowd of Tibetans, East Africans, and Latinos. A Sikh woman in a bright red Salwar-Kameez and waist-length pigtails plaited with silk ribbons catches his eye. Jeez! Does she think she is still in her village in Punjab?

He looks at the next check. It is for $27.12 and the order number is barely legible. Just three years ago, he remembers the thrill of signing off a balance sheet reporting three billion dollars in assets. His paycheck had been so absurdly inflated, he’d stopped checking his bank statements. What a ride it was for a lower-middle class kid from Nashik to get there! This feels more like where he belongs. He can imagine his father, the post office clerk, helping illiterate migrant workers send twenty-seven-rupee money orders to their families.

###

It is week three. Nitin runs queries on the corporate database while nibbling an insipid fish sandwich from Your Black Muslim Bakery—the only restaurant near the warehouse, just down the street. He has noticed that the workers bring their own lunch boxes. By noon, the breakroom erupts like several overlapping ethnic festivals. He chooses to eat alone at his desk.

It was clear Sledgehammer was testing his loyalties over the last two weeks by assigning him frenetic menial tasks. At least he wasn’t asked to fetch his Red Bulls from the vending machine! But today’s task is interesting.

“So ... I believe you have an engineering degree from before you got your high-falutin Wharton MBA?” the boss asked, when he came in this morning.

Despite his Industrial Engineering degree being a relic from two decades ago, buried beneath his graduate degrees and corporate career, Sledgehammer had tasked him with improving operational efficiencies. Speed up restocking. Improve pick times. Investigate missed shipments.

“One more thing ...,” Sledgehammer says now, rushing into Nitin’s office. He stops when he sees the sandwich bag on Nitin’s desk.

“You are buying lunch from that gangster’s place?” he bellows.

“What?” Nitin stutters, looking at his sandwich bag for clues.

“Hell! Use the internet. Learn who these guys are. Tell you what, take ten minutes to drive down to the Public Market or someplace and get some decent eats. Stay away from the Commie town of Berkeley, though.”

Nitin nods. The little sprinkle of kindness from his boss makes him feel warm, like he hasn’t felt in a while. Back in his white-collar crime prison, everyone around him carried the “I alone don’t deserve to be here, I am only here because of a grave miscarriage of justice” snootiness. But he surely deserved to be there for signing off on the balance sheet he shouldn’t have. For his boss. But, here’s a different boss.

“Anyways, as I was saying, focus on shrinkage first. Find out what’s happening with the 'could not track' shipments. Some of our inventory could be very tempting to one of those floor guys with a nephew or niece whose birthday is coming up,” Sledgehammer says, pointing to the warehouse area.

“Which data table should I look at?” Nitin asks, bewildered, looking at his monitor.

Sledgehammer scowls at him. “Not there, Mr. MBA! The breakroom table is where you should look. Take your lunch there. Meet the grunts. Figure out who is doing what.”

He rushes out, talking with his back to Nitin. “It takes a thief to catch a thief.” The last word, in Sledgehammer’s Texan drawl, stretches long and lazy as it floats over the doorway.

Nitin’s face goes red.

“I didn’t steal,” he says, voice low. “I got swept up in the stock price euphoria; pressured by the sweet-talking C-Suite brass. They said 'sign' and I signed. I folded when I should have stood. The vultures picked me for their fall guy.”

But Sledgehammer is gone, Nitin is talking to himself.

###

Nitin decides to take a walk around the block, to let off some steam. Screw “operational efficiencies.” He is shaken with a rage of such intensity that he couldn’t possibly work. He steps out to the street, where a taco truck blows its shrill whistle to announce its arrival. A few workers stream out noisily.

He drifts along unfamiliar streets and alleys, taking random left and right turns at intersections. Did he pass the Mississippi fried catfish cart before? Or the boarded-up commercial building covered in graffiti that appears to have been a Tamaleria once? If he has, he has; why should he care about where he has been?

He pulls out his cellphone, his first ever, and flips it open. It’s brand new, and he has only entered a dozen contacts in it. He scrolls through them and sees Dr. Reddy, listed as a 213-area code number. The doctor, who was in for Medicare fraud, was one inmate he kind of bonded with in Lompoc. The doctor had all kinds of tax evasion ideas that he wanted to run by Nitin.

He’s not sure if long-distance calls are more expensive, but he calls anyway. There is no answer; the doctor is probably golfing.

Nitin walks down a street lined with old Victorians, craftsman cottages, nondescript bungalows with vinyl siding, and vacant weed-choked lots. He recalls his pre-divorce home in Hillsborough and the street it was on. Uniformly styled villas on a gently curving street. Every house was fronted by manicured lawns and rose bushes, heights enforced by the HOA.

This street is quiet except for the squirrel scolding him from a bough high above him on a sycamore tree. He stands transfixed. Why was he a fan of the HOA and the order they imposed? What would his ex-wife be doing in that home now? Perhaps opening her first bottle of Merlot?

He pulls his hand through his hair in despair and calls her. Who else could he call? His college friends would be supportive, but he doesn’t have the courage to face them yet. Their numbers aren’t in his phone; they probably don’t even know he’s out.

“Hello, Nitin?”

“Oh, hi, Asawari,” he replies. “All okay with you? And the kids?”

He hears her puttering around, so she must be on speakerphone. They make small talk. He doesn’t say why he called. She doesn’t ask either; she must know what is coming.

He perfunctorily pleads with her to convince their daughters to forgive him and start talking to him again. He is sure she is the one restraining them, but he holds back on any accusations. A cork pops in the background, and he hears liquid pouring in a glass. She whines that she is trying her best, and she’s begging them every day to reconnect with their father.

She must be tired of him—she doesn’t even bother to mention how he chose work over family, and how he doesn’t deserve his daughters. With no appetite for conflict on either side, the dissolution of their marriage seems complete. He thanks her for pleading for him with the kids.

She asks if he wants money. He reminds her that the stockholders’ lawsuit from his previous job is still in the courts, they are still trying to reach into his personal assets, and there should be no indications of “collusive divorce” or “fraudulent conveyance,” which could make them come after her assets. It didn’t matter that the marriage was over, the divorce finalized, and the kids already antagonized—well before the CapEx audit caught the first whiffs of the crooked digits behind the books. He doesn’t want to compromise his girls’ college funds.

“New job. You must be busy,” she speaks around a sip.

“Yeah. Busy. Gotta go. Tell the kids I love them,” he says, then hangs up.

###

Across from his desk, Tempa Gyaltsen is smiling sheepishly, a bit puzzled. He is five foot one, wearing a Baja hoodie, worn-out jeans, and grubby, tired-looking, no-brand sneakers. His face seems to be made of old, tanned leather.

“Where are you from in India?” he asks in Hindi.

“You speak Hindi?” It is Nitin’s turn to be puzzled.

“I grew up in Delhi. I was a five-year-old boy when my father brought me across the Himalayas from Tibet.” The more he fills in his biographical details, the more animated he gets. He reminds Nitin of his father, though Tempa is younger.

Nitin stops him. He says, “Well, Tempa. Can I follow you around when you do your picking today? I am new here and want to learn how things work.” He doesn’t say that the reports indicate he is the least efficient picker on the floor. What could he be doing in his rounds?

###

An hour later, they are back in his office. Nitin pulls out a blank paper from the laser printer and starts sketching the warehouse plan. "This new system could cut your picking time by fifteen percent," he explains to Tempa, who watches with furrowed brows.

“I’m not an educated person like you,” he says. “I only finished tenth grade. In Hindi medium school.” He thinks for a bit and says, with slight trepidation, “Am I doing something wrong?”

“No, no. It’s all good,” Nitin says. He stares at his sketch for a minute and then crumples it into a ball. He tells Tempa, “Never mind, I will find another way.”

After Tempa leaves, he emails Akshay, the IT guy, to create customized pick paths for the shorter pickers. The improved paths should exclude boxes on the upper shelves so pickers waste less time wheeling step ladders around. Sledgehammer is on the cc list.

Sledgehammer responds, “How brilliant of me to hire a little Indian for the job. We Texans only think of big things.”

###

A couple of weeks later, Nitin finds a pattern among the lost shipments. He reruns the reports till he is sure. It is clear that the main person of interest in this case should be Amy Goldberg. The name itself is unusual in the employee roster for its non-exoticness. He buzzes Gerashchenko, the floor manager, to send her over.

A few minutes later, he is interrupted from his spreadsheet gazing by a loud giggle. The Sikh lady is at the door; she’s in a bright pink outfit today.

“You call-ed me, Nitin-sir?” Her Punjabi accent is very thick.

“Just Nitin, you are ...”

“Amrinder. Amy.”

“Oh!”

She unties a knot in her pallu scarf to reveal a small zipper bag with barfis.

“Home made last night, sir-ji,” she says, handing one to Nitin.

He starts with the “I am trying to learn, want to follow you around” ploy. But it doesn’t work with this woman. She has a crafty way of derailing every train of conversation he starts, till he is left mumbling at a dead end.

He tries a different tack. “You know the shipment that came in this morning? You were in receiving. The shipment was from Hanjin ...”

She bursts into hysterical giggles. Nitin, annoyed, can do nothing but wait. She is bonkers.

Finally, when she gets a hold of herself, she slides another barfi towards Nitin.

“Hanjin,” she says, and starts giggling again.

“What’s so funny?” Nitin asks.

“How you say ‘Hanjin.’ It is like Hanjin, Hanjin, Hanjin ...”

The way she moans it—like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally—makes her point painfully clear. He quickly gets up and closes the office door.

“Amy, ...”.

“In Punjabi, ‘han ji’ means ‘yes, sir,’ you know. That is what we gurrels say when we, you know, like American gurrels says ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ we say ‘han ji’...”

“Shh,” he says, more firmly.

“My husband like han ji,” she says, winking. “He is old man, my Professor Goldberg, buddha aadmi hai, but he still like it.”

“That’s good,” he says, looking at the door to make sure it is shut. He says firmly, “Now listen. I want to show you some numbers.”

In a minute, Amy is unusually quiet.

###

For two days now, Sledgehammer has been pacing the warehouse floor like a caged animal even as the shrinkage numbers—which had plagued him for months—have shown marked improvement under the new system. He knows Nitin is behind it, but he is not naming names.

“I have a pink slip at my desk that needs to be filled in ASAP,” Sledgehammer tells him. He is itching to identify the pilferer.

“Don’t worry, it isn’t a personnel issue,” Nitin remonstrates. “I just tweaked the receiving processes for better tracking. For a safe measure, I also installed X-10 cameras at the receiving stations. They were on sale last week, half off.

Sledgehammer gives up. “Fine! Go ahead and expense those cameras,” he growls. As he storms away, Nitin hears him mumbling, “Thick as thieves. These bastards always stick together.”

And that’s where they leave it.

###

Nitin is six months into his job. His desk is clean as always, but he takes out a new Kleenex from the top drawer and wipes the surface, making sure there are no leftover crumbs. He takes out two fresh napkins and lays them out flat on the desk.

The middle drawer has the digestive biscuits and Typhoo tea. A little convenience store at the Public Market had an excellent collection of European snacks. He is drawn to ‘Poids Net’ on snack packaging.

He pulls out exactly two biscuits and places them on his napkin “plate.” This will have to do until his next run-in with the boss—in an hour, at the sales meeting. His doc said something about A1C and blood sugar and having to go on medication if he didn’t fix his diet. He picks up the first biscuit and studies the spreadsheet in front of him.

The week’s performance numbers are dismal. Compared to his previous forecast, the sales team’s forecast, Sledgehammer’s unreasonable diktats, whichever one. Even with creative conditional formatting, the spreadsheet is a jumble of red cells across teams, down product lines. And he would need a lot more than the cup of tea to “put lipstick on the pig” before him. The sales meeting promises to be a boisterous one, lavishly sprinkled with Sledgehammer’s F-bombs. Like each of the sales meetings in the last three weeks.

It was much nicer when he was the “efficiency guy,” especially after Sledgehammer cooled down over the shrinkage incident. Unfortunately, he had been reassigned to marketing just when Amazon encroached into their space.

He can predict the tirade that is coming. “What goddamn part of ‘get those numbers up’ wasn’t clear to you?” Sledgehammer will ask. Then he will try to show his human part: “My Texas drawl ain’t too thick for you foreigners, is it?”

The two biscuits are gone. The cells are still red. He places two more biscuits on the napkin, making sure the office doors are closed.

The door swings open at the first nibble. Sledgehammer, as usual, did not knock. He slumps into the office chair across from Nitin.

“Uh, cookie?” Nitin pushes the second biscuit towards him. The boss ignores his question.

“Don’t Jo-Ann and Ray report to you?”

“Yes.” They are two new kids who he hired to explore the new world of pay-per-click advertising. Fresh grads from Cal. Of course, Sledgehammer knows this.

“I saw them leaving at quarter to six yesterday. They can’t punch out on the clock like this place is Burger King. Are they watching our acquisition cost numbers? If they are not backstabbing each other to avoid the pink slip, you are not doing your job.”

The biscuit feels mealy in his mouth. He knows it is not their productivity that is the issue.

“I checked their campaigns. They have exceeded their targets.”

“So fucking what? They can’t clock out at ...”

The bile rises in Nitin’s gut. He pushes his chair back and looks up at his boss.

“I don’t think it would be warranted to push them any further,” he says. The voice is passive, but the line is firm.

Sledgehammer’s eyebrows arch up, and he bites his lip, and nods slightly.

“Well, shit, a little accountant grew a spine today!” he says, standing up. “See you at the sales meeting, Mr. Warrant. Your spreadsheet better show some green.”

After a pause, he stares at Nitin’s desk and sneers, “And fuck ‘em British biscuits! What’s wrong with Oreos?”

He shuts the door behind him, leaving Nitin drenched in sweat.

###

He has fifteen minutes to kill before the meeting. He closes the spreadsheet, where the reds stay red.

He calls a number from his office phone. She wouldn’t know this number.

From the other end, he hears a voice from the past: “Hello?”

Tears well up in his eyes. He instantly feels like pleading to her, promising her the earth. He holds this instinct in check.

“There's something I need to say, and I'd like you to hear me out,” he says in a gentle, but firm tone.

“Dad?” she says. There is something new in his voice. She doesn’t hang up.