DIRTY FLOAT

Vikram Nair has spent seven years buying his Friday nights the same way: Old Monk at the Harbour Bar, four friends, a view of the Arabian Sea. Deputy General Manager of Corporate Banking at Aryan Mercantile's Fort branch, he built the life a man his age is supposed to want: the flat, the marriage, the seat on the building committee. Then he found the gap in the float.

Four to eight basis points on an overnight balance. Nothing anyone would notice. Enough, over thirty-eight months, to fund a second life running parallel to the first: amber-lit rooms at Sapphire Nights, the particular attention only easy money can buy, a flat in Versova with rent no salary explains.

Vikram isn't alone. Four other men, Pradeep, Rajesh, Deepak, and Sameer, found their own way into the same arithmetic, and their own reasons to keep running it. The women of Sapphire Nights aren't the story's victims or its ornaments; they're playing their own long game. And at home, the wives, Sunita most of all, a radiologist who reads for a living and knows a finding isn't a conclusion, are waiting with a patience that isn't the same thing as not knowing.

Then the Financial Crimes Bureau's pattern-detection system flags an anomaly nobody meant to leave behind. The record doesn't forget. It waits.

Dirty Float is a novel about the moment the distance between the life you built and the life you wanted stops being theoretical, and what it costs, in a currency no easy money can refill, to find your way back.