Why a Dice Hall?

2026 · a dead sugar mill near Mawana, Meerut district · 10 November, 11:20 PM

“Tell me again why we’re here,” said Kanchi.

“Because the border says so.”

“The border says stars, Puram. The border says four stars and a wiggly line.”

“The wiggly line is a river.” Puram didn’t take his eyes off the mill. “The stars are where they sat over this spot five thousand years ago. I ran it through the star app eleven times. The Ganga used to bend here. Right here. The old city was on the bend.”

“What old city?”

He didn’t answer.

They were lying on their stomachs on the roof of a cold storage shed, in the dark, looking across a field of cut sugarcane stubble at the dead mill. It was huge. A black brick chimney, a rusted iron tower, broken windows all along the top. No lights in the windows. No lights anywhere. But in the last hour, forty-one motorbikes and nine cars had driven up to a side door, and every single one of them had gone inside and not come out.

Amma had given them the second border the morning they left Kanchipuram, rolled in newspaper, without being asked. Four stars, a river, and the same square-in-a-square. She’d given them coffee, too, and said, “Eat something first.” That was all she’d said.

“Puram. What old city?”

“Hastinapura.”

Kanchi knew the name. Every child in India knew the name. The great capital, the elephant city, where the old story began and where a kingdom was gambled away over a game of dice.

“So why a dice hall?”

“What?”

“You said on the drive, ‘It’ll be under the dice hall.’ Why a dice hall? There were palaces. Temples. Kitchens. Stables. Why would anyone hide something in the one room where a whole family destroyed itself?”

Puram was quiet.

She knew his quiets. There was the I’m calculating quiet, and the you’re right and I hate it quiet, and the I’m tired quiet. This wasn’t any of them.

“Trust me,” he said.

She turned her head and stared at him. Four stars and a wiggly line were bad enough. Trust me was worse. In six years, Puram had never said trust me. Puram said here are the numbers. Puram said here’s a diagram. Puram showed his work like a schoolboy who was afraid of losing marks.

“That’s my line,” she said.

“I know.”

“You don’t get to use my line.”

“I’m borrowing it.” He lifted the little ground-radar unit he’d built in Kanchipuram out of a car battery and a plastic lunchbox, and pointed it at the mill again. The screen showed shades of gray. “There. See?”

She saw. Deep under the mill, under the floor, under everything, a shape. A square, and a square inside the square.

“It’s under the crushing floor,” he said. “Where the old cane crushers used to be. Five meters down. Solid stone around it.”

“And what’s on the crushing floor now?”

He pointed at the side door. Another motorbike was pulling up. The rider took off his helmet, checked his phone, and knocked. The door opened, and for a second, before it closed, Kanchi saw light, and heard a roar of voices and a television, and a commentator shouting in English about a six.

“Cricket,” she said.

“Betting. The biggest illegal book in western Uttar Pradesh. Every match, every ball. Tonight it’s Australia against South Africa in Perth.” He checked something on his phone. “And the man who lends them the money to pay out when they lose? His company is a Swarna Dynamics company. Three companies deep. But it’s his.”

“Vik owns a betting den on top of our vault.”

“Vik owns a betting den on top of our vault,” Puram agreed. “He probably doesn’t know it’s there.”

“He knows,” said Kanchi. “He knows everything. The woman at Amma’s door knew my name.”

They lay in the cold and watched another car pull up.

At midnight, Puram would check the dial, the way he had every midnight since Gurgaon. A hundred left, last night. She’d stopped asking what it was counting down to. He’d stopped pretending he knew.

“Right,” said Kanchi. “Plan.”

Puram rolled onto his side and opened the green notebook, and she felt better at once, the way she always did when he opened the green notebook.

“The crushing floor is where the big players sit. The very big players. The small ones stay upstairs and bet on their phones. You can only get down to the crushing floor if you’re playing at a table, with real money, in person. Security checks you at the stairs.” He turned a page. “I can’t go down. I don’t look like a gambler.”

“You look like an accountant.”

“I am an accountant. Of crime.” He turned another page. “You go down. You sit at a table. You play. You keep them busy and looking at you. I go under, through the old drain from the river side, and I get to the vault from below. You buy me time.”

“How much time?”

“An hour. Maybe ninety minutes.”

“And how much money do I play with?”

Puram told her.

Kanchi looked at him. “That’s everything.”

“That’s everything.”

“That’s everything we have, Puram. That’s six years.”

“I know,” he said. “Try not to lose it.”

The woman at the stairs searched her bag and her jacket and the soles of her shoes, and looked at the stack of cash, and then looked at Kanchi, longer.

“First time?” she said.

“First time here,” said Kanchi.

The stairs went down into heat and noise and cigarette smoke. The crushing floor was a long stone room, lit by bare bulbs, with the old iron crushers still standing at one end like sleeping animals. Big screens on every wall showed the match in Perth, green grass and blue sky, from a world away. Men shouted at the screens. Men shouted into phones. Ledgers lay open on every table, and boys ran between the tables with slips of paper.

In the middle of the room, right over the square inside the square, stood the biggest table of all. Six men sat around it. They weren’t looking at the screens. They were looking at her.

One of them pushed out an empty chair with his foot.

Kanchi sat down.