The "honeymoon" was a one-day business trip to the southern coast of Hainan. They took a morning flight, were met by a photographer from a Hong Kong society magazine that owed Huilan's faction a favor, spent two hours posing stiffly on a pristine white-sand beach and in front of a picturesque fishing village, and were on the evening flight back to Shanghai. They spoke little. The photographer, a nervous man with a expensive camera, kept chirping, "Closer, please! Look happy! Think of a shared secret!"
Rajendra thought of export licenses. Huilan, he suspected, thought of parliamentary manoeuvres.
On the flight back, she finally broke the silence, staring out the window at the darkening South China Sea. "The photographs will be sufficient. My father will be satisfied. The narrative will hold."
"It's done, then," Rajendra said.
"Yes." She paused. "The application for your license has been submitted to the State Council. My name is on it. It will be approved."
"Thank you."
"It is not a favor. It is a term of our contract." She turned from the window and looked at him, her sharp eyes assessing in the dim cabin light. "You are a very transactional man, Rajendra Shakuniya."
"I find it clears the air."
"It does." She nodded, almost to herself, and looked back out the window. The conversation was over.
He returned to Shenzhen the next day, the strange emptiness of the performative trip clinging to him. The factory site was a cacophony of progress. The skeleton was fully clad, the roof was on, and the first assembly lines were being bolted into the concrete floor. And in the middle of the organized chaos, like the still eye of a storm, was Shanti.
She was standing on a metal gantry overlooking the main production floor, helmet on, pointing down at a team installing a large hydraulic press. She was shouting instructions in Hindi to a Marathi foreman she'd brought from Pune, who was then translating into broken Mandarin for the local workers. It was a ludicrous, three-way chain of communication, and it was working.
Rajendra climbed up to join her. For a moment, they stood side-by-side, watching the birth of a machine that would make millions of pressure cookers.
"Conveyor belt is misaligned by three millimeters," Shanti said, not looking at him. "I've told them three times. They keep saying it's within tolerance."
"Three millimeters is a canyon," Rajendra said, echoing the words of the concrete-obsessed foreman from Mumbai.
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. "So you do listen."
They stood in silence for a few more minutes, the noise of construction a wall around them. The professional tension between them had settled into a wary, respectful truce. But the personal silence was a vast, cold thing.
"Was it beautiful?" Shanti asked suddenly, her voice quiet.
"What?"
"Hainan. The photos… it looked beautiful."
He looked at her profile. She was still watching the workers, her face carefully neutral. "It was a backdrop," he said honestly. "A set. We were props."
She finally glanced at him. "And the other prop? How is she?"
"Efficient. Focused. We understand each other."
"Because you're the same," Shanti said, and it wasn't an accusation, just a observation laced with a deep, old sadness.
Something in her tone cracked the shell around him. The exhaustion of the double life, the weight of the unspoken, the sheer loneliness of standing on this gantry with the person who knew him best and yet felt a world away—it all pressed down at once.
"We're not," he said, his voice rough. "She's playing a game for survival in a system that will eat her if she falters. I'm…" He trailed off, searching for the words. "I'm trying to build something that can't be eaten. Something real. This." He gestured at the factory. "What we're doing here. What we built in Mumbai. That's real. The rest is… noise. Static."
He'd used the word unconsciously, thinking of the psychic mine. But to Shanti, it meant something else.
"You let the static in, Rajendra," she said softly. "You let it become part of the deal."
"I know." He looked down at his hands, calloused from years in the mill, now clean from weeks of playing the executive. "I miscalculated. I thought I could compartmentalize it. Keep the static in one room and the real work in another. But walls have cracks."
Below them, the foreman gave a shout. The hydraulic press powered up with a deep, satisfying thrum, perfectly aligned. A small victory.
Shanti let out a long breath. "My father," she began, then stopped. She rarely spoke of him. "When he made his first big deal—a shipping contract that broke the cartel in Cochin—he came home and didn't speak for two days. My mother thought he was sick. He wasn't. He was just… heavy. With the weight of what he'd promised, the people he'd stepped on, the new enemies he'd made. The cost of the victory." She turned to face him fully. "I look at you sometimes, and I see that same weight. But you don't go silent. You just add another column to the ledger."
He had no answer. She had seen right through him.
"I don't need to know what's in every column, Rajendra," she continued, her dark eyes holding his. "But I need to know the final sum is worth it. Not just in rupees. In… integrity. In the thing we're building. If this," she pointed at the factory, "becomes just another cover for more static, then I'm out. Not as an investor. As a person."
It was the most vulnerable she had been with him in months. She wasn't threatening; she was stating a boundary. Her line in the sand.
"The final sum," he repeated slowly, the merchant in him turning the phrase over. "The marriage ends in ten months. It yields a ten-year exclusive export license. That license turns my… other operations from grey to white. It makes them safer, bigger, more stable. That stability feeds back into MANO. It protects this." He looked at her. "The static has an end date and a quantifiable yield. The real work is permanent. That's the sum."
She searched his face, looking for the truth behind the mercantile logic. Finally, she gave a small, slow nod. "Alright. Then we make sure the real work is worth it."
She turned to climb down the gantry, then stopped. Without looking back, she said, "The static… it's loud. Don't forget what the real work sounds like."
He stood there long after she had gone, the thrum of the press below now a steady, rhythmic heartbeat. The real work had a sound. It was the sound of machines being built, of orders being fulfilled, of something tangible taking shape in the world.
For the first time in weeks, the cold knot in his stomach began to loosen. The ledger was still complicated. But on the line marked "Shanti," he hadn't just recorded a loss. They had, painfully, begun a new negotiation. And the terms, for the first time, felt honest.
He climbed down and walked across the factory floor. He didn't go to the site office. He went to the workers' makeshift canteen, got two cups of strong, sweet tea, and carried them over to where Shanti was now bent over a wiring schematic with the foreman.
He held one cup out to her. She looked up, surprised, then took it. Their fingers didn't brush. But for a moment, their eyes met over the steam, and the silence between them wasn't cold anymore. It was just quiet. A shared, exhausted, determined quiet in the middle of the noise they were building together.
It wasn't a reconciliation. It was a reset. And for a merchant who dealt in hard assets, it was the most valuable thing he'd acquired all week.