The Ultimate Secret by David Thomas Moore

skipped over it without focusing. An affectation, then. “...Sabharwal. Yes?” He looked over his glasses at her, smiling affably, a little absently.
    “Kumari. Kim. My... my mother calls me Kim.” Inwardly, Kim swore at herself. Why had she said that? Be professional. Speak when spoken to. Don’t waffle, don’t say any more than you have to. You need this. She stared straight ahead, just over his right shoulder, and tried not to look as nervous as she felt. The man – Call me Smith , he’d said, although he was at least as Indian as she was – regarded her mildly for a moment, then continued.
    “Kim? Very well. So, Kim. Why come to me? What brought you here?”
    Kim shifted her weight slightly, stopped herself from crossing her arms. “Work, sir. I need work. Mother’s ill, sir, and there’s no-one else. My brothers need to stay in school. I tried to get work on the new building sites, but they said I was too small. One of the men said to come here, to ask for you. Said you sometimes had work for people... for people like me.” She bit down on another sir . Damn! She was better than this. She focused on her breathing, strove to remember the little meditation her grandfather had taught her.
    Smith leaned back in his chair, which creaked beneath him. His belly – unusual in Mumbai, or for an Indian man in Mumbai, but then it was unusual to see an Indian man on that side of a desk at all – strained at his suit. An English suit, she thought; jacket and waistcoat.
    “People like you?” he asked, in the same gentle tone, although she thought the air grew a little more tense. “People with sick mothers? People with” – he glanced at the sheet in front of him – “excellent school results? Really very young women?” He laced his hands over his belly. It was hard to read him, behind his moustache and his round-lensed glasses. The room was gloomy, the blinds behind her pulled low to block out the afternoon sun, but stray beams of light struck his glasses when he moved, and his eyes – dark eyes, but bland, as if he had blinds behind them as well – came and went behind flashes of brilliant white. He allowed the question to hang in the air for a few seconds, and then continued. “Or do you mean half-castes?”
    Kim’s cheeks burned. She shrugged, then stopped herself and straightened her back again. “Yes, sir.”
    He nodded once, to himself, and looked down at her resume again. She followed his eyes. The desk was old; the dark wood battered and nicked, the green leather stained and ripped.
    “Why didn’t you try at the offices of the British East India Company?” he asked. “These results really are outstanding; even if you couldn’t afford to go to university, you could have found work as a clerk.” He looked back up at her.
    She hesitated. “Because–” She wasn’t sure how to proceed. Did he really not know how the East India Company operated? Was this a test? “Because you can’t. They only hire English people. Even half-castes only have a chance if they have someone to vouch for them. Everybody knows that.”
    “Indeed,” he said, shifting in his seat. “Well, if everyone knows it, it must be true. And your mother? She couldn’t help?”
    Kim shook her head. “No, sir. My mother... she left Britannia under a cloud. Didn’t get on with her family. The Dashwoods... she’d argued with her uncle.”
    “Ah, yes. Of course.” He fell silent and focused on her resume again. The smells of cooking – sauces, spices, grilling meat – wafted through the window from the market outside the building, and Kim’s stomach rumbled. She’d missed breakfast.
    “Beautiful woman, your mother,” he said at last. “Everyone loved her.”
    “Sir?” Kim stared at him.
    “Smith, Kim. I said, call me Smith.”
    “It’s not your name, though, is it, si – Mr Smith?”
    He looked up from the paper and stared at her, and his eyes were clear this time, piercing. “Do you know what I do here,