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for their acts. Today, finally, I came to this venerated court room to hear the summary judgment on my case. I await your Honourable decision with all grace and humility. Thank you, Your Honour.’
    And she rolled back a metre from the bench, keeping her head down and eyes averted, praying that she hadn’t gone too far, that her little ‘performance’ had served to draw the media’s attention to her otherwise nondescript case and the judge’s attention to the presence of the media, in the hope that whatever backdoor deal the Shahs had worked with this R.K. Jain, it wouldn’t be immune to the glaring eye of the fourth estate.

2.3
    SHEILA WAS DOING ABS when the men entered the gym.
    She did cardio and abs three days a week, legs twice, weight training six times weekly, one major body part and one minor. Today was chest and triceps day. She had started with a ten-minute warm up on the treadmill, just to get her heart rate up and a little sweat going. Then she had started with flat bench presses: three sets of 60, 80 and 100 kgs, fifteen reps each set, thirty seconds between sets, then a two-minute break and a couple of tiny sips of an electrolyte drink to keep her salts balanced. She tended to sweat a lot once her heart rate crossed 135–140 and hence dehydrated easily. After that, incline bench presses, same weight, same reps and time. And finally, decline bench presses.
    That earned her and her spotter a five-minute break each, during which she exchanged hellos with regulars and kept an eye on the trainers, both the private ones who got paid extra for every forty-five-minute workout session as well as the floor trainers who only got a salary. She preferred to promote floor trainers to private trainers because that motivated the salary earners who were eager to work hard and prove that they deserved their own set of clients and a cut of the extra fee paid for private training. She also paid a better percentage to the private trainers – 60 per cent as against the 30 or 40 per cent most gyms reluctantly shared. She was routinely called by private trainers from other nearby gyms, eager to bring their roster of clients with them to earn the extra commish she paid. But she rarely agreed because in her view the extra commish was to reward her own deserving trainers who had worked hard to build their own list of clients, rather than an incentive to poach trainers and clients from other gyms. It kept other gym owners from getting too resentful of her quick success and at least one had visited a couple of times and expressed grudging admiration for how she ran the place.
    Five-minute break over, she did flat bench dumbbell flys, three sets of 25 kgs (two dumbbells made 50 kgs), 30 kgs and 35 kgs, twelve to fifteen reps each. The same thirty-second break between sets, two-minute break to sip on Enerzal. Repeat with incline, then decline. Then another five-minute respite, during which she greeted a group of young women who had just entered for their workout: the Dakshineshwar athletes in training. These were India’s best women boxers, wrestlers and weight lifters, many of them world class, all national-level or at least state-level champions, and Sheila had offered them a month of free workouts if they won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. They had won not one but two golds, one silver and a bronze, and she had generously upped the offer to three months of free workouts. The girls came by bus all the way from Dakshineshwar just to workout here, and livened up the place. It was great publicity and inspirational for the regular members to see these international-class athletes pushing the same weights and sweating it out on the same mats every day. New memberships had quadrupled by the second week before stabilizing at about twice the normal sign-up rate. Cheers and high-fives went up all around as they greeted her one by one and made the usual jibes about the ‘old woman’ who still liked to keep in shape. She was well