Leverage. That’s what it came down to. You needed leverage to get people to do what you wanted, when you wanted them to do it.

But the damnedest thing about leverage was that you never knew where it lay. Not really. For one man it might be money; for another it could be fame, or pride; the desire for glory or the fear of rejection. It could be anything as long as it tapped into one of the two basic sources of human motivation – the desire to get what you don’t have or the fear of losing what you do.

Jehan had minored in psychology back in college; not that they taught you anything useful in the undergraduate classes. As Sinya liked to say, the only useful thing you learn in the first three years of university, is how to survive the next three years of university.

Kind of a cynical thing for a professor to say. But Sinya had never been a glass-half-full kind of girl, despite her mother’s repeated warnings that no one would marry her if she kept up with that attitude.

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Sinya was the first person who hadn’t looked at him with a mixture of fear and pity when he had told her about his theories on leverage. In fact, she had looked positively fascinated. Which probably didn’t bode well for her mental health. But Jehan would be forever grateful to her for that first rush of relief, the feeling of belonging that his seven-year-old self had felt when Sinya asked him to tell her more.

Twenty years later, Sinya was still the first person Jehan called when he had a new idea or reached a breakthrough on an old one. Not that she’d been particularly happy with his latest idea. But then, he didn’t need her to be happy. He needed her to be helpful. Leverage. And Sinya had played her part to perfection, as had her husband.

She and Dileep had both had a very dramatic – and very public – falling out with Jehan. Voices had been raised and insults had been hurled. And hundreds of cheap cell-phone cameras belonging to students and research scholars had captured the incident for the benefit of the Internet.

It had all gone off without a hitch. And now it was time for the next part. Jehan closed his eyes and breathed. God, how he wished he could have Sinya beside him right now.