Behind Closed Doors

“She’s just an innocent girl. What is she going to do going out there all by herself?”

“So what do you want her to do instead?”

Her mother’s voice came back immediately, sharp enough to cut right through the closed wooden door.

“Sit at home like me? Cook for you three times a day and wash plates until her life is over?”

Behind the bedroom door, Anu sat on the floor with her knees pulled tight against her chest, holding her head in her hands.

Outside in the hall, the silence lasted barely a second.

“That is what a woman is supposed to do,” her father said.

“Then why did you make her study until now?”

Lalitha almost never raised her voice. For as long as Anu could remember, her mother’s entire world had ended at the front gate. She had spent her whole life inside four walls like a prisoner serving a sentence nobody talked about—doing the same thankless chores every day, folding away every ambition she had ever had. Before marriage, her own parents had never allowed her to step outside the house to build a life; after marriage, only the walls had changed.

She had sacrificed her whole life for this family. And listening to the shaking anger in her voice now, Anu knew her mother wanted only one thing: for her daughter to walk out of this house and make a name for herself. To prove that women weren't weak, and they weren't any less.

“I only made her study so she’d get a respectable match when she gets married!” her father shouted back. “Not so she can walk out the door and do whatever she wants!”

In the dark behind the door, Anu pressed her palms harder against her temples.

All through her school years, whenever the house was quiet in the afternoon, she used to watch foreign movies and international business channels on television. She had watched women in Western countries walk into offices as equals—independent, respected, answering to no one.

That was what had pulled her toward finance in the first place. She hadn't wanted a degree just to print on a marriage biodata. She wanted to understand how money worked, how investments grew, and how to build enough wealth to stand completely on her own feet.

In the hall, her mother refused to back down.

“What about her dreams? What about her career?” Lalitha demanded. “Is your image in front of society more important than your own daughter being happy and choosing her own path?”

“Shut your mouth! You don’t get to tell me how I run this house!”

Steel clattered violently across the floor as her father swept his hand across the table.

Anu flinched behind the door, her heart hammering against her ribs.

“How dare you talk back to me?”

The heavy, sickening sound of blows echoed through the wood, followed by a muffled gasp.

“Go back to your room and don't even think about coming out!” her father roared, his breathing ragged and furious. “Step out of that door again, and I’ll break your legs!”

Sitting on the cold floor in the dark, listening to the silence that followed, Anu had truly believed her dream—and any chance at a real career in the market—was dead.

Until—

✦ ✦ ✦

“Buy Granjax.”

Anu blinked.

They were still in the computer section of the library. Rishi had turned around in his chair to face her, his notebook open on the terminal desk beside him while the live price of Granjax Auto Components sat at ₹84.60 on the monitor.

“What?” she asked.

“Granjax,” he repeated, quieter this time.

Anu didn’t answer right away. She studied his face.

There it was again—that exact same quiet, unshakeable look he’d had when he told her about Vardhan. Like he was looking at something nobody else in the room could see.

“You saw it again?” she asked, lowering her voice so the students at the next table wouldn't hear.

Rishi nodded.

“What exactly did you see?”

He glanced back at the monitor for a second, then looked at her.

“The price,” he said. “It goes up. Stops at one-twenty-eight point eighty.”

Anu stared at him for a beat as the pieces clicked together in her head.

“Is that why you didn’t respond while I was talking to you this whole time?”

Rishi blinked. “What?”

His reaction caught her off guard. He didn't look embarrassed—he looked genuinely lost.

“You were completely spaced out,” Anu said, frowning slightly. “I called your name twice. You didn’t even flinch. For a second, I thought you were ignoring me on purpose.”

Rishi went still, his eyes dropping to the desk as he thought back over the last minute.

“I heard you talking about how you compare company announcements with their competitors,” he said slowly. “And then… everything just went quiet. Like nothing around me was making a sound anymore.”

Anu watched his expression change.

“Don’t tell me,” she said quietly, “you didn’t hear me calling you at all?”

“No,” Rishi admitted. “Not a word.”

Before she could ask him anything else, the afternoon lecture bell rang out from the corridor, sharp and loud through the library doors. Around them, chairs scraped back across the floor as students started packing up their notebooks.

Rishi glanced up at the wall clock, turned back to log out of the computer, and slung his bag over his shoulder.

“I have class on the second floor, Prof.”

He gave her a quick nod and slipped out through the glass doors with the crowd of students heading for the stairs.

Anu stayed where she was for a moment, looking at the empty chair and the logged-out screen.

✦ ✦ ✦

Back in the commerce staff room, Anu let out a slow breath and leaned forward over her desk.

The room was mostly empty. Two other lecturers had already left for their two o’clock classes, leaving only the steady hum of the ceiling fan and the open laptop in front of her.

She hadn't been able to get his face out of her head since she walked out of the library.

She opened the browser and typed in the BSE website. The page loaded slowly, one block at a time. The college connection was always at its worst in the afternoon, when half the department was downloading something.

Ten paise higher than what she had seen in the library. Nothing unusual.

She checked the 52-week range first. Low ₹71.20. High ₹98.40.

So the stock wasn't sitting at the bottom, and it wasn't anywhere near the top either. It was stuck right in the middle, the way small companies usually were when nobody in the market was paying attention to them.

If Rishi was right, it would have to cross its own yearly high by thirty rupees.

Anu frowned and opened the corporate announcements section.

The list was short. A board meeting notice. A change in company secretary. The quarterly results from July. And at the top, the filing she had already read last week—the small plant expansion in Sriperumbudur.

She opened it again anyway.

The notice was only two pages long. Additional capacity for aluminium housings. Land already available right next to their existing unit. Funded through internal accruals and a term loan, with commercial production expected in the next financial year.

That was it. No customer name. No order value.

She read it a second time, slower.

A company didn't expand capacity unless it expected more orders. That much was basic. But "expected" could mean anything. It could mean a confirmed contract from a big carmaker, or it could just mean the promoters were being optimistic.

The filing didn't say which.

She went back and opened the July quarterly results.

Sales were up eleven percent from last year. Profit was up a little less, mostly because raw material costs had climbed. Aluminium prices had been rising all year—she had seen it on the commodity tickers on TV.

Decent numbers. Not exciting numbers.

Definitely nothing in there that would make a stock jump fifty percent.

Next, she checked the shareholding pattern.

Promoters held a little over sixty percent. It hadn't changed at all in the last two quarters. No big mutual fund names. A few small institutions. The rest was public—ordinary retail investors holding a few hundred shares each.

If the promoters had been quietly buying up shares from the market, it would have shown up here. They hadn't.

Anu leaned back in her chair.

She opened Moneycontrol in another window and searched for Granjax.

The price chart looked the exact same as it did on the BSE site. Flat, with tiny ups and downs. The volume bars at the bottom were thin. On most days, only a few thousand shares changed hands.

She scrolled down to the message board. Most of the posts were months old.

Anu almost smiled at the last one. Every neglected small company on Moneycontrol had at least one person in the comments calling it a multibagger.

There were no analyst reports either. She searched the Economic Times site and found only one article—a short piece from the Chennai edition about auto component companies expanding near Sriperumbudur. Granjax was mentioned in a single line near the bottom, lumped in with four other names.

That was all.

No broker had written about it. No TV channel had mentioned it. As far as the market was concerned, Granjax barely existed.

And yet a boy who had never heard the name an hour ago had looked at the screen and said one-twenty-eight point eighty.

She pulled a notepad toward her and wrote down what she knew.

Then she stopped and thought about the bigger picture.

The car market was doing well this year. Every month, the SIAM numbers came out and passenger car sales were up again. Everyone on CNBC kept talking about small cars, and how India was going to become a major hub for exporting them. And several big carmakers had their factories right around Chennai.

If one of those carmakers increased its orders, a parts supplier sitting right next door in Sriperumbudur would be one of the first to benefit.

It made sense.

But it was still a guess. It wasn't a solid reason.

Her fingers rested on the edge of the desk. She could still hear her father’s voice from the memory that had hit her earlier—loud, final, telling her mother to stay inside. Becoming a college lecturer had gotten her out of that house and given her a safe, respectable life of her own, even if she had quietly shelved her childhood dream of making a real name for herself in the markets.

She had built her life on reading what was actually on the page. Outside the library, she had told Rishi that news only tells you what has already happened. Whatever was going to happen to Granjax hadn't happened yet. It wasn't in the filings. It wasn't on the message board. It wasn't anywhere she could verify.

Anu looked at the screen for a long time.

Then she switched back to the BSE page and copied the company's phone number and registered office address at the bottom of her notepad.

If the reason wasn't online, maybe someone sitting at the company could tell her.

She stared at the phone number for a long moment before closing the laptop.

✦ ✦ ✦