The Witness

At 9:14, Vardhan AutoSystems was still showing yesterday's closing price.

₹255.

I refreshed the page.

Nothing changed.

The bus had dropped me outside campus almost twenty minutes early, but instead of going inside, I was standing under the shade of a half-dead tree near the main gate with my phone in both hands.

Students passed around me in groups. Someone behind me was arguing about an assignment. An auto driver leaned on his horn for no reason I could understand. A tea seller near the gate was already shouting orders over the hiss of boiling milk.

I barely heard any of it.

9:15.

The page refreshed on its own.

₹254.40.

My thumb stopped against the screen.

Then ₹255.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. The number sat exactly where I had seen the glow stop.

Then it changed.

₹254.25.

₹253.90.

I refreshed again even though the page was already updating by itself.

Still below ₹255.

A group of first-years pushed past me toward the gate, nearly knocking my bag off my shoulder. I moved aside without looking up.

₹253.60.

I locked the phone.

For most of last night, I had imagined the opposite. ₹258. ₹260. Maybe ₹270 by the time Professor Anu checked. Instead, the stock had reached ₹255 and backed away from it.

That should have made me feel better. It did. A little.

It also made the thing in my notebook harder to dismiss.

Tasha had stopped where I saw it stop. Now Vardhan had done the same thing.

I slipped the phone into my pocket and headed toward the main building.

For the first time since all of this started, I wasn't wondering whether I had imagined the glow.

I was starting to wonder what exactly it was showing me.

✦ ✦ ✦

Professor Anu did not call me during the first lecture.

Or the second.

I checked the phone once under the desk, then forced it face-down beside my notebook before the habit became a rumor.

Sameer noticed anyway. "Waiting for someone?"

"No."

"You check your phone like someone owes you money."

"I wish."

He was drawing something that was supposed to be a database diagram and looked more like the South Central Railway after a cyclone.

"Your diagram," I whispered, turning his notebook slightly toward me, "is supposed to show the relationships between tables. Why have you drawn an entire railway junction?"

Sameer glanced at his drawing and grinned. "It made sense when I started."

"You're going to fail."

"Then help me fix it, idiot."

I shook my head and pulled his notebook closer. The guest lecturer was still explaining memory management, so we had a few minutes before he started walking around the classroom. I crossed out two unnecessary connections while Sameer searched through his notes for the example the professor had shown earlier.

The phone stayed face-down.

I still knew what it would say if I turned it over.

✦ ✦ ✦

The lab-fee notice had gone up beside the internal exam timetable.

I stopped to check the deadline. Next Friday. I had almost forgotten about it, and judging by the crowd around the notice board, I wasn't the only one.

I had a little over ₹2,000 saved in my drawer at home. The fee wasn't a disaster, but paying it meant dipping into money I had been putting aside for myself. Mom already handled most of my college expenses, and I didn't particularly want to ask her for extra when I could manage this one on my own.

Two thousand rupees.

Vardhan was at ₹253. I could have bought a handful of shares with that drawer money and still had change. I hadn't. Last night that had felt like caution. Standing in front of the notice, it felt like I had watched the number stop exactly where I said it would, and still done nothing with it.

"Oh, the lab fee. I completely forgot about that."

Sameer had come up beside me and was reading the notice over my shoulder.

"It's due next Friday," I told him.

"Already? I thought we had another two weeks." He checked the date again before pulling out his phone.

"What are you doing?"

"Setting a reminder. I forgot to pay on time last semester, remember?"

"You could just pay it tomorrow."

"What's the hurry? We still have a whole week."

I laughed, because that was easier than explaining why a lab fee had started to feel like a decision.

Sameer followed me toward the staircase, complaining about how the department always seemed to remember fees just when students had other plans for their money.

By the time we reached the classroom, he'd moved on to worrying about the upcoming practical exam.

✦ ✦ ✦

There was a long gap before the last lecture, so I went behind the library block and sat on the low wall with my notebook.

I tapped the pen lightly against the page.

There were hundreds of companies on the exchange, and most of the names meant nothing to me. Yesterday in the lab, I had opened one ticker after another without even knowing what they did, hoping the glow would trigger if I just looked at enough screens.

Nothing had happened.

Maybe I should start paying attention to the business news instead. At least I'd have some idea of why people were buying or selling.

Footsteps approached from the paved path beside the library.

"Rishi?"

I looked up.

Professor Anu was walking toward the staff block with a stack of reference books tucked under her arm. She slowed, stopping a few feet away from the low wall.

She looked at me for a quiet second.

"Two-fifty-five," she said.

Her voice wasn't loud, but the weight behind it was unmistakable.

"It touched two-fifty-five at nine-fifteen," she continued, shifting the books slightly against her arm. "Then it slipped to two-fifty-three by ten o'clock."

I kept my hands flat on the notebook. "I saw."

She held my gaze. Her expression stayed composed, but her eyes were sharper than usual. She had spent the morning watching that chart. Waiting to see if she had thrown away money because of an undergraduate.

"You told me that was the limit."

"It was what I saw."

She let out a slow breath. She didn't ask about the glow. "Don't you have class?"

"Not yet. Long break before the last lecture."

Her eyes dropped to the open notebook. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to understand something about stocks."

"What?"

I looked down at the blank lines. "How do people decide which companies are actually worth following? There are thousands of them. You can't keep checking everything."

Anu adjusted the books in her grip. "You don't check everything. There are too many companies, too much noise, and most of it won't matter to you anyway."

"Then where do you start?"

"Usually, you start with a reason to look," she said. "New debt. A plant expansion. Management changes. A competitor doing something strange. Something that makes a company worth a second look instead of just another line on a screen."

"Doesn't the news already cover that?"

"By the time something reaches television, the price is usually already moving," Anu said. "And knowing that something happened doesn't mean you know how the market will price it. News tells you what has happened. It doesn't tell you what hasn't shown up yet."

I looked at the paper. "Then opening stocks at random is pointless."

"Completely."

"Yesterday I sat in the lab and opened dozens of tickers," I said. "I thought if I looked at enough of them, something might appear again."

Her brow lifted slightly. "How many?"

"Enough to give me a headache."

"And?"

"Nothing."

A faint trace of a smile touched the corner of her mouth, gone almost as soon as it appeared. "Then at least you learned one thing."

"That I don't know what I'm doing?"

"That whatever you're seeing doesn't seem to care how many pages you open."

I smiled a little. "Fair."

"If you're going to keep looking, do it properly," Anu said. "Follow something for a reason. Otherwise you're just filling your screen with noise, and noise is the one thing the market doesn't run short of."

"That still doesn't tell me which one will glow."

The word sat between us.

Professor Anu watched me quietly.

She shifted the books against her arm and waited for me to notice I had said it out loud.

I didn't.

I tapped the pen once more, frowned at a blank line, and then looked up as if I had only just remembered she was still standing there.

"If you were me," I said, "how would you proceed?"

Anu blinked.

"Today," I added, before she could ask what that meant. "If you could only keep an eye on a few stocks. Not everything. What would you actually watch, and why?"

The question was better than the glow.

She almost said so. Then she didn't, because I was still looking at her the way students looked at a board they had not copied down in time, and the books were getting heavy.

"Give me a second."

She set the stack on the wall beside me, not quite sitting, one hand still on the top book. A scooter went past the library path. I stopped tapping.

"I wouldn't start with a list," she said. "Lists are how you end up opening fifty companies and learning nothing, which you already tried."

My mouth twitched. "Fair."

"I would start with what moved for a reason, and what has not finished moving." She nodded at my phone, face-down on the notebook. "Vardhan touched a number and backed off. That is one. I already know why I was looking at it. I would not open it again today unless the price did something it has not done yet."

"And the others?"

"Auto ancillaries," she said. "Not because the sector is exciting. Because if one parts company is stalling at a round number, I want to know whether the stall is the stock or the orders behind it."

She thought for a moment, then named one without making a speech out of it.

"Granjax Auto Components."

I had never heard of it.

"They make housings for two of the same lines Vardhan buys from," she said. "Last week they filed for a small plant expansion in Sriperumbudur. The notice was dull. The market has not cared yet. That is usually when it is worth caring."

I had gone still somewhere in the middle of that.

Not the polite still of a student waiting for the important sentence. My pen had stopped. My eyes had dropped at the blank page.

Anu kept talking, mostly to see if the line would leave me.

"I would also keep half an eye on a transport name," she said. "Not a buy. A watch. If Kaveri were actually expanding — no, if Granjax were actually expanding — someone has to move the extra castings. If the freight names are dead and the parts names are dead, the filing is just a filing."

I was still trying to fit the name into something I could picture.

Granjax.

It sounded like a company that existed in the real world, which somehow made it worse. Real companies had strangers running them, balance sheets, union disputes, power cuts, all the boring machinery that turned a stock into a story people could trade on.

For the first time, I understood that Anu was not giving me a prediction.

She was giving me a starting point.

And even that felt like more than I deserved.

"The transport name?" I asked.

"Vikas Freight Lines," she said. "Older. Smaller. They move container traffic out of the Chennai belt on and off. Not glamorous. But if a parts company actually starts adding capacity, the first question is who carries the extra load. Sometimes the answer shows up there before it shows up anywhere else."

I nodded slowly.

"So I should watch Granjax and Vikas."

"No," she said.

I looked up too fast.

"You should learn what they do first," she said. "Then you can decide whether they deserve your attention. The market does not care whether you are watching. It only cares whether you are paying attention to the right thing for the right reason."