“Mr. Khurana,” Vinod said, his voice a silky, dangerous purr. “We have satellite imagery of your… wall. The National Security Council is not amused. We can do this the easy way—you remove the wall by Friday—or the hard way, which involves the Income Tax department, the Enforcement Directorate, and a very long stay at Tihar jail. Your choice.”

The next morning, Rohan woke to his father shaking him. B.D. Khosla’s eyes were wet. “Beta,” he said, holding up his phone. A photo from the site. The wall was gone. Not broken. Not damaged. Professionally demolished. In its place was a single white flag on a bamboo stick—Khurana’s surrender.

Rohan stayed up all night. By dawn, he had a plan.

There was a long, trembling silence on the other end. Then Khurana’s voice, stripped of its earlier swagger, whispered, “Who is this?”

The blue light of Rohan’s laptop screen illuminated his tired face in the dark of his small rented room. Outside his window, the chaotic symphony of Delhi’s night—a stray dog’s bark, the distant rumble of a truck, the persistent whine of a mosquito—played on. But Rohan heard none of it. He was on a mission.

Rohan, a software engineer in his late twenties who debugged code for a living, felt a peculiar kind of rage. He couldn't punch Khurana. But he could engineer a solution. He remembered watching Khosla Ka Ghosla with his father years ago—the hilarious, brilliant scam of a family building a fake deal to scare a goon. That was fiction. This was real life.