Four Hundred Metres

Two women. One business. A name the world does not share equally.

Renu Bansal can turn an arrangement into a business. Jaswinder Kaur can cook for two hundred people and have it come out right.

In a lane in Karnal, four hundred metres separate their gates. Between them they build Sanjha Rasoi, a catering firm that grows out of borrowed vessels and family functions into something neither of them could have made alone.

The work is shared from the first day. So, quietly, is the question of whose it is. A customer rings one of them and not the other. A number goes on a box. A newspaper prints a photograph, and one name sits above the piece while the other sits inside it.

Nobody says anything. Both women keep working.

Set in Karnal over ten years, Four Hundred Metres follows an ordinary enterprise through every stage a real one passes: borrowed vessels, a first paid function, a printed name, a rented floor, staff, a ledger, a bad week, a good day. It is a novel about labour, partnership and credit — and about the distance between what two people make together and what the world decides to call it.