The Race Never Ends
The Cost of a Life Forever Deferred

There are men who spend their finest years preparing to live, and discover, upon completing their preparations, that the years themselves were the possession they ought to have guarded. Nikhil Maheshwari’s The Race Never Ends belongs to this ancient argument between worldly advancement and the claims of an unrepeatable existence. Its setting is contemporary Indian finance. Its deeper concern would have been understood by any nineteenth-century moralist who suspected that prosperity could enlarge a household while diminishing the life conducted within it.

The opening offers an admirable instance of that division. At a birthday gathering in Lonavala, approaching forty, Maheshwari sits among friends, his wife and daughter, outwardly supplied with the conditions of happiness. Yet Monday has already entered his thoughts. A vibrating telephone summons an involuntary response, although the message proves trivial. The scene establishes the memoir’s central affliction through a recognisable bodily habit. The office has acquired jurisdiction over hours in which it has no business being present.

From this uneasy celebration, the narrative returns to Ajmer and the respectable arithmetic of middle-class aspiration. Marks promise college, college promises employment, employment promises safety. Maheshwari, a Mechanical Engineering graduate of BITS Pilani who would become a Director at UBS Investment Bank, understands the force of that promise from within. His account grants the parental creed its dignity. For families acquainted with insecurity, a salary carries moral weight. It signifies that tomorrow may be approached without quite so much apprehension.

The difficulty begins when this useful discipline survives every circumstance that originally justified it. Recognition becomes necessary to sustain the appetite that recognition has trained. Each arrival prepares the next departure. Here the memoir touches a condition extending well beyond banking. A society devoted to advancement may educate its children thoroughly in the means of obtaining approval while leaving them almost uneducated in deciding when approval has ceased to deserve their obedience.

The book’s gravest passages concern Aahana, Maheshwari and his wife Kanika’s first daughter, whose illness and death place professional calculation beside an anguish it cannot master. The hospital scenes derive their force from helpless particulars. A report is examined, unfamiliar medical language enters the room, parents search for answers that remain uncertain. The professional instinct persists, seeking sequence, information and the next useful action. Love discovers that competence, however diligently acquired, possesses limits which no additional preparation can remove.

Maheshwari’s most persuasive refusal occurs afterwards. He declines to arrange bereavement into a convenient conversion. Ambition survives the catastrophe. Indeed, vulnerability strengthens the desire for reserves, insurance and protection. Work supplies order and the reassurance of continuing competence. This admission gives the memoir moral substance. Suffering has not obligingly purified its subject of vanity, fear and professional appetite. He remains a man capable of grief and ambition simultaneously, which is considerably more credible than the exemplary figure produced by retrospective wisdom.

The prose is strongest where an ordinary occurrence bears the argument without assistance. After leaving the bank, he takes Naysha to school and listens to her account of a disputed pencil. His first instinct is to settle the matter efficiently. The child requires something more patient. Her grievance must be heard while it still occupies her world. In this small transaction, the book finds an exact account of parental attention. Availability acquires meaning through the effort of listening, without any ceremonial announcement that a life has changed.

Domestic humour provides welcome relief. Kanika’s responses to newly proclaimed routines puncture the solemnity with which a former executive might approach his reinvention. The abandoned office identity card, the unclaimed weekday, the household object that cannot be found before school, all restore scale. Such details prevent freedom from becoming an expensive abstraction. The later movement towards independent financial work and community responsibility also gives the narrative continuity. Experience remains useful after the institution that employed it has disappeared from the daily calendar.

There are limitations. Maheshwari sometimes explains a scene after it has already delivered its meaning. The recurring vocabulary of numbers, races, calendars and freedom can press the argument too insistently upon the reader. His reflections would occasionally gain authority from being trusted to remain implicit. The most effective passages suggest that he possesses the necessary command of observation. Greater restraint in the accompanying commentary would allow those passages a fuller resonance.

The social qualification is equally important. Departure at forty rests upon resources unavailable to many diligent people. A reader supporting dependants on a precarious income may possess every insight offered here and still be unable to resign. The memoir’s value therefore lies in its examination of attention, identity and obligation, rather than in retirement as a generally accessible remedy. Its challenge travels further when detached from the exceptional financial circumstances that made its author’s decision possible.

For the emerging independent house The Good Earth Publishers, this is a subject with a clear reason to reach readers. The familiar ascent through education and employment is examined at the point where its assurances become inadequate. The publishing opportunity lies in that recognition. Readers who have never entered an investment bank may nevertheless know the fatigue of perpetually deferring the claims of those nearest them.

The Race Never Ends earns its most serious attention through the persistence of uncertainty. Leaving employment does not dismiss fear, abolish comparison or establish permanent wisdom. The final domestic promise, to take a daughter to school, offers a modest standard against which the grander promises of success may be judged. A child requires a father tomorrow morning. The market will conduct its affairs without him for an hour. Between those two facts lies a choice whose significance no balance sheet can adequately express.

Maheshwari has furnished a searching occasion for that choice to be considered. The reader need not follow his road to recognise the question waiting beside it. Having spent so much labour securing a life, how much of that life remains available to be lived?