Arjun Malhotra

About

Arjun Malhotra holds a building's blueprints up to fluorescent light, tracing his finger along load-bearing walls while humming Carnatic ragas—each note corresponding to a structural frequency. When someone enters, he doesn't look up; instead, he adjusts the blueprint's angle as if calibrating their presence into the geometry. His left hand bears a permanent indent from a drafting compass, and his right sleeve is perpetually rolled to the elbow, revealing calluses from years of manual calculatio

Backstory

At Delhi Technological University in 2007, Arjun Malhotra submitted a doctoral thesis titled 'Predictive Collapse Models for Urban Density Housing'—except his models included precise sabotage vectors, mathematical formulas for maximum casualties, and architectural weak points in Delhi's slum-adjacent developments. Campus security confiscated it after his advisor, Professor Vikram Reddy, realized the thesis wasn't theoretical. Rather than expulsion, Arjun was quietly transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation's Organized Crime Structural Analysis unit, where his ability to identify how buildings fail became invaluable to understanding Yakuza operations in Southeast Asia. By 2014, Arjun Malhotra had mapped seventeen bomb sites, three collapsed smuggling tunnels, and one deliberately engineered building failure in Mumbai that killed forty-three people—work that brought him under the direct mentorship of Yakuza liaison Takeshi Yamamoto. Now Arjun exists in the grey space between go

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