The founder
Hello, I’m Kunal.
Eight months. That’s how long a man in New Jersey had been trying to sell a flat in India.
Not a difficult flat. An ordinary two-bedroom he owned with his sister, in a building he’d grown up in. Clean papers. A willing buyer.
And still — eight months of nothing.
Here’s what nobody tells you about owning something in a country you’ve left. The law isn’t your obstacle. Geography is. The registrar’s office opens at ten and closes at five, and by the time it opens, he’s asleep. Every signature has to cross an ocean twice and come back with a stamp on it. And every person he called in India explained the problem to him with great authority, great sympathy — and then quietly did nothing.
He didn’t need advice. He had a WhatsApp group full of advice.
He needed a person standing in the room.
So I stood in the room. Power of attorney drawn properly. Capital gains worked out to the rupee. TDS handled before it became a nightmare. The money moved cleanly to his account abroad.
He signed one set of papers. Three weeks later he called me, slightly stunned, to ask if that was really all of it.
It was.
I understand that man better than he knew. Home has always meant Nagpur, and I have spent most of my adult life away from it. Kolkata first, for a B.Com Honours at St. Xavier’s. Then Mumbai, where I qualified as a Chartered Accountant at BDO India and spent three years learning to read what a document is actually saying rather than what it’s pretending to say.
That training matters. It was never the hard part.
The hard part is the thing you already know. You’re building a whole life over there, while a piece of your life sits back here — in a file, in a queue, in an office that shuts at five, quietly ageing.
That’s the work. Property that needs selling. Taxes that need filing. Money that needs to come home, or go. Parents who need someone to check in on them on a Tuesday. The whole unglamorous machinery of still belonging to a place you no longer live in.
You’ve got a life to run over there.
Let me be your hands over here.