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public record. Headlines like “Gupta Takes the Fifth” could destroy him. Wadhwa suspected it was the reason Naftalis and his client Gupta had been pushing to delay the SEC testimony until after the Rajaratnam trial. Naftalis said his preference was for Gupta to “say ‘same answer’ or something like that.”
    Jason Friedman jumped in. He wanted to make clear that “same answer” referred to the response Naftalis so clearly did not want his client to articulate. “Can we agree that the representation, that the formulation he read before into the record is an invocation of his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination?”
    “Yes,” replied Naftalis.
    So over the next fifteen minutes, Henderson asked Gupta fifty-three questions. His response to all fifty-three questions was a weary “same answer.”
    As Wadhwa watched Gupta during the absurd exercise, he saw his facial expression change from that of the implacable stoic to a more human one. He seemed far away, lost in a great sadness. It was as if Gupta was internally reviewing his life story and thinking, I can’t believe I am sitting here.
    *  *  *
    As Rajat Gupta grew up, there was a sense among friends that he would be as remarkable as his baba . “He got the brilliance of his father,” says Udayan Bhattarcharyya, who lived in the same compound in New Delhi as the Guptas.
    When “he decided on something, it had to happen,” says his cousin, Damayanti Gupta-Wicklander. One time when the family was setting off on an outing in New Delhi, young Rajat decided to climb onto the car hood and lie flat on his stomach. Repeated efforts at coaxing and cajoling failed to bring him down, so the family finally resorted to the one inducement that always seemed to work: sweets. They—along with bananas—were a great weakness of his and he quickly succumbed.
    When Rajat was five years old, his father, Ashwini, was given a tall task, moving to the nation’s capital and founding the Delhi edition of Bengal’s English-language paper, the Hindusthan Standard . It was a difficult assignment because at that time people tended to read local newspapers.
    Despite the challenge, the Guptas’ early years in Delhi were among the family’s happiest. They enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class Indian life, living in a twelve-hundred-square-foot company flat housed in a big enclosed compound not far from the old Delhi Railway Station. It was a protected world, a self-contained city with its own soccer field. On weekend nights, Ashwini Gupta and friends walked to Connaught Place, a business district in the center of Delhi, to catch one of the English-language movies coming out of Hollywood. Sometimes the men would play bridge while the boys kept busy with chess, a game Rajat quickly mastered.
    At the time the Guptas moved to New Delhi, there were two elite schools in the city. One was St. Columba’s, a Catholic boys’ school, and the other was the Modern School on Barakhamba Road, not far from Connaught Place. Founded at the height of the British Raj, the Modern School married Indian ways of education with modern pedagogy. It was “‘the’ school in those days,” recalls Mukul Mudgal, the retired chief justice of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana.
    Students from the 1950s and 1960s tell long tales of how they got a place at Modern. Some used money or influence; others who had neither resorted to determination. It is not known if Ashwini Gupta used his connections to get young Rajat enrolled at Modern. It didn’t matter. Rajat quickly showed that he deserved as much as anyone else to be at the school. He was a living embodiment of the school’s motto, a Sanskrit saying that translates into English as “Self-realization cannot be achieved by the weak-willed.”
    Like his father, Rajat worked hard, often putting in long hours to overcome deficiencies in subjects such as written English. Once when a classmate scored a perfect mark on a pop quiz in physics on the