Anirudh Devraj did not set out to become anything in particular. He simply followed what felt right, and that instinct took him further than he ever imagined.

From the corridors of IIT Mumbai to the research labs of MIT, from the classified floors of India's Defense Research and Development Organization to the glass towers of Mumbai's financial district, Anirudh builds ACRO Investments from a single room and a conviction that the markets could be read differently. What follows is a decade of quiet, relentless building - of a company, a reputation, and a life that looks, from the outside, like success.

But Anirudh's story is not only about what he builds.

When a signal anomaly on India's disputed border with China sets off a chain of events that pulls him back into the world of classified intelligence, he finds himself on a Himalayan mountain in the dark - alone, injured, holding a laptop that contains the only intelligence that can prevent a border being redrawn. What he does next will cost more than he planned to pay.

And through all of it - the ambition, the duty, the loss - several women shape him in ways he does not fully understand until it is almost too late to act on what he knows.

It Always Does is a thriller, a love story, and a meditation on what it means to live fully. Set against the backdrop of contemporary India - its boardrooms and border posts, its film studios and forward operating camps - it is the story of a man who kept picking up the phone, even when he did not know what was waiting on the other end.

Because the call that changes your life will not look like one when it arrives.