by Sonali Dev
China extracted a beer from the cooler. “Maybe it’s too late for tea.”
Trisha noticed the stack of mail Ashna had brought in earlier and started filing through it. The kettle whistled.
China and Trisha jumped.
“Okay, what’s going on? What do you two want?”
Instead of answering, Trisha picked out an envelope and waved it like a victorious flag. “I think we finally know how to get rid of these foreclosure notices.”
China took a gulp of beer and nodded.
“They’re just warnings.” Ashna snatched the envelope away. “And I don’t need any more of your harebrained ideas.”
Last week Trisha had tried to convince DJ, who was her boyfriend and one of the Bay’s hottest private chefs, to insist on all his offsite parties being held at Curried Dreams. DJ had been one of Ashna’s closest friends since culinary school in Paris. Ashna was, in fact, the one who had introduced DJ and Trisha, a matchmaking win she would always be insufferably proud of. But she was not going to let DJ hold his clients ransom for her restaurant. He had already done enough for her with the Menu She Couldn’t Cook.
Trisha made a face. “I’ve never had a harebrained idea in my life. Neurosurgeons can’t have harebrained ideas. It’s in the Hippocratic oath.”
Trisha was being only half facetious. The woman was abnormally brilliant and Ashna was obnoxiously proud of her cousin, but when it came to ideas for saving Curried Dreams, not so much.
Ashna sighed. “I’m sorry. I appreciate the effort. It’s not like I’ve come up with anything that works either.”
China and Trisha high-fived. Were her best friends high-fiving her failure?
Trisha grabbed Ashna’s hand, dragged her into the dining area, and pushed her into a chair with the stupid know-it-all smile Ashna was only too familiar with.
Looking at China for answers simply caused her friend to study her beer bottle.
“Now that you have a boyfriend,” Ashna said to Trisha, not attempting to hide her irritation, “shouldn’t you be home spending time with him instead of worrying about Curried Dreams?”
Trisha dropped into a chair across from Ashna. “First, you should smack me upside the head if I let myself get involved with someone who doesn’t understand how much you and Curried Dreams mean to me.”
Fair enough. But Ashna kept her eyes stubbornly narrowed.
“Second, this actually has to do with said boyfriend. DJ needs your help.” Trisha tried to look pleading, but she was incapable of pulling off helplessness.
Ashna very much doubted DJ needed help, and she could clearly imagine the scene where he had tried to stop Trisha from whatever fanciful errand she was on.
“Right,” Ashna said, leaning forward in her chair. “First, if DJ needed my help, he’d ask himself. Second, I know that face.” She stuck a finger at Trisha. “And that one.” She moved her finger to China’s face. “What are you two up to? Spit it out. I need to be at the farmer’s market at five A.M.”
“There’s my girl. We would very much love to spit it out.” Finally China spoke, relief clear in her alpha-of-the-pack voice. Her ability to lead crews through crazy schedules had made Food Network steal her away from a local production company earlier this year.
“So, you know how DJ was going to be a pro on my new show?” China was one of the producers on Cooking with the Stars—a new competitive show that followed the format of Dancing with the Stars, where they teamed up celebrities with professional chefs and the duos duked it out for viewer votes and judges’ scores.
Ashna had helped China and Trisha talk (bully?) DJ into it. DJ was handsome, madly talented, charismatic, and had that magic element for American television: a Very British Accent.
“Did you say was?” Ashna asked, alarmed.
“Yeah, he’s not going to be a pro chef on the show anymore.” Trisha sounded far too cheery.
“I thought he was all excited about it. What happened?”
“Well,” China said, “Aaron Smith, our host for the show, his wife has cancer. So he had to quit to take care of her.”
“Oh no. That’s so sad.” Ashna pressed a hand to her mouth.
“Yes. But the prognosis is excellent. Catching ovarian cancer at stage one is a win.” Trisha sounded every inch the doctor she was. “DJ is taking over as host.”
“DJ? Our DJ?” Ashna sat up.
“The very one.” Trisha beamed like a smitten fool. “It’s the accent. Also, he’s actually a better fit to host the show than Aaron was in the first place. He knows so much more about food. Plus, I was a little worried about him working with a celebrity. He’s such a diva about cooking, I can’t imagine him teaming up with someone who might not turn out something utterly perfect.”
Ashna grabbed China’s beer and took a sip. “What does all this have to do with me?” The moment the words left her mouth, she knew she shouldn’t have asked.
“Well, the network is set to announce the pro chefs the day after tomorrow on a special episode of Iron Chef. We’ve been promoting it for months.” China grabbed the beer back and took a sip. “And we’re short a chef.”
“Oh no, look at the time.” Ashna jumped out of her chair. “If I don’t close up I won’t be able to get to the farmer’s market before all the best produce is gone. Palo Alto chefs are ruthless. You won’t believe how fast everything gets swept away. Last week they ran out of bitter melon because I was twelve minutes late.”
Using both hands, Ashna tried to yank China out of her chair, but she didn’t budge. “This doesn’t sound like an emergency.” It totally sounded like an emergency. For Ashna, not them. “We can discuss it tomorrow.” She tried to move Trisha with similar results. “Don’t you have work tomorrow? Surgeries maybe? Saving lives and all that?”
China made her best puppy-dog eyes. “Trisha will have her lives to save. You’ll have your restaurant to run.” Her sigh took on a desperate quality that didn’t sound like she was faking. “But I won’t have work to go to. Not if I don’t have a new chef to replace DJ by tomorrow.”
Boom.
Trisha and China stared at Ashna with all the gleeful expectation of friends who had you perfectly cornered.
“Of course you’ll find a chef to replace DJ. Chefs have to be scrambling to get on your show.”
“Like who? We start shooting in less than a month. How will I run auditions before the announcement in one day?”
“How about . . .” Ashna racked her brains. Why oh why hadn’t she worked harder to network with her peers? She wanted to help. Truly, she did.
“You know how hot DJ is,” Trisha said.
“We need someone hot and talented,” China said.
“I can’t think of anyone—”
“We can,” they both said in a perfectly delusional symphony. “You, Ashna.”
A giant ball of laughter gathered inside Ashna and came tumbling out like an avalanche. “Very funny. No, really, you guys are hilarious,” she said between hiccupping and—bordering on maniacal—laughter. “Hil-fucking-arious.” She pressed her hands into her sternum. Her heart felt like it was going to explode. And she couldn’t stop laughing.
Identical worried frowns creased Trisha and China’s foreheads. Ashna couldn’t remember the last time this panic-fueled laughing fit had happened to her.
China brought her water.
“Do you need a paper bag?” Trisha asked.
Ashna shook her head and sucked in several deep breaths. It took a few moments, but she forced the laughter to subside. “What are you going to introduce me as? ‘Ashna Raje, owner and executive chef of the soon-to-be-foreclosed Curried Dreams?’”
“But if you do this, there will be no foreclosing. They’ll pay you a signing amount, and the prize for winning is a hundred grand. Think about the exposure Curried Dreams will get!” China swept an arm around the room. “You’ll be able to make repairs, freshen things up.”
It stands for decrepitude and dated recipes.
An
other spurt of laughter burst out of Ashna. She pressed her lips together as tightly as she could.
Trisha nudged the glass of water toward her. “Calm down and think about this without freaking out.”
Too late. Ashna forced herself to focus on the cold glass in her hand, at the mosaic lamps hanging from the ceiling, the jasmine diffuser scenting the air. She grounded herself one sight, one sound, one smell at a time. The laughter died out, but her heart still galloped in her chest.
“Okay?” Trisha asked, studying Ashna’s pupils in her doctorly way.
Ashna pushed her away. “I’m fine, but you’re both insane.”
“Why is helping your two best friends in the whole world, and yourself, insane? Why?” Trisha said, her usual relentless self. “You know what’s insane?”
“If you give me the ‘definition of insanity’ line right now, I will strangle you with my bare hands,” Ashna snapped.
“Okay, I won’t. But look at you, Ashi, you’ve been doing the same things for the past ten years and it hasn’t helped. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing something. Doing just one thing differently.”
Ashna didn’t bother to hold back her groan. “I can’t.”
The idea of cooking in front of a camera made Ashna want to bring up her dinner, bring up all the dinners she’d ever eaten. She wished she could explain why to them. But how could she explain something she didn’t understand? How could she explain the ugly panic that choked her when she tried to cook anything but Baba’s recipes? All she had was how her loved ones saw her, as strong, in control. A little bullheaded, but capable. Easy Ashna. Dependable Ashna. If that went away, all she’d be was the girl to pity, to tiptoe around.
Been there. Never going back.
“I’m begging,” China said, standing up. “At least take the night to think about it.”
I can’t. But she didn’t know how to repeat it. Not with the dogged hope sparkling on their faces.
Chapter Two
As always, routine relaxed Ashna. Her day started at the farmer’s market. The night sky had not yet fully transformed into day. She loved when the sun peeked at the edges of the sky while the moon was still not quite hidden away. The carts overflowing with plump and fragrant fruit and vegetables added to the magic of the hour. Vendors and chefs talked in hushed tones in deference to it.
There was plenty of bitter melon today, glossy and lime green with lush scalloped ridges. Ashna let Charlie, her favorite farmer’s son, sell her everything he had left, an extra five pounds, so he could go home early. He was taking care of business while his father recovered from colon surgery—which Charlie felt the need to explicate in lurid detail as he helped Ashna carry her bags to her car.
Apparently, the pre-surgery “bowel clean-out” hadn’t gone as smoothly as they had hoped.
Ashna patted the poor boy’s shoulder and asked him about high school, and they bonded over every Asian child’s favorite topic: their family’s obsession with grades and college applications. Charlie’s parents were Vietnamese, and Ashna much preferred the image of Farmer Dang as an exacting parent to any sort of bowel clean-out association.
“You’re a good son,” she told him, and he blushed, which was incredibly endearing given that talk of bowels hadn’t embarrassed him in the slightest.
Ashna dropped off the produce at Curried Dreams. Extra bitter melon was never an issue. The unpopular vegetable was a favorite with the Rajes, none of whom were daunted by the bitterness that sat atop the other, more complex underlying flavors. She would take some over to her aunt and uncle’s house later.
Her grandmother could make magic with bitter melon, stuffing it with fried onions and then frying the entire thing to a buttery, salty crunch. Baba’s recipe at the restaurant was derived from Aji’s recipe, but he’d made it richer with cashews added to the stuffing and a creamy onion sauce. Decadent, the way all of Baba’s versions of traditional recipes were. Ashna could make that version in her sleep, but she preferred the taste of the one her grandmother made.
After washing and sorting the produce at Curried Dreams she headed home to shower. Her restaurant and her home were separated by a cedar fence and a thicket of jacarandas, a distance of barely one hundred feet. Ashna’s father had built both buildings—the mansion-style restaurant and the Spanish stucco bungalow—from the ground up just after they moved from Sripore to California when Ashna was ten years old. Before that Ashna had only ever lived in the palace her ancestors had built centuries ago.
With Curried Dreams and the bungalow, she had watched the backhoe break ground as she stood there with her cousins, smelling long-buried earth being dredged up. She’d walked on newly laid tile and touched freshly plastered walls, watched furniture being moved in, tapestries being hung and rehung to Baba’s satisfaction.
Until he built Curried Dreams, Bram Raje had been the quintessential spoiled prince, the youngest son of the royal family of Sripore, one of India’s oldest princely states. Unlike his older brothers, Bram had lived up to the stereotype of indolent entitlement and fed his antics to the hungry media machine that surrounds royals everywhere. Until one such antic had landed him in trouble with the law and forced him to flee India.
His older brother Shree—HRH, as Ashna and her cousins called him—had rescued Bram (yet again) and brought him to California. Then he proposed (Raje code for dictated) that Bram channel his taste for decadent food and his passion for keeping the public entertained into an Indian restaurant that wasn’t the usual curry house in a strip mall.
HRH had been right, as he often was. Curried Dreams had finally given Bram the sense of responsibility his family had hoped for as they’d bankrolled business after business to help give him purpose that might save him. They had gotten it right that last time; Curried Dreams had given Bram purpose and taught him responsibility, which even having a daughter had not managed to do. But Curried Dreams hadn’t saved him.
Ashna stopped to pluck the few dandelions poking up among the roses along the side of the house. She had just enough time to get in a run before returning to the restaurant. Today was her yoga day, but there was no way her mind would stay quiet enough for yoga. Putting her phone on silent all morning had been cowardly, but she didn’t care.
The downside of choosing cowardice was that there was only so long you could hide. Problems were patient. They always waited you out. On her way to the front stoop, she finally checked her phone. Surprisingly, there was only one message from China and nothing from Trisha. Thinking about the Herculean effort that must have taken made her smile. She had agreed to take the night to think about the show. Not that there was any way she could do it. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing from Mandy either. So it seemed like that chapter was closed.
China’s message was a simple Call me.
All night Ashna had tried to think of another chef who might do the show, but she’d come up empty.
Just contemplating cooking off-script made her heart race so hard she had to breathe through it.
Dear judges, I have for you today: a giant meltdown.
Nope, never going to happen.
How tidy her life had felt yesterday. Thirty occupied tables, a sous chef who helped her find solutions for the restaurant, best friends who didn’t think she was too selfish to help them. What else could possibly go wrong?
She picked up her phone and was about to call China when the name of the last person she wanted to think about right now flashed on her screen.
Every bit of sense Ashna possessed told her to ignore the call. Another minute and she would have missed it anyway. But it had been six months since she’d spoken to her mother. A long gap even for them. That last silently destructive fight—a specialty of their mother-daughter bond—had been one of their most spectacular ones. Ashna had even wondered if they’d ever speak again.
She pressed talk.
“Hello, beta. Why does it take you so long to answer the phone?”
Why oh why had she asked what else coul
d go wrong? Obviously she was in no position to tempt fate.
“Hi, Mom,” she said with the casualness of a daughter who didn’t care that she hadn’t heard her mother’s voice in half a year. “What’s wrong?” Not the smartest question, given that when it came to them that answer could take a while.
“Can your mother not call you without something being wrong?” Her tone was perfectly self-possessed, not a whit of emotion in those words. Shoban Gaikwad Raje probably didn’t even remember that it had been six months since she’d spoken to her only child.
The hard blast of anger in Ashna’s belly meant she needed to calm the heck down. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, and then did what she did best with Shobi: stayed silent.
Shobi gave a self-deprecating laugh, the one that always came out as a huff-cough. “Well never mind all that. How are you?”
If Shobi had been standing in front of her, Ashna would have checked over her shoulder to see if she was talking to someone else. But Ashna was an adult woman; she could handle this without regressing. She took the phone into the house and removed her shoes. “Everything is peachy with me. How about yourself?”
Her (admittedly overdone) breeziness was met with a long pause.
Shoban Gaikwad Raje, whose most recent TED Talk had tens of millions of views, was not given to pausing.
A short, almost unsure clearing of the throat followed. Another most un-Shobi-like move. Putting her shoes in the closet, Ashna made her way up to her room. If Shobi was giving her a silence to fill, it had to be a trap. Ashna had been raised by her aunt, whose first rule was: read the room before you show your hand.
Finally, Shobi went for self-deprecating laugh, round two. “Actually, I have news.” Her voice did a strange wobble. Which had to be Ashna’s imagination, because Shobi did not waste her time on displays of emotion. She wasn’t called Dragon-Raje by the Indian media for nothing. “I know we didn’t leave things in a good place the last time we spoke, but you had to be the first person I told this to.” The quiver in Shobi’s voice was unmistakable this time. “They’re giving me the Padma Shri.”
