by Sonali Dev
For a long while they sat there without words, just the solidity of her aunt’s lap beneath her cheek and the comforting rhythm of her hand on her hair.
When the tears slowed and Ashna sat up, Mina Kaki met her eyes, her warm, clear brown gaze fierce. “The only thing I want you to remember from anything that you heard today is this: It is not your fault. None of this is your fault, beta.”
SOMETIMES ASHNA WONDERED how time hadn’t touched her aunt at all. The Mina Kaki of her childhood had seamlessly transformed into the Mina Kaki of the present day. If anything, she’d become more energetic, thanks to her obsession with running marathons. Even her hair was the exact same color—rich, perfectly highlighted auburn—and the same length, a sharp-edged bob that skimmed her jaw, and no one ever saw her until she was impeccably dressed in perfectly fitted linen pants and tailored blouses. Their mother’s seeming perfection was a point of amused frustration for her daughters, Trisha and Nisha, but to Ashna it was such a comforting cornerstone that the world fell back in place anytime she saw her aunt.
It wasn’t like Mina Kaki to open the front door herself, but Ashna had called ahead instead of texting, which meant her aunt had heard something in her voice, which in turn meant that despite the placid calm on her face, Mina Kaki was freaking out on Ashna’s behalf. Her overprotectiveness toward her children was legendary. Ashna wasn’t certain of much, but the fact that Mina Kaki considered Ashna and her cousin Esha her own was an undisputable fact.
“I’m fine.” Those were the first words she said when her aunt dropped a kiss on her cheek.
“I can see that.” Mina Kaki would never do something as inelegant as rolling her eyes. She didn’t need to because she could achieve the exact same effect with her tone. She had been a Bollywood actress before she married Ashna’s uncle and moved to America more than thirty years ago, and her voice inflections were impressive things. “I’ve had tea sent to the upper floor. Let’s head up there?”
The Anchorage, her aunt and uncle’s estate, nestled in five acres of redwood forest in Woodside, was much more the home of Ashna’s childhood than the bungalow she lived in. Ashna dropped off the bitter melon in the kitchen and followed her aunt up the stairs.
When Ashna had moved here from the Sripore palace at ten, a room decorated to match her room in Sripore had been waiting for her on the second floor. Ashna had lived here during the week and gone to school in Woodside. She’d spent the weekends with her father in Palo Alto. She’d only moved permanently into the bungalow after she returned from culinary school in Paris two years after Baba’s death.
Her room in the Anchorage remained untouched to this day, same as her cousins’ rooms. Although they all had their own places now, her aunt refused to entertain the fact that the Anchorage was not their primary home.
Yash, her aunt and uncle’s oldest child, had been the first to move out. Or rather, he hadn’t moved back home after college, as the traditionally Indian part of Mina Kaki’s heart had wished. Yash was currently running for governor of California. So, the hope was that he’d be moving into the governor’s mansion soon. That certainly made up for some of Mina Kaki’s heartbreak over not having her children live at home.
Nisha, their older daughter, had been married for ten years and lived in Los Altos Hills, and Trisha and DJ lived in a Palo Alto condo down the street from Ashna. Vansh, their youngest child, was always off traipsing across the world trying to search for things that made him feel useful. He was currently in Zimbabwe working on water filtration systems.
The only one of “the children” who still lived at home was Esha, Shree and Bram’s oldest brother’s daughter. Esha and their grandmother occupied a suite in the uppermost floor of the mansion. Esha hadn’t left the estate in close to thirty years because of a condition where she couldn’t handle any stimulation outside of what was familiar.
Every time Mina Kaki worried about Ashna, she tried to convince her to sell the Palo Alto bungalow. But the bungalow and Curried Dreams were all Ashna had left of Baba. Without them she had no idea who she’d even be. It was like asking her to cast off her body and rely on the promise that her soul would still be here. Or maybe it was like losing her soul and being left with only a body. Well, she’d never have to find out.
“Mom called,” she said to her aunt as she followed her up the sweeping marble stairs. “To tell me about the Padma Shri.”
Her aunt stopped midstep and studied Ashna as though she were an event spreadsheet from one of her fund-raisers.
“I’m happy for her,” Ashna said, hoping like crazy that her voice sounded happy. “I really am.”
“I know you are. It’s huge.” Pride flashed in Mina Kaki’s eyes. She and Shobi were inexplicably close. Ashna had always wondered what someone who treated motherhood as sacredly as Mina Kaki did had in common with Shobi, who treated it like nothing more than bondage.
Mina Kaki sank down on the spotless marble staircase and Ashna sat down next to her.
“She wants me to come to India and speak at the ceremony.”
“That’s nice, right?” Mina Kaki took Ashna’s hand.
“She wants me to shut down the restaurant, move there, and get involved in her work.”
The pressure of Mina Kaki’s grip on Ashna’s hand tightened. “Shobi said that to you?” Irritation slipped into her voice.
“I said no.”
That got Ashna a tilt of the head. An impressed and slightly disbelieving tilt. “And Shobi agreed?”
“Well,” Ashna chewed her lower lip. “I told her I’m working on a Food Network show.”
“No!” Mina Kaki threw her head back and laughed. “I can’t believe Trisha and China pulled that off.”
“They came to you first to try to convince me?” Of course Trisha would try that first. Trisha knew Ashna would do it if Mina Kaki asked her. But Mina Kaki must have refused, and that made Ashna want to hug her aunt.
Her aunt smiled. “Trisha really wants DJ to do that hosting gig. But she also believes it’s the perfect solution for Curried Dreams.”
“I know. I don’t think I can do it, though,” Ashna said.
Her aunt pulled her hand to her lips and dropped a kiss on her knuckles. “Are you joking? You’re going to be spectacular. You’ve done far harder things.”
Ashna’s only response was a twist of the mouth.
Her aunt cupped her cheek. “The real question is, do you want to do it?” She paused, weighing her next words carefully. “You have to start giving a little more thought to what you want, Ashi.”
Ashna pulled her hand away. She didn’t want her aunt to feel her hands go clammy.
“You don’t have to figure that out right now. Just think about it, that’s all.”
Ashna wondered if she would bring up selling Curried Dreams, or offer to bail her out again. Like everyone else in her life, Mina Kaki believed that Ashna’s obsession with Baba’s restaurant was unhealthy. Ashna knew they meant well, but they didn’t understand. Her family was everything to her, but Curried Dreams was hers and hers alone. She had to be the one to save it.
“Trisha is right,” Ashna said. “It could help pay off the debt on Curried Dreams once and for all. Give me a clean slate if I win.”
Mina Kaki blinked as though Ashna had spoken a foreign language.
She stood and pulled Ashna up to standing. “Well then, you’re doing this.”
They ran up the remaining stairs—Mina Kaki, probably because she was excited, Ashi, because moving helped curb her anxiety.
“Ashi is going to be a TV star!” Mina announced as they emerged into the suite of rooms Ashna’s grandmother and her cousin Esha shared.
Aji, Esha, and Nisha were lounging on the white leather sectional and turned to Mina and Ashna as though that announcement were a simple hello.
The first thing Ashna did was lean over and squeeze her grandmother in a hug.
“It’s been a full week!” Aji said indignantly, returning her hug. It was her way; she always
counted off how many days it had been since she saw her grandchildren. She also always exaggerated the time. It had been five days since Ashna had been by to see her. But of course it was futile to point that out, because Aji would only tell her that five days was a working week, or that it felt like seven days, or something else no one in their right mind would argue with.
Instead, she said, “Sorry, I thought about coming to see you every day”—the truth—“but a lot’s been going on at the restaurant.”
Sadness flickered in Aji’s eyes. She was the only one in the family who saw the value in holding on to Curried Dreams. It was a link to her youngest child. “A lot should always be going on at one’s workplace,” she said with a smile that crinkled her nose.
Ashna hugged Nisha, who stood to display her adorable baby bump, which seemed to have doubled since Ashna had seen her last, then turned to Esha to see if she was up for a hug. She wasn’t, but she squeezed Ashna’s hand and made one of her declarations. “Being in public needs armor.”
Wasn’t that the truth. Esha wasn’t just incredibly wise; she was also clairvoyant. There was no armor from her sight, and what she saw always came true. Ashna had a sense that Esha not only saw but also felt her pain, no matter how hard Ashna tried to hide it. She sat down next to Esha, careful not to touch her except for the firm grip Esha’s soft hand still had on hers.
Esha had suffered seizures ever since the plane crash she’d been in when she was eight. The accident had killed the other thirty passengers on the family’s private jet, including Esha’s parents. Esha had been the miraculous sole survivor. No one could explain how that had happened, or why the seizures and visions had started after.
HRH and Mina Kaki had brought Esha to California before word of her clairvoyance leaked out of the Sripore palace. Just the rumors had caused lines to form outside the palace gates for one look at the “Little Goddess” even as the poor little goddess went into seizure after seizure at the least stimulation.
Staying within the Anchorage estate and restricting contact to only the family had finally minimized the seizures.
“So, what is this about being a TV star?” Esha said with mischief in her smile.
Nisha poured tea from Aji’s china service, a blend Ashna mixed specially for her grandmother that she called “Aji’s Hug,” and Ashna found herself smiling as she filled them in on China and Trisha’s midnight visit and offer.
“I’m so glad you’ve decided to do it.” Nisha rubbed her belly. She’d had to slow down her work. With her history of miscarriages, she was being cautious. It had to be hard given that she ran Yash’s campaign and the election was less than a year away, with the California primary nipping at their heels.
“Have you found someone to help you with the campaign yet?” Ashna asked, only partially deflecting. She wished she could help, but strategy and politics were alien to her. Asking people why they wouldn’t vote for the best man they would ever meet in their pathetic lives was not a workable approach.
Nisha let out a long-suffering sigh and popped one of their grandmother’s ladoos into her mouth. “The last guy who seemed promising tried to ‘handle’ Yash. He also tried to tell him that his policies were too complex for the simpleminded voter. You can imagine how that went.”
Yash’s theory was that people rose to the levels you expected of them. Ashna wasn’t sure that was true; she was certain it wasn’t how recent political campaigns had worked. But Yash knew what he was doing, and he would only do things the way he believed they should be done, not in ways that would get him elected.
That was why she had the urge to shake anyone who didn’t get him. Definitely a terrible strategy.
“We’ll know when the right person comes along. Yash knows what he’s looking for,” Mina Kaki said with the kind of certainty that dissipated every iota of doubt in Ashna’s mind about the existence of such a paragon who combined strategic wizardry, ideological integrity, and the family’s nonnegotiable requirement: trustworthiness.
“Until then, I can totally handle it,” Nisha said, part bravado, part desperation. “So long as I don’t have to travel.”
“Only, you can’t run a gubernatorial campaign without running from district to district at the drop of a hat.” This from Esha. Such an uncharacteristic thing for their ethereal cousin to say that they all burst into laughter.
“What?” Esha said, her always peaceful face quirking with humor. “It’s time for Nisha to loosen the reins.” She patted Nisha’s hand when Nisha pouted. “Don’t worry. The person you’re waiting for is almost here.”
There, that was much more like Esha. All would have been well with the universe had Esha not reached over and patted Ashna’s hand too, as though the words were also meant for Ashna.
Chapter Five
As a child, Rico had always had a hard time with waiting. Patience had not been his best virtue. As an adult, he prided himself on his composure. He’d worked hard to harness his restlessness, focus it, and set an example of decency and grace on and off the pitch—a tribute to his father, whose sportsmanship was just as legendary as his football moves. Right now, however, waiting to get his cast off was making Rico so restless that he had visualized himself ripping it off with his bare hands more than a few times.
It had been just a couple of days since he’d been back in London, but waiting another day for it to come off felt like pure torture. If he didn’t stop pacing (okay, hobbling) around his flat, he was going to cut a trail in the floor. Kneading the knot at the nape of his neck, he made his way onto the balcony. Usually, the perfectly synchronous white facades of Kensington calmed him. Today, the sun was too bright, a complaint another Londoner might smack him upside the head for. He went back inside and held down the button that pulled the shades. They descended far too slowly.
My impatient baby. He heard his mother’s voice in his head.
His mãe had loved to tell stories of how Rico gobbled down all the brigadeiro before she could get the condensed milk truffles molded into balls.
Then a time had come when his impatience had dissipated in the blink of an eye. Everything had dissipated when his mãe and pai left home one evening to go to the movies and never came back. Well, they had come back, but in closed coffins because the car crash hadn’t left much of them. Everything had stopped that day and never quite started up again.
Rico had entered a fog that felt like glue, viscous and sticky around him. One moment he’d been in a hurry to rush from thing to thing—football, friends, school—then the next moment it had all vanished. There had been nowhere to go, nothing he needed to get to. That’s how it had stayed as he moved, seemingly in slow motion, from Rio de Janeiro to his mãe’s sister’s house in California. She had been his only living relative. At least the only living relative who acknowledged him. His father’s family had never acknowledged his mãe and him.
His pai had met his mãe in England while playing for Man U. He had asked her to go to Rio with him after he retired, and she had. He had asked her to keep their relationship quiet, and she had. If the fact that he never left his wife bothered her, she never showed it. She had once told Rico that she would do anything his pai asked of her. Because that’s what love meant.
At fifteen Rico had still needed a legal guardian, and that meant leaving his home and moving to California. Not that he cared where he moved. His ability to care about anything at all had also vanished.
That’s how it had stayed until he’d stopped a ball from hitting a girl on the head. Then everything had changed again. Almost everything. His impatience, his burning need to get to the next thing, hadn’t come back. Not until he made his way to England and found football again.
Being dumped by someone you believed to be the love of your life because her family thought you were worthless had a way of shaking you out of the thickest stupor. Over the past decade, Rico had left that heartbroken boy so far behind that he barely recognized him in his own memories. At least, that’s what he had believed unt
il Zee’s bachelor party. Apparently his young self was more tenacious than Rico gave him credit for.
Dropping onto the couch, he turned on his laptop. Out of habit he scanned the tabloids to make sure there were no fires to put out. Things had gotten batshit crazy with the guys at the bachelor party. Journalists had caught wind of it, and some employees from the venue had leaked information. Rico had spent all day yesterday negotiating with media outlets, releasing curated pictures of the party and throwing in videos and sound bites from Zee and Tanya about their wedding to keep the illegally taken pictures out. Information was power, and controlling how you disseminated it was the difference between disaster and adulation.
Being the public face of his team for years meant Rico could divert scandal in his sleep. He reminded himself that it wasn’t his job anymore. That meant the team was going to have to find another face. But hell if he was going to let the tabloids make a mockery out of his best mate’s wedding.
After making sure that the paps had kept their end of the bargain, Rico skimmed the news. In America, the California primary race was gathering steam. Yash Raje’s name caught his eye. The candidate’s speech at the last Democratic convention was possibly the most exciting thing Rico had heard in politics in decades. He inhaled the piece about how the candidate had used a wheelchair for a few years as a teen.
Rico had to laugh. Now that he had let the portal to his younger self open, everything seemed to lead right back there. Ashna had rarely talked about her family, but her cousin’s accident had still been fresh back then and Rico remembered her telling him about how the doctors had declared that Yash would never walk again and how he had refused to believe them.
Yash’s quote should have sounded like the usual politician drivel about being able to overcome anything, about the human spirit and its power, yada yada. Only, the man had a way of making you believe it. The one thing my parents taught me was that only you can fix what you know to be wrong.
“It’s what my parents taught me too, mate,” Rico said to his laptop.
