by Sonali Dev
There had never been anywhere to go. From the moment she’d heard that shot, there had been nowhere to go.
The phone rang in her bag.
Shobi.
She touched talk on the screen and didn’t wait for a hello. “You said you wanted to help me, right? Then tell me how you do it. Tell me how you keep from caring.”
“Hello, beta,” Shobi said. Then a breath. “I do care.”
“You were married to someone, had a child with them, and then when they died you weren’t even there to pick up the pieces.”
“I tried. I tried to be there for you. You asked me to leave.”
She had. She had told Shobi she hated her, that she wanted nothing to do with her.
I want you to leave. I don’t ever want to see you again.
What Ashna hadn’t been able to say was I killed him. I left him too, like you did, and it killed him.
Self-loathing twisted her insides.
You’re just like your mother. Selfish. The last words Baba had said to her.
“What is it you really want to ask me, Ashi?” Shobi’s voice was gentle. The kind of gentle Ashna would have killed for growing up, when all she’d gotten from Shobi was a general’s marching orders.
“Do you ever feel any guilt?”
“Yes. More than you can imagine. But for what you went through. Never for what Bram did. Why do you? He was an adult. He cheated you out of the life you should have had by not thinking about you.”
“He was ill, Mom! His mind had become entirely sick. Don’t you have any empathy?”
“Is it guilt, then? The reason you don’t let yourself live? Is it that he had no life and you deserve the same thing because you couldn’t save him?”
What was it with everyone suddenly coughing up these insights for her? “I thought you wanted to help me. When will you understand that shitting on Baba doesn’t help me?”
“Why does every conversation we have end up being about him? My leaving you was never because you weren’t precious to me. Every single time I left you it tore my heart out.”
“You still did it.”
“And that was my fault, the fault of my circumstances. Not your fault. I wish I could tell you how sorry I am. The fight exhausted me, beta. There were many times when I gave you up because I didn’t want to put you through a battle you were too young to be caught in the middle of. My only hope then was that when you grew up and saw my side as an adult you’d give me a fair chance and I’d be able to explain myself. I’m sorry.”
Ashna was so tired. So sick of the apologies.
But Shobi’s words turned over inside her, filling the vacuum Rico’s words had left behind.
“Can we talk when you get home?” Shobi said, voice unrecognizably soft.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I have to go.” Ashna ended the call and picked up her pace.
All her memories around Baba’s death were fuzzy, like someone had gone over them with a marker and blacked parts out. The only clear part was the blood. It was a good thing Rico left her. His betrayal turned out to be a kindness. There was no way she could have faced him when she couldn’t see past the blood on her hands. Too dirty for him, too damaged for anything beautiful.
I love you, Ash. I’ll do whatever you want to make myself worthy of you. Please don’t leave me. I’m going to start playing again. I’m leaving for the UK. Please, just call me back.
When she got that message it was too late. It had been the last time she heard his voice.
Don’t ever contact me again. We can’t be together.
After sending that last message, Ashna had pulled her hand back and thrown her phone into the bay. The last time she’d made a throw. The last time she’d expected to say anything to the boy she loved. She wished her last memory of him wasn’t him calling her father a sick asshole.
Months before, Baba had sent in an application for her to Le Cordon Bleu. A week after the private cremation, she had left the ashes to her aunt and uncle to spread over the cliffs at the Sagar Mahal and flown to Paris and started at the culinary school. The family had used all its influence to hide Baba’s suicide and keep it out of the papers. Baba had never had friends, but his patrons believed he’d gone back to India and left the restaurant to Aseem and Baba’s executive chef.
In Paris, cooking hadn’t given her solace per se, but it had connected her somehow to Baba and eased the boulder of guilt off her chest. Growing up, Ashna had hated being in the kitchen or having anything to do with food. At first it was because she’d wanted to be outside with a ball, but then Baba’s insistence on everything to do with food being just so had felt stifling. This is how biryani must be cooked. This is how a crab shell must be cracked. This is how trifle pudding must be eaten. Focus on the food, Ashna; how will you taste it if you’re too busy talking?
In Paris, his rules, which she had found suffocating growing up, had become comforting. The exact opposite of how Rico had gone back to soccer. He’d found freedom in it and she’d used it to lock herself up. Cooking had been Ashna’s long-drawn-out apology. Every chop, stir, dice had felt like she was doing something to erase what she had caused.
Then Baba’s executive chef and Aseem had absconded with money embezzled from the restaurant over the two years she was in Paris. Ashna had come home to find Curried Dreams stripped dry, its glory gone. Her uncle and aunt wanted to press charges, but the scandal would make the suicide public. No one wanted to open up those wounds, least of all Ashna.
Her first day back at Curried Dreams, she had been filled with resolve, if not hope, that she would turn things around. Everything she’d learned in Paris had been bursting from her fingers.
Then she had tried to make a curried coq au vin.
The panic attack was so severe, she passed out from it. A horrible black gunk had choked her lungs. Congealed blood had filled her nose. The boom of a bullet had deafened her. Over and over and over again, making her heartbeat race to exploding.
She had woken up surrounded by her staff looking down at her on Baba’s kitchen floor.
Instinctively her hands had turned to Baba’s recipes. Recipes she’d placed no value on when he lived. She remembered thinking them too rich, too heavy, too dated. Now it was all she could manage with her chef’s hands. It was the only way to avoid the boom of the gunshot, the near explosion in her chest from the palpitations.
Staring down at her hands, she tried to bring her focus back to her phone, gripped too tightly in her hands.
Where are you? A text from China.
Rico had passed a rolling pin to her that first day, when panic had made her hands tremble.
I’m almost there. She texted back and broke into a jog. The beating of her heart felt somehow different in her chest.
SO excited for today’s show, China texted back. Then, You know how much I love you, right?
Ashna texted a heart back, thanking the gods of technology for emojis.
My pai always said that you couldn’t win unless you played like the game was a matter of life and death. That’s how you keep the goal, Ash.
Sadness and anger overwhelmed her. She had missed Rico’s return to the game, missed something she had hoped and prayed for with all her heart.
So he hadn’t fought for her, for them. But he’d fought for something and won. While here she was. Could it be that he was right? Until she’d met Rico, she had never really given happiness any thought. With her cousins she’d always felt gratitude for having them, more love sometimes than she could bear. It had come with a definitive sense that she wasn’t like them. Never in her life had she expected to feel what she had felt with Rico, that bursting, full-bodied joy of being enough. When she’d tasted it briefly and lost it, she hadn’t questioned the loss.
It had felt natural, inevitable.
How did you fight what was natural and inevitable?
The bubble of emptiness she’d been trying to breathe around for years pushed to the surface. She needed a win.
A
s she got back to the studio, for the first time in years she felt the adrenaline in her veins. Pushing away the kick of fear and anxiety, she reminded herself that she had cooked just fine in Paris. That she had only developed her phobia of cooking off-script after coming home to Curried Dreams, after letting someone run it into the ground.
Blood and guilt.
Keep your mind on Paris. Don’t think about the panic, she told herself as she made her way through the isolated lobby and to the green room. Everyone else was done with their hair and makeup and was already in the staging area. Jenny, the HMU artist, made quick work of Ashna’s face and touched up her bun.
“I wish you would leave it down,” Jenny said. “It’s so pretty.”
“Never in the kitchen,” Ashna told her. “My first boss would hunt me down.” Andre had sent her a text wishing her luck that morning, so she knew he would be watching the show.
Keep your mind on Paris.
The pulse of panic beat faintly in the pit of her stomach as she made her way into the studio. If she had a panic attack they would just have to roll her out on a stretcher.
God, were they going to have to roll her out on a stretcher?
The image of Rico being carried out of her restaurant sprang to life in her mind just as her eyes found him across the room. His athletic form was slumped over his phone at their kitchen station. He looked up and relief flooded his eyes at the sight of her.
Less than an hour ago this had felt impossible: being here, facing a cooking challenge.
He stepped toward her and something moved beneath the relief in his eyes like dark shadows.
“What happened?” she asked. “You’re in pain.”
He swallowed instead of answering.
She looked at his knee, hands itching with the need to touch him.
“I’m fine.” But the tightness around his eyes and mouth said he wasn’t.
“Aren’t your pain meds working?”
He didn’t answer, but she knew that look. How tiresome being a hero must be.
“Please tell me you’re taking them.” She wanted to shake him. “What’s wrong with you, Rico?” Pulling out her phone, she did what anyone in their family did when faced with pain and illness. She texted Trisha. “You have to speak to Trisha. She deals with a lot of people in pain, she can help.”
“I’m all set with the meds. Thank you.”
“There is no good reason to be suffering,” she said incredulously. Of course she’d looked up the kind of surgery he’d had. One had to be crazy not to take pain meds so soon after. Especially when one had been crazy enough to slam down on that knee.
For her.
“You decided to stay,” he said, changing the topic with no finesse at all whatsoever. The exhaustion from the pain made the usual sincerity in his eyes twice as potent. “And cook?”
“Yes, you didn’t talk to anyone, did you?” Given his “I’ll take care of it,” she wouldn’t be surprised if he had charmed China into changing the format of the show.
“You asked me not to,” he said simply, and she had the oddest urge to cry.
For a few seconds they were back at her school locker, him taking her bag from her, willing to do as she wanted, no questions asked.
“It isn’t easy to be here.” A tiny piece of honesty felt right. “But it will be a waste if you’re in so much pain, because we can’t do anything when you’re like this.” She checked to see if Trisha had responded to her text.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, but it sounded like a whimper.
“Please tell me where your pain meds are.” How did men make do without purses and bags? She would be lost without her bag.
He watched her search his surroundings with what amusement he could muster. “I can’t take them. They make me loopy.”
“Loopy how?”
“Loopy as in saying whatever the hell pops into my head.” A speaking look. “But also, unable to sleep and terribly queasy and unable to think clearly.”
It was tempting to discount everything he had said to her by blaming it on the meds, but she knew what he had meant and what he hadn’t. Knowing his thoughts was her superpower. (Yay, her!)
“Well, then, you’re on the wrong meds. Why haven’t you told your doctor?” She typed in the symptoms he’d listed and sent them to Trisha.
It took Trisha precisely three minutes to send Ashna a few options for alternatives that she wanted Rico to ask his doctor about.
Ashna made him have his doctor call in a prescription. Then she had China send someone from the crew to pick it up. If the shoot had to be delayed, it had to be delayed.
The rest of the contestants were gracious. All except Danny, who had the gall to roll his eyes as though this were all part of some sort of drama. The idea of beating his conceited ass made the adrenaline return to her veins with added force.
The sheen of sweat on Rico’s brow made her belly cramp. How could he torture himself this way?
Within half an hour after taking the new medication, that green pallor receded from Rico’s face, and his sun-kissed glow started to reappear.
“Thanks,” he said as everyone took their positions again. The look in his eyes made the word unnecessary.
It wasn’t until Jonah started shouting instructions on his megaphone that the reality of the cooking challenge came back to her.
“If you need to stop, we stop,” Rico said, and she almost choked. He’d said those words to her at a very different time in their lives.
He made the connection at the exact same moment that she did, and heat flooded his eyes.
Despite herself a smile broke across her face, which made one burst across his.
DJ started his introductions and they were both grinning like fools when the camera turned to them.
Today’s challenge was to make a street food that celebrated the star’s heritage.
“This is great.” Rico smoldered at the camera, giving her a sidelong look that told her he knew he was smoldering. “Brazil is the land of street food.” The way he said Brazil, the word ending with a u instead of an l, had always made her weak in the knees. “Let’s ask the chef what she thinks.”
“Are we guessing again?” Hearing the playfulness in her own voice shot a bolt of energy through her. “Because you know we could use the extra viewer votes.”
Rico laughed, and the audience went crazy.
As the studio filled with laughter, Rico’s eyes found her. “It hasn’t changed,” he whispered.
It was the strangest thing, but in that moment Ashna knew there would be no panic attack. She was going to do this. She was going to cook today. There would be no stretcher carrying her to the hospital. She was going to kick Danny’s butt with this challenge.
They were going to make tapioca pancakes, another thing Rico had talked about in the stories from his childhood.
“Is there a particular recipe?” she asked, refusing to let the word recipe wobble on her tongue.
“My mãe never made them at home. But I know they have coconut and you can eat them with doce de leite.”
She tried not to smile. If you cut him he might bleed doce de leite. How had he sustained his condensed milk addiction as a pro athlete?
“You made the doce de leite really well last time. You want to get started on that and I’ll get started on the pancakes?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed a can of condensed milk. There wasn’t a whisper of doubt in his actions that she could do this. Her heart gave one hard thump as she reached for a mixing bowl, but when she watched his hands, sure on the pot as he set the condensed milk to boil, it fell back into its normal rhythm.
She got to work soaking the tapioca in coconut milk. Usually tapioca needed to be soaked overnight, but the show had some presoaked stuff that should work well enough. She added in some fresh shredded coconut and mixed it with her hand until it clumped together when pressed. Her grandmother added peanuts when she made sabudanyachi khichdi, which was a savory tapio
ca hash. The nut protein kept the tapioca from becoming gloppy when cooked. Ashna powdered some cashew nuts and added those to her mixture.
By the time the pancakes were sizzling on the pan, Rico was done with his part and flipping them as she instructed. They had only twenty minutes to pull off the challenge.
“These are good.” Rico popped an extra piece in his mouth.
“As good as the ones they sold at your fiera livre?” As soon as she said it, they both froze. This was all on camera. At least she wasn’t holding a knife.
“No.” Rico smiled at the camera. “Better.”
The skip of joy in her heart brought with it a shadow of fear, but she ignored it and grabbed square black platters and started to plate the bright white pancakes in delicate quarter folds to form a clover. She handed spoons to Rico and he poured doce de leite into them and placed them next to the pancakes.
They were done a good two minutes before the rest of the contestants, but they would still have to act like they were rushing at the end because it made for better television.
“It looks a little plain,” Rico said, taking in everyone else’s workstations, where everything from empanadas to elephant ears and patajones (Danny, naturally) were being tossed up. “Should I cut up some strawberries? It could use some fruit, and maybe whipped cream?”
He was right. It needed something. Plain would definitely get them hammered by the judges. But not strawberries and whipped cream. Not anything so predictable.
Ashna raced to the pantry, picked up a mango, and tossed it at Rico. Then without waiting to see if he would catch it, she turned to grab some saffron and ran back to their station.
“Can you dice the mango?” Before the question was even out of her mouth, he was slicing.
DJ called out the one-minute warning.
Ashna pinched out a fat clump of saffron into a metal spoon, mixed in a few drops of milk, and held it over the fire. The saffron dissolved into the milk, turning it orange, and despite the smells from all the workstations, the aroma of saffron permeated the air.
