by Sonali Dev
The entire studio went silent, holding one long combined breath. The knife spun in the air, the sharp silver edge catching the light, and landed neatly back in Ashna’s hand.
The crowd went crazy.
Rico picked her up and spun her around.
As the food was being transferred onto trolleys to be taken to the judges, China announced that their families were in the audience again.
The one-way screens between the staging area and the audience were moved away and there they were: her family. Her uncle and aunt; Nisha and her husband Neel; Mishka; Trisha; Yash; and right there squeezed between Trisha and Nisha, Mom.
Her mother’s eyes shone with pride. She winked at Ashna after a quick look at Rico.
Ashna searched the audience for Zee, but he wasn’t there, and her heart twisted.
As soon as they went to break so the contestants could mingle with their families, China brought Rico an iPad with Zee on live video chat.
Zee and Tanya were squeezed tightly together in the frame. Tanya was even more stunning than Ashna had imagined, hair in braids and beautiful black eyes that swept up at the edges. They were supposed to fly out last night, but Tanya had felt sick and they had gone to the hospital and found out that Rico was going to be an uncle.
“Another godchild, Uncle Rico,” Zee said.
“Bring it on, mate,” Rico said, joy brightening his face.
Just as Ashna and he said bye, her niece flew at her. “Ashi Maushi! Can you introduce me to Danny? He was so amazing!”
“Why thank you, darling.” Ashna squeezed her. “I’m so touched to have you rooting for me.”
“Well, of course you’re going to win. Because everyone loves you and your new boyfriend.”
“Mishka!” Nisha said.
“Come on, Mom! You and Dad said it too. Don’t you always say we don’t have to pretend with family?”
Nisha let out a resigned sigh.
Yash and Rico pumped each other’s hands like they were long-lost loves too, and it made Ashna giggle.
Mom and Mina Kaki both squeezed Rico’s cheeks and kissed his forehead.
“That’s how desi grannies show their affection,” Mishka said, and this time her father ruffled her hair and asked her to behave.
“What? At least I didn’t say anything about how excited everyone is that Ashi Maushi finally found a boyfriend.”
Ashna squeezed Rico’s hand. He looked entirely unfazed by the circus, which made her press into him. A move not a single one of them missed.
“So actually.” Ashna cleared her throat. “He’s not a new boyfriend.” She looked up at Rico and his eyes were intensely focused on her, his breath held. “Rico and I knew each other in high school.”
“Knew?” Trisha said.
“Biblically?” Mishka said, and this time Nisha gasped and slapped a hand across her daughter’s mouth. “What?” Mishka said, undaunted. “Trisha Maushi said she and DJ Kaka knew each other biblically when you guys were talking.”
Rico started shaking with silent laughter against Ashna.
Ashna ruffled her niece’s hair. “We were in love. We still are.” She went up on her toes and kissed his lips, quick and full and tender, right there in front of everyone.
Shobi was the first one to start laughing. “All right then.”
Mina turned to her. “She told you?” She sounded somewhere between offended and delighted.
An avalanche of questions came at Ashna. “You didn’t tell us!” “So this was your junior year? See, I knew something was up. You were never home.” “Did you go to Paris with him?”
“We’ll talk later,” Ashna said. “But we broke up at the end of senior year.”
The mention of her senior year silenced everyone for a moment.
“Did you get on the show because of her?” Yash asked.
Rico’s arm was still tight around Ashna. “Never stopped missing her. Googled her. Saw the announcement for the show and bullied myself in.”
“That explains a lot!” Ashna said and kissed him again.
One of the assistants made an announcement for everyone to start getting back to their seats. The judges had finished deliberating and had their results.
Yash threw Rico a look Ashna couldn’t quite interpret. “Thanks for the email you sent me about the news pieces being the start of a smear campaign. You were right, we’ve been able to trace some pretty tenacious digging. I was wondering if you had any ideas about how to address it. And, well, if you had any interest in helping with the campaign.”
Rico looked at Ashna like a child thrown into a ball-pit of candy.
Really? She widened her eyes at him.
He shrugged. You okay with that?
Was he kidding? This was perfect.
“You’re bringing him to dinner tomorrow,” Mina Kaki declared before everyone was ushered back into place.
“Welcome to the family,” Shobi said, and gave Rico a hug.
When they were lined up in the staging area again, Ashna could barely bring herself to care about what the judges thought. Then their plates were in front of the judges and adrenaline started to pump through her. Reaching for Rico’s hands, she pulled his arms around herself.
His heartbeat thudded against her back. They were up first.
“What on earth was that?” the food editor judge asked, mimicking (very exaggeratedly) Ashna’s knife move.
The rom-com director stood up and clapped, setting off another round of hooting applause. “That, my friend, was fabulous television.”
“Looks like we’re witnessing the beginning of something here.” The chef judge who had been most critical of their food threw a suggestive look between them.
“What gave us away?” Rico said lazily, and Ashna laughed.
“So, we’re not wrong, then?” the other chef judge asked.
Ashna shrugged at the camera.
“As a matter of fact . . .” Rico said, his tone insanely reckless.
Ashna’s heart started to hammer. Her entire family was in the audience. The entire world was watching.
His hands rubbed up and down her arms. “There is something I’ve been meaning to ask Chef Raje, and it makes sense that you’re all here to witness it.” His hand went to his pants pocket.
Every single person in the audience gasped.
Ashna thought she was going to faint.
“Ashna Raje, would you do me the honor of—” he said with far too much sincerity and anticipation as he reached into his pocket. He pulled out his phone. “—of giving me your number? Because it’s about damn time.”
Ashna pressed her face into her hands, her heart falling back in her chest. Laughter exploded in the room. Nisha and Trisha were on their feet whooping.
Instead of dying of mortification, Ashna burst into laughter—clean untainted laughter. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said, bringing the audience to their feet again. Then, taking Rico’s phone from him, she entered her number.
Finally, the judges tasted their dish, and loved it, but no one seemed to care.
The other two dishes were just as spectacular. Danny El had managed to make some sort of turducken, which was creepy and amazing at the same time.
When he won, Ashna could hardly begrudge him.
“I came here to prove something,” she said when they shot reactions to the results. She sought her mother out in the crowd. “And to get people to discover Curried Dreams. What I’m taking away from here is something I never thought I’d find again.”
If that wasn’t the understatement of her life, she didn’t know what was.
After a long few hours of celebrations and interviews, Ashna and Rico made their way back to Rico’s hotel.
They started kissing in the elevator and Ashna was convinced her life had turned into a movie. They stumbled into the suite, still kissing.
Ashna hadn’t been this breathless, this excited ever, and it had been a breathless few weeks. They kissed like they hadn’t seen each othe
r in centuries. Like parched earth in a cloudburst.
“You almost gave me a heart attack there, Rico!” she said when they came up for air. “What is wrong with you?”
“Other than the fact that not being able to check up on you this morning almost killed me?”
“I’m sorry. Things got to be a lot with my mom.”
He stroked her cheek. “She’s lovely. There’s so much of her in you.”
She nodded and kissed him again, because hearing that made beautiful feelings dance inside her.
With one tug at the clasp in her bun, he made her hair slide down her back. “Did you really think I’d propose to you on live television? It’s like you think I don’t know you at all.”
“Thanks for knowing me.” She stroked his lips with the pad of her thumb. “Also, I would have killed you if you had done it. There were knives there.”
He kissed her fingers and unleashed his chuckle on her poor heart. “First, I know how you feel about proposals putting the power of a relationship’s future in a man’s hands.” She had told him that back in high school. She hated the rabid romanticizing of proposals—as though the act of women waiting to be claimed were a good thing. “If I did want to express my feelings—in a non-proposal—I would do it in private. Just you and me. Maybe in a room where I finally had you back in my arms, where I had prayed so hard to have you back, I don’t know how I didn’t crack the walls.”
He fell to his knees.
“Rico, your knee.”
“Good as new.”
She went down on her knees in front of him. “What are you doing?”
“Exactly what you think. You ready? It’s going to be a long speech.” He extracted a box from his pocket and flipped it open. There, on white satin, sat the most exquisite blood red ruby circled in diamonds.
She wiped the tear that slid down his cheek. He was too choked up to speak. “I’m waiting for the speech.”
He swallowed and squeezed her hand, his own shaking. “All those years ago when we were together, I used to wonder what might happen if you left me. I remember the terror of it. Finding you after I had lost everything—it felt like too much. I used to have nightmares about losing you too. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to bear it. I imagined each day to be hell, I imagined having no way out. But I had no idea.
“I didn’t know then that hell would be in the littlest things—in meeting a perfectly lovely person and having my heart yearn for you, in touching someone else and wanting to feel you. My heart held you up like a mirror, a line on a wall where the height of my feelings would never again be as tall. It might have been easier without the intermittent normalcy between the blasts of memory, where your voice, your taste was so vivid it undid everything. After all those years of forcing myself not to give in to the yearning to search for you, it was the best thing I ever did, because it led me back to you, back to the me I had lost. I don’t know how to be me without you.
“Ash, meu amor, will you please put me out of my misery and let me spend the rest of my life with you?”
“That was long,” Ashna said through a sniffle. “And beautiful.”
“I wrote it when you left this morning. On the hotel notepad.” He pointed at the desk. “I thought I’d bring it to you, an old-fashioned letter. Then I read it so many times I knew it by heart, and I heard my mãe’s voice telling me I couldn’t say those things without a ring. I knew rings make you uncomfortable, but I did want to honor my mãe and get you something. Good thing Song’s sister knows a jeweler.”
This time he wiped her cheek.
She took the ruby out of the box. It was a pendant on a chain. Rising to her feet, she helped him up. “It’s not something, Rico. It’s everything.”
“Turn it around.”
On the back was engraved #Ashico.
She was laugh-crying so hard she could barely speak. “Will you put it on me?”
They walked to the mirror in the alcove, where he had shown her what it meant to be beautiful. There again in his eyes was the only thing that made anyone truly beautiful. Love.
Slipping her hair onto one shoulder, he hooked it around her neck. A chain that didn’t feel like a chain but a lifeline. Then he kissed her neck, eyes locked with hers in the mirror.
“Thank you for finding me again.” She leaned into his kiss, took his hand and pressed it against her full heart. “Happiness seeps into me when you’re around, Rico. Without invitation, without notice, joy finds me. Being around you is being alive, it’s breathing, it’s home.”
Then she let him lift her up and place her on the table against the mirror, and she was reminded again exactly how loud the love of her life could be.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Smashing the patriarchy is complicated business. It’s true that you can’t throw a punch without hurting your knuckles, but it’s time to stop telling women that it’s all or nothing, that it’s only valuable if it hurts.’ That was my favorite line, Mom,” Ashna said, telling her mother again how fabulous her award acceptance speech had been.
“When you and Rico have a baby girl, she can be whomever she wants to be,” Shobi said.
“So long as she’s badass. And plays soccer—okay, any sport. And doesn’t cut her hair. And takes over the restaurant. And her grandmother’s institute,” Ashna said with a laugh.
“Goes without saying.”
Mother and daughter sat on a Sagar Mahal terrace overlooking the cliff that dropped into the Arabian Sea, drinking tea and watching the waves crash into rocks. Ashna leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder. “If you had fallen in line, I’d have had a happy childhood. And I’d have married who you and Baba picked for me. It wouldn’t have been a bad life, but then we wouldn’t know what it’s like to love these two.”
Omar came up the cliff, the breeze ruffling his silver hair and squeezed Shobi’s shoulders and dropped a kiss on Ashna’s head. Then he proceeded to pour the tea Shobi handed him from a bone china cup into a black stoneware cup.
He dropped into a wicker chair across from them. “Kya guftagu chal rahi hai ma beti mein?” Whatever he said sounded incredibly poetic and Mom’s eyes went soft and hazy.
Every woman deserved that, Ashi was thinking when a wet face pressed into her cheek from behind. “Yuck, you’re all sweaty,” she said, and Rico shook his head and splattered some more sweat all over her.
Rico and Omar were supposed to have gone for a walk. “How much did you run? You’ll hurt your knee again.”
“I won’t. It’s good as new,” he said stubbornly and poured himself tea.
“I think the man is fully capable of gauging his own pain levels,” Mom said as Rico kissed her cheek and sank down on the marble floor between Ashna and Shobi.
“Thanks, Mom, I’m not doubting his capability.”
“And yet, you won’t let me swim because I get ear infections,” Omar said sagely into his tea. There was a warm strength to him, and Mom’s entire demeanor relaxed in his presence.
“That’s because you’re not thirty anymore. And you get cranky when you’re in pain,” Shobi said with the most ineffective frown, because her eyes were twinkling.
“But he’s old enough to know how to put some earplugs in his ears.” Ashna shook the hand Omar held out.
“Want to go for a swim later, beta?” Omar said to Ashna. They had spent last evening jumping the waves and he had explained the backwards process with which Bollywood lyrics were written to retrofit already composed music. The man seemed to approach life with a sardonic yet empathetic eye, and a calm passion that was the yin to her mother’s fiery yang.
“Of course.” The Sripore ocean was Ashna’s favorite place to swim, and she had forgotten quite how much she loved it.
The four of them sat there sipping Ashna’s newest blend. She called it Family Ties. Tomorrow Rico and she would go back to their lives in California—Rico to his new job as Yash’s campaign strategist; Ashna to the renovations they were doing on Curried Dreams. Her mother had
paid off the mortgage and freed Ashna up to gather more debt in rebuilding it to be a chai and pastries place.
Ashna hated the idea of leaving Mom, but distance no longer felt like separation. They already had Shobi and Omar’s next trip scheduled for Curried Dreams’ grand relaunch in three months.
It had been Aji’s idea to totally gut the place and “bring it into this new era.”
“If I changed Curried Dreams, would that be horrible?” Ashna had asked her grandmother the day after the show ended, when she took Mom’s ring back to return to her. It was a memory of her son, after all, and a family heirloom.
“Nobody in their right mind would say you haven’t done everything possible to save your father’s restaurant,” Aji had said with her limitless kindness. “Sometimes, no matter what you do things can’t be saved. Or even people. I should have said this to you years ago. But I never wanted to admit it. For a mother to see a child self-destruct is the worst kind of pain. I do believe I tried everything with Bram. I tried saam, daam, dand, bhed—the traditional four steps to fixing any problem: logic, bribery, punishment, and separation. I tried affection, tough love, everything, but he was who he was. Every time life presented him with two choices he chose the easier one, the selfish one, and it destroyed him. What I didn’t realize until it was too late was that you paid the highest price for it.”
“I had you, Aji,” Ashna had told her grandmother. “You made everything softer.”
Rico leaned his head back on her knee, and Ashna ran a hand through his newly cut-short hair, her heart bursting with gratefulness.
“You know,” Mom said, looking at Ashna in a way Ashna still wasn’t used to, and might never be. Then again, maybe her mother had always looked at her that way, she’d just never been able to see it. “The night you were born, I remember having a vision, a vision like this, of us with this feeling in our hearts. Like anything was possible because we were loved and free. That vision filled me with so much hope, I scratched out your name on the birth certificate and put down the only word that could describe how I felt. Ashna.”
Acknowledgments
Some books have such a deep impact on you that they shape how you expect to love and be loved. Jane Austen’s Persuasion laid the foundation for how I felt about love and constancy in the face of society’s influence. Ashna, Rico, and Shobi’s story is my tribute to that timeless tale and what it taught me about second chances. As in the writing of all my books, I stumbled through this one lost at first, then slowly found my way because so many people held my hand.
