by Sonali Dev
Granted, he’d only had the chance to pitch for the job because Mrs. Raje was Ashna’s aunt, but turning the meeting into a gig had been all him. During the tasting, Mrs. Raje had done what most health-conscious women do, taken a small nibble of his gelato, meaning to simply taste it. After scraping the bottom of the bowl less than five minutes later, she had told him that she couldn’t remember the last time she had finished an entire serving of dessert. Then she had offered him the job.
Now he needed to make sure he got all her jobs going forward. He placed the heavy-bottomed pan on the stove. All that remained for him to do tonight was turn out a perfect salted caramel, and nothing had ever stopped DJ from doing that before.
Chapter Four
When the choice was between a spectacular butt and food, Trisha, naturally, chose food. If she stood around waiting for Nisha to finish being the perfect daughter and sister and chat up every single guest who so much as looked in her direction, Trisha might starve to death. Now that her brain had acknowledged her hunger, it was starting to feel a distinct dearth of oxygen from lack of nutrition.
How much of an irony would it be to die of starvation the day she had made history? Not that anyone in her family would know that she had made history if she did die. Not one!
Hell if she cared! She was thirty-two years old, and perfectly capable of understanding that her work was its own validation. A spasm cramped her heart at the memory of the hours she had spent mapping Emma’s tumor to feed the calculations into the robot, and that moment of absolute exhilaration when she had known exactly how she was going to remove an astrocytoma wrapped around the optic nerves that no other surgeon would even think of touching. This was true love, how she felt about her work. And she needed nothing more.
She wandered through the main kitchen, which was as pristine as it always was, made her way down the long corridor to the working kitchen in the back of the house, and pushed through the heavy swing door. If this had been just a family gathering and her grandma had been down here running the show, Aji would have put a plate of food aside for Trisha, knowing how hungry she would be.
Maybe she should go back up and tell Aji about the grant. She would care.
Her stomach groaned again, and seriously, she was this close to fainting. The fact that she hated kitchens made things worse. Especially when the kitchen looked like this—a million ingredients and dishes strewn about the endless granite surfaces. Nonetheless, she soldiered on.
On the stove sat a huge pot with a clear lid that looked promising, but it was too close to another pot on an open flame. She looked around for help.
For all the cooking paraphernalia lying in wait of something, there wasn’t a soul here tending to it all. Who left something thick and molten bubbling on a stove unattended? Carefully reaching past it, she lifted the lid of the other dish and found pure white, long-grained rice mixed with green peas and bright orange carrots. The intoxicating smell jabbed her straight in the olfactory cortex. Drool gushed into her mouth.
“May I help you?”
She jumped. And dropped the lid.
It slammed into the bubbling pot, making the thing teeter on its side.
Trisha stumbled back, trying to get away from the splash of molten liquid.
The man in a white chef’s jacket who had just scared the living crap out of her dived at the careening pot and saved it from crashing to the ground.
“Bloody hell!” he snapped, completely ignoring the fact that she had almost just had her toes burned off. “What do you think you’re doing? Who the hell let you into my kitchen?”
Her heart slammed in her chest. “Excuse me?” Was he actually yelling at her? As though she were some sort of deviant child? And since when was this his kitchen? This was her damn home!
“You almost tipped over my caramel. My caramel! It’s my pièce de résistance,” he said in a tone no one had ever taken with her.
Who the hell said things like “pièce de résistance,” that too in perfect French? But his voice was so enraged she almost took a step back.
Almost, because, it was her damn home! “Maybe you should not have left it unattended then,” she said icily.
His skin flushed red. He swallowed and ground his jaw. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have. I apologize.” Anger flashed in his eyes, and not a trace of apology. “To be fair, I wasn’t exactly expecting anyone to be snooping around my food and tipping over my pots the moment I stepped away for one bloody second.”
“I was not snooping.” Were they really having this conversation? “You startled me and almost burned me.”
He had started to turn away, but he spun back around at that. “All you had to do was set the pot straight and no one would have been burned.” He enunciated each word with exaggerated calm.
If one more person spoke to her today like she was an imbecile, she was going to wring someone’s neck! “Set it straight? You wanted me to touch a boiling pot? Do you have any idea what these hands are worth?”
His eyebrows rose in disbelief, as though the words she had said were somehow incomprehensible. He raised both hands, done with this conversation. Then he turned off the stove with more of that exaggerated calm, walked to the sink, and stuck his hands under running water.
Shit.
He had just set the pot straight with his bare hands.
“Are you okay?” Trisha asked, her annoyance slipping a bit.
“Do I look okay, miss?” She registered for the first time that he had an accent. A very British accent. And those tightly clipped notes gave his words the exact impact of a slap.
God help her, she had just tried to be nice! He just stood there taking deep breaths, his very stiff—very broad—back expanding and then releasing with deliberation. Between those football player shoulders and that ridiculous chef’s hat he looked so large, so tall that she did take a step back this time, so she didn’t have to lean her head back to take him in.
He turned the water off and inspected his hands. They had to be hurting like a bitch.
“Do you want me to take a look?” she asked his back, feeling just the tiniest bit sorry for him.
He threw a look at the ceiling as though praying for patience and turned around with unmissable reluctance.
She made a beckoning gesture with her fingers. “Let me.”
He kept his hands by his sides. “As I said, I’m fine. Thank you all the same.” With nothing more than that, he gave her his back again and started spooning the caramel into a bowl.
When she didn’t run off the way he evidently expected her to, he half turned back toward her again. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather do my job than stand around calculating the value of your hands.”
Her confusion must have shown on her face because he drew another annoyingly exaggerated breath. “You asked me if I had any idea what your hands were worth.” He was doing that overenunciating thing again and, news flash: it sounded even more condescending in a British accent.
She’d had enough. “I’m a sur-geon,” she said, mirroring his enunciation and feeling like a prized fool for doing it. “Our hands are important to the work we do.”
This only made the scowl return to his face. “Good information. Congratulations. And I’m the chef and I still have dessert to serve. Before someone else comes by and tries to destroy it.”
“I was not trying to destroy your dessert.” She tried to sound dignified, but this was the most juvenile conversation she had ever had. “It’s just food. And your sauce seems just fine.”
He went utterly still. “It’s caramel. Not”—he paused as though the word tasted bitter in his mouth—“sauce.” Then he continued with whatever it was he was doing with his precious caramel—which, Trisha realized, smelled like someone had melted heaven and slathered it in butter.
She felt light-headed. “Listen, I’m sorry. I’m just not comfortable in kitchens, okay? I was burned as a child.”
Nothing. Here she was trying to be the bigger person and he was
n’t even listening to her. She flipped him off in her head and without letting herself think about the trauma of the memory of being burned, or how much fun her siblings made of her because of the incident, she yanked open a drawer and pulled out the biggest bowl she could find.
Then, against her better judgment, and because she was hungry enough to commit murder, she spoke to him again. “Excuse me.” She pointed her spoon at the rice when what she really wanted to do was shove him out of her way and stab her spoon into the pot and start eating right out of it.
He stepped aside, taking his precious caramel with him all the way to the other end of the kitchen without helping her with the rice. Weren’t her parents paying him to feed people? But she said nothing. Because who wanted to unleash all that enunciating again? Instead, she served herself, piling the rice high. She had just brought a giant spoonful to her mouth when her sister sashayed into the kitchen.
“There you are,” Nisha said, smiling widely. Her eyes found the sulky man at the other end of the room. His back was to them and he was so focused on his caramel, one would think he were performing lifesaving surgery. He certainly seemed to think he was.
Nisha’s smile turned into a grin. She wiggled her brows, completely missing Trisha’s current mood.
What? Trisha mouthed, seriously considering sororicide if her sister didn’t let her eat in peace.
Nisha’s eyes danced in the man’s direction and dropped to his behind.
Really? Trisha narrowed her eyes, then without looking where her sister was looking, she stormed out of the kitchen, bowl in hand.
“What’s got you all grumpy?” Nisha asked, catching up with her in the corridor.
“Seriously, I have the best day of my professional life and all you and Ma can think of is how to throw me at men!”
“I thought you wanted to be thrown at men. Weren’t you biting my head off earlier about withholding good butt from you? Seriously, what’s wrong? Didn’t you see him and his . . . oh!—” Her eyes went round, and she let out a squeak of delight. “You got the grant!” She threw her arms around Trisha.
There, was that so hard? That’s all Trisha had wanted. She let Nisha squeeze her tight, the irritation inside her melting away. Then again maybe it was this pulav. She shoved another spoonful into her mouth. It was seriously the best thing she had ever tasted. She thought she knew rice. She’d grown up eating rice. But this . . . this was like an explosion of familiar flavors doing an entirely unexpected dance in her mouth.
“I’m so sorry. It should have been the first thing I asked,” her sister said with enough remorse that the remnants of Trisha’s annoyance fizzled.
“That’s okay. I know how important today was to you.”
“To all of us.” Reprimand flashed in Nisha’s eyes. “It’s happening, Shasha. After all his hard work. After all he’s been through. Yash is running. He’s going to be governor.”
Nisha was right. It was happening. And it was important. To all of them. This was her family. If they shut her out, she could at least bang on the door. She should be part of Yash’s campaign. “This rice is turning my world upside down,” she said, chewing with reverence.
Her sister smiled again. “So did Entoff totally fall at your feet?”
Trisha grinned and pinched her finger over the spoon. “A teeny bit. Who am I kidding, he practically kissed them!”
Her sister’s eyes brightened in a way that proved exactly why she was Trisha’s favorite person in the whole world.
“And how about that artist patient of yours, is she going to be okay?”
Emma’s fierce eyes, her bottle-cap-popping vagina, it all did a slo-mo flash inside Trisha’s head. “She’s going to lose her sight,” she said softly.
Her sister stroked her hair and rolled a curl around her finger. It was such a Raje gesture. Their mother used to twirl her fingers in their hair when they were babies to put them to sleep and all the kids had picked up the habit. Even Ashna and Esha did it. It was their way of giving comfort, showing affection.
“But you’re saving her life. Trisha, you’re saving her life,” Nisha repeated gently. “It’s not like there’s anything more you can do.”
The rice stuck in Trisha’s throat as she swallowed. She had to get a grip and stop letting this bother her so much. It was one case and she had done all she could. “Yes, and the surgery will give us a chance to use the new robot!” Thinking about the surgery brought the enthusiasm back to her voice.
“My badass baby sister!” Nisha squeezed her shoulder and Trisha pushed the memory of the despair in Emma’s eyes out of her head and focused on the joy warming her insides at Nisha’s praise.
She put another spoonful of the magic rice in her mouth and moaned, the satisfaction of filling her empty belly making all the tension of the day melt away. She was home. Her brother was about to make the family’s dreams come true. And she wasn’t going to watch from the outside anymore. Even the fact that she had been yelled at in her parents’ home by some cook who seemed to think he was on the set of Iron Chef seemed funny in retrospect.
“You’re right. I am totally badass!”
FOR THE SECOND time that day, DJ stood at the kitchen door listening to the sound of that voice. Only this time he knew exactly whom it was coming from. It was coming from someone who had almost cost him this job.
What flooded through him now was certainly not warmth.
Watching his caramel almost splatter on the floor had damn near given him a heart attack. To say nothing of his hands, which stung like the fires of hell. He could feel the blisters forming on his thumb and fingers under the platter he was carrying.
“Not just badass but also, ahem, a genius,” the woman was saying, and it brought to mind an image of her staring at her hands, contemplating their worth. She tried to inject a note of self-mocking into her tone, but this time he knew better than to buy it. He’d seen the truth in her eyes back there.
Do you have any idea what these hands are worth?
He almost laughed at that. Who the hell talked like that?
“Well, you did walk away from that beautiful creature in the kitchen without so much as a glance, so I don’t know about the genius part,” the other woman said, and DJ felt his face warm. “You want to go back in there? I’ll introduce you. You can celebrate for real.”
Both women broke into giggles. DJ almost smiled; maybe he’d overreacted in there a bit.
“No thank you,” the good doctor said in that voice of hers. “But thanks for thinking I’m desperate enough to be set up with the hired help.”
DJ stepped away from the door, the warmth on his face turning into an angry burn.
The hired help? He had worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant, for crying out loud. For years. People across Paris knew his name.
Who the bloody hell did this woman think she was? Sometimes he really, truly hated rich people.
“This rice is like an orgasm in every bite,” she said as though she hadn’t just called the person who had created that rice a servant.
Suddenly, the thought of her eating his food felt like a violation. He wanted to yank it from her hands. His blistering fingers stung as his grip on the platter tightened.
Curry sweep. Smelly. Little. Curry. Sweep.
“DJ got called curry sweep at school,” Emma had sobbed to Mum the moment Mum had walked in the door. She had cried all the way back from school when DJ and she had taken the bus home.
“I blame William Blake,” DJ had said, getting out of the chair he was sprawled on. He’d worked in Ammaji’s kitchen for six hours and he was tired, but Mum had to be even more tired. “It’s a play on chimney sweep.” Not even a good wordplay at that. But the gits in his school weren’t exactly literary geniuses.
Mum had smiled. A literary reference never failed to get a smile out of Mum. And distract her.
“You didn’t get in a fight, did you?” she said, sinking into the chair DJ had just vacated, the only one they had in the rooms
they rented. No fighting back—it was Mum’s number one rule.
“He was wet on the bus,” Emma said, wasting the hour he had spent coaching her to shut up so she wouldn’t ruin Mum’s evening.
Some boys in his grade had dragged him into the locker rooms and pushed him under a shower in an attempt “to teach the curry sweep how to wash off the curry” so they didn’t have to hold their breath around him all day.
He didn’t care. Being wet didn’t hurt. At least no one had punched him that day.
Thankfully Emma hadn’t mentioned the curry smells.
Because to Mum a nasty wordplay on chimney sweep was just words, but mentioning the smells of their landlady’s cooking—DJ’s cooking—was sticks and stones. It drew blood.
The first time Emma had let slip that the boys liked to spray DJ with cheap deodorant while passing him in the hallways, Mum had packed up DJ’s clothes in a laundry bag and taken them to the local dry cleaner’s instead of washing them in the ancient washer in the attic.
“Those things cost too much, Mum.” He had tried to get her to see sense. “We can use that twenty quid to buy Emma paints.”
She had smacked him upside his head, albeit affectionately. “Emma doesn’t need any more stupid paints. You need to develop some self-respect. No one can have self-respect while smelling like curry.”
“How am I supposed to develop self-respect if you still smack me around when I’m fourteen?” he’d said because he knew it would make her smile.
She’d ruffled his hair. “Why don’t you care when those boys treat you like that?”
“Just because some spoiled gits say something, that doesn’t make it true.” He’d wanted so badly for her to believe that he didn’t care. Truth was, dry-cleaning the clothes once would do nothing to get rid of the smell of frying onions for six hours in a little kitchen, every day. The smell was in his pores. An even bigger truth was that he loved it. Those six hours were the best hours of DJ’s day and he would not let anyone take them away from him. Not even his mother.