Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  Trisha had never met His Royal Highness Maheshwar Rao Raje, Esha’s father, but from everything she’d heard he had been a version of HRH on steroids. A barrister, and India’s youngest ever and most charismatic member of parliament, he’d been earmarked for prime ministership and leading India out of the chaos that colonization had left behind. All it had taken to derail that plan had been a failed airplane engine.

  Esha’s episodes had started after the airplane crash had killed her parents along with thirty other passengers, leaving Esha the miraculous sole survivor. The seizures caused her to go catatonic and were followed by debilitating migraines. All the medical scans in the world had not been able to come up with an explanation for why they came on—or for her visions.

  A week after the accident, six-year-old Esha had dreamed of their Sripore estate manager, J-Auntie’s husband, being crushed under a tractor. They had found his body that same day, mangled by the machine. A spate of visions about everyone who worked at the Sripore palace had followed, turning her into a shaking terrified mess.

  Just the rumors of her clairvoyance had brought throngs of people seeking their futures to the palace gates. No amount of refuting the rumors had dissuaded the crowds. They took to leaving offerings for the little goddess outside the palace. Before the news spread further, HRH had whisked his dead brother’s daughter off to California where Trisha’s mother had been pregnant with Trisha.

  In California they had found that not leaving the home kept her seizures under control, and it kept the visions restricted to the people Esha was connected to. She had seen Yash in a wheelchair before his accident. She’d seen other things about Yash too. Things that fueled the family’s dreams.

  Aji had moved to California when they had brought Esha here. She never left her side. She guarded Esha’s periods of meditation and her trances with her signature soft fierceness. Trisha believed it was her way of paying for the death of her oldest child. Atonement, because she had insisted he get on that plane and take his family on vacation, because he worked too much. Everyone had tried to convince her that it wasn’t her fault. But guilt had tenacious tentacles. It burrowed under your skin and possessed your entire being until you couldn’t exorcise it without losing yourself.

  Trisha blew Aji a kiss and was about to turn around when Esha raised her head, skewing her heavy bun to one side. “I’m sorry about your patient,” she whispered, her eyes still shut as though opening them would hurt. “Good thing you never give up.” Then she laid her head down and went back into her trance.

  Chapter Seven

  Gathering up the oversize canvas bags of groceries from his trip to the farmers’ market, DJ let himself out of the Palo Alto flat that was costing him a kidney to rent. He made his way across the eight blocks that led to Curried Dreams, his friend Ashna’s restaurant.

  As he took High Street, every cell in his body seemed to want to turn toward University Avenue and go back to Emma. But he had promised Ashna that he would help her work on new recipes for the upcoming summer season. Plus, he had no idea how he was going to face his sister. Now that she had lost her blooming mind.

  Her words still stung like oil burns on his skin, but he deserved them. She was right about all of it. It was too late to change their history, too late to change the choices he’d made. He couldn’t bring their mother back, couldn’t change the fact that he was responsible for her death. But he could keep Emma from taking her own life.

  It was suicide. There was just no other word for it. And it was not going to happen, not while he still breathed.

  He forced himself to turn toward Forest Avenue. The homes in this part of Palo Alto were unlike the mansions a few miles away. This was where the scale still felt somewhat urban. Not quite like the tightly packed flats of avenue de Flandres but a little like the town houses in Richmond, old money so insouciant it needed to make no effort at all to be shown off.

  Sunshine filtered in and out from behind the jacarandas lining the street and made him squint. There was something about California sunshine that kept him standing, kept him moving, and he hooked into it. How the sun touched you here was different from anything he’d experienced before. It carried a little more heat than Paris and definitely more light than London.

  The Clapham flat they had lived in before his father died had windows that somehow trapped what little sunshine fell upon London and streamed it into their lives. DJ barely ever thought about that home anymore, or of his strapping, hazel-eyed father sitting in his threadbare tweed chair with the Times open in front of him, throwing headlines at the family as though he couldn’t keep his newfound knowledge about their world to himself. DJ couldn’t remember the last time he had thought about the car that had jumped a red light and run his father over on his walk home from the factory. DJ had been twelve.

  After Dad died and his family threw Mum, Emma, and DJ out of their home and onto the street, they’d moved to the attic rooms of Ammaji’s Southall house. There had been one dormer window in the attic that overlooked a tiny patch of backyard where Ammaji hung her clothes on clotheslines. No light ever seemed to reach that little square of yard but the smell of freshly washed fabric had still infused it with warmth.

  He turned into the back alley that led to the deliveries entrance of Curried Dreams. Ashna stood at the top of the half flight of stairs, leaning against the service door, beaming at him in jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed the name of her restaurant. It had been over a decade since they had attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris together before starting their careers under Andre Renoir, but time hadn’t touched Ashna.

  They had barely kept in touch after she had moved back to the States. Fortunately, another thing time hadn’t touched was the easy friendship they’d developed as Andre’s fresh and eager assistants. When DJ had moved here a month ago, lost and unable to come to terms with the prospect of losing Emma, Ashna had taken him under her wing and made everything fall into place.

  “Hullo there, love!” he said, then laughed as Ashna tried to take the bags from his hands. When he refused to release them, she kissed him on the cheek. “Hello yourself, Chef!”

  Ashna had to be one of the dearest people DJ knew. Andre had tried hard to play matchmaker between them, but it had only made them laugh. There was a melancholy air about Ashna, as if tragedy fluttered like a cape behind her. She took herself a tad too seriously, something DJ too was accused of often enough. For all their shared somberness and the comfort of their connection, their friendship had never been touched by attraction.

  DJ had always believed that when he met the person he was meant to be with, he’d know. It would be the way it was with food, a moment of truth when he tasted a dish and knew it was perfectly as it should be. It would just feel right. He couldn’t imagine getting into a relationship until that happened. Without that connection, he was just wasting his time and he certainly hadn’t been born with the privilege of time to waste on playing the field.

  He followed Ashna into the sunny kitchen and put the bags on her spotless stainless-steel countertop.

  “These mangoes look great.” Picking one plump orange-gold fruit out of a bag, she gave it a sniff. And scrunched up her nose. “You should smell the mangoes in India. They smell like sugar melting in the summer heat. How do these have no aroma at all?” Then she smiled. “Yikes, I sound just like my aunt.”

  They started emptying out the bags, laying out the okra, spinach, and cilantro in little heaps across the countertop, each shade of green as distinct as each vegetable’s identity.

  “Oh, and speaking of my aunt”—her eyes turned positively smug—“I think you have a fan. Everyone’s been asking who catered the dinner last night and she called to let me know that I was not to give anyone your contact information unless she personally okayed it, which, by the way, is the highest praise you can receive from her. You are now one of Mina Raje’s favors to be handed out.”

  He touched his heart and beamed at her. “I’m flattered. And grateful.” Mina
Raje’s contacts had meant his phone hadn’t stopped buzzing with bookings. He removed the colander hanging from a hook over the sink and started rinsing things one by one.

  Ashna’s kitchen was perfect, well designed and spacious enough to make up for the equipment from two decades ago. She spread a towel on the countertop and nudged him playfully with her elbow. “So, I believe Mina Kaki offered you ‘the job’ last night! How are you feeling about catering the event of the year—our future governor’s first official fund-raiser?”

  His smile widened until his cheeks hurt. If his hands weren’t wet, he’d have hugged her. “You have no idea! I’ve already started working on the menu. There’s some new recipes I’m thinking of.” He’d woken up at four this morning in Emma’s hospital room to write down an eggplant roulade with tandoori paneer. The magic was in the Indian thyme and garlic chive foam infused into the paneer.

  “It’s funny how excited you get,” she teased fondly, and having this, an old friend in a new and foreign place, nudged some of the despondence out of him.

  “Are you still okay with me doing the prep work for the dinner here?” He started patting dry the okra so it wouldn’t string when they cooked it.

  “Of course. Quit acting like you’re taking advantage of me. You’re already helping me with the Curried Dreams menu in return. You know I suck at that sort of thing. You can use my kitchen during off-hours for as long as you need it.” Suddenly exhaustion flashed in her eyes. He almost asked what was wrong. But she put it away fast enough that it was obvious she didn’t want him to see it.

  “Are you sure?” Even though she’d said repeatedly that he wasn’t taking advantage of their friendship, it felt a little bit like he was. But not too many gift horses had been smiling at him lately and he also was just exhausted enough to not inspect this one’s mouth too closely. Renting a kitchen in this town would mean burying himself in debt.

  Ashna nodded and her worried gaze swept the room. She had left Paris after just a couple of years with Andre and returned to California to run the restaurant that was her dead father’s legacy. She’d never said it in so many words, but DJ had gathered that all these years later she was struggling to save that legacy. Although how financial troubles could touch someone with a family as influential as hers, he had no idea.

  “We’ll come up with a spectacular menu for you. I swear. We’ll pack them in.” He’d repay her in every which way he could.

  The smile reached her eyes again. “I’m counting on it.”

  He picked up a finger of okra and pointed it at the fryer. “I was thinking, let’s fry it with a light batter and then try a hot yogurt kadhi sauce with it.” Extracting his smock from one of the bags, he tied it on.

  “What kind of crust?” She turned on the fryer and adjusted the temperature.

  “We could try a rice flour batter? We want it papery—thin and crisp.” He started to mix spices into the flour, a spoonful of powdered cumin, a pinch of powdered cloves.

  “I heard the good news about Emma,” she said, watching him, and his hands froze for a moment.

  “And I think just a dash of gram flour like a pakora batter?” He forced himself to walk to the pantry shelves and grabbed the box of besan.

  He couldn’t discuss Emma right now. Silence stretched between them as he added splashes of buttermilk to the dry ingredients, working the batter with his hands, feeling it turn silky between his fingers.

  He couldn’t let the silence get awkward. “Seriously, Ashna, thank you. For everything. For the referral to your cousin, and to your aunt. Thanks to her, I’m booked up solid for a month.”

  She didn’t call out the awkward topic change or push about Emma and he loved her for it. Instead, she simply dipped a teaspoon into the batter for a taste and made an approving sound. “All those bookings have nothing to do with me or with Mina Kaki. It has to do with what you do in the kitchen, DJ.” She raised the spoon and offered him a taste. “You more than deserve it. You know that, right?”

  Deserve was such a strange word, throwing out both blame and accolades with equal mercilessness. Society’s skewed scale for assigning a value to human beings. How many times had he been judged and found lacking? Was there ever a way to measure what anyone deserved? Or was it just another way to pretend that the randomness of the universe made sense?

  “Uh-oh, did I turn DJ Caine all brooding?” Ashna laughed, patting his arm with one hand while using the spoon in her other to signal him to open his mouth.

  Her unguardedness felt like a gift. Getting her to overcome her usual reserve and trust him lifted some of the worthlessness he’d been carrying around since Emma threw him out.

  He took a taste from the spoon she was holding up. “It’s a good start. Let’s try it this way, then we can tweak it.”

  “Got it, Chef.” A drop of batter dribbled from the spoon onto his chin making her giggle. “Sorry,” she said and quickly used her thumb to wipe it off.

  A loud gasp sounded across the kitchen. “Holy shit! I’m so sorry! I didn’t know you had company.”

  DJ looked over Ashna’s head at a woman with her hand slapped across her mouth, her eyes so round one might think she had just walked in on them shagging on the kitchen floor.

  Ashna stepped away from him. “Hey, Trisha! Come on in.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt, I swear.” Her flushed cheeks were so high they practically swallowed up her eyes as her gaze flicked here and there as though trying to avoid looking at Ashna and him.

  Where had he seen those eyes before?

  Bollocks! It was that woman who had almost destroyed his caramel. Those flame-colored eyes, glinting with all those uppish airs, were burned into his brain.

  “Seriously, I’m sorry,” she said again. And that voice, it made a million feelings run up and down his spine. Every one of them uncomfortable.

  “You’re not interrupting anything,” Ashna said with her trademark patience. But there was an edge of reprimand in there as well. “DJ and I were just working on some recipes.” It was clear from Ashna’s tone that overreacting was nothing new with this one.

  Her mortification morphed into suspicion. She looked as though she smelled something dodgy in the air, and threw DJ the most reluctant smile he’d ever been at the receiving end of.

  “This is DJ Caine, Trisha. Emma Caine’s brother. Haven’t you two met? DJ, this is my cousin Trisha Raje, Emma’s doctor.”

  What on earth was Ashna talking about?

  This was Dr. Raje?

  Bloody sodding bollocks on toast. The luck he’d been having recently, of course she’d be Emma’s doctor.

  “Oh.” She swallowed a few times, highlighting the fact that she had the longest neck he’d ever seen. “No, we’ve never actually met,” she said finally. “But I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” She dropped a handful of Tupperware containers on the countertop, then stuck out her hand. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition on her face.

  So the hired help wasn’t worth remembering then. His heartbeat elevated in that way it did when anger rose inside him too fast. He tamped it down.

  “I thought you guys had met,” Ashna said, looking thoroughly puzzled. “DJ’s the chef who cooked that fabulous dinner at Yash’s party last night.” There was pride in Ashna’s voice and it seemed to totally befuddle her cousin.

  “The hired help with the nonsurgeon hands, remember?” he wanted to say, but of course he stayed silent and moved to rinse the batter off his hands in the sink.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” Her gaze slid across his shoulders, lingered there for a bit, then came back to his eyes. Now she remembered. “I had no idea who you were. Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand again, and if she was embarrassed by her behavior the other evening, she hid it well.

  He took his time wiping his hands on his smock and obliged her. Her precious surgeon’s hand was unexpectedly delicate in his, but her grip was entirely self-assured, and yet again he pictured her staring at her palms
lovingly for hours. His were still smarting from the burns.

  “Are your hands okay?” she asked, as if reading his mind.

  At least she remembered burning him. He feigned ignorance. “What’s wrong with my hands?” She didn’t need to know that he remembered, too. Or that anything she’d said had meant anything to him.

  She cocked her head, confused. “Seemed like you might have burned them at my parents’ house.”

  Parents? Great. This just got better and better. She was Ashna’s cousin. Of course that made her Mina Raje’s daughter. Of course he had yelled at his most important client’s daughter in her own home. And she just happened to be the person who could save his sister’s life.

  Could everything go any more tits up than that?

  “DJ, you burned your hands? Why didn’t you say something?” Ashna took his hands and inspected them.

  “They’re fine. No harm done.” That was British for I want to sob like a baby every time I touch something. But Ashna didn’t need to know that. Dr. Raje most certainly didn’t.

  “May I take a look?” Trisha Raje said, her expression pinched.

  Do you have any idea what these hands are worth?

  Yeah, no, she was still not taking a look. Not when she had been okay with his hands being burned because they didn’t do important enough work. Not if he had anything to do with it.

  God, he sounded like a petty knobhead. Evidently, something about being called the hired help had stung enough to induce pettiness.

  “DJ, let Trisha look. She’s really good at this doctor thing,” Ashna said and Trisha Raje grinned at her as though she had just dropped the deepest curtsy in front of her.

  DJ picked up the colander filled with okra and moved to the fryer. “As I’ve already mentioned, my hands are fine. I hope yours are still worth as much as they were last evening.” Definitely a petty bastard.