Chapter 2

As always, routine relaxed Ashna. Her day started at the farmer’s market. The night sky had not yet fully transformed into day. She loved when the sun peeked at the edges of the sky while the moon was still not quite hidden away. The carts overflowing with plump and fragrant fruit and vegetables added to the magic of the hour. Vendors and chefs talked in hushed tones in deference to it.

There was plenty of bitter melon today, glossy and lime green with lush scalloped ridges. Ashna let Charlie, her favorite farmer’s son, sell her everything he had left, an extra five pounds, so he could go home early. He was taking care of business while his father recovered from colon surgery—which Charlie felt the need to explicate in lurid detail as he helped Ashna carry her bags to her car.

Apparently, the pre-surgery “bowel clean-out” hadn’t gone as smoothly as they had hoped.

Ashna patted the poor boy’s shoulder and asked him about high school, and they bonded over every Asian child’s favorite topic: their family’s obsession with grades and college applications. Charlie’s parents were Vietnamese, and Ashna much preferred the image of Farmer Dang as an exacting parent to any sort of bowel clean-out association.

“You’re a good son,” she told him, and he blushed, which was incredibly endearing given that talk of bowels hadn’t embarrassed him in the slightest.

Ashna dropped off the produce at Curried Dreams. Extra bitter melon was never an issue. The unpopular vegetable was a favorite with the Rajes, none of whom were daunted by the bitterness that sat atop the other, more complex underlying flavors. She would take some over to her aunt and uncle’s house later.

Her grandmother could make magic with bitter melon, stuffing it with fried onions and then frying the entire thing to a buttery, salty crunch. Baba’s recipe at the restaurant was derived from Aji’s recipe, but he’d made it richer with cashews added to the stuffing and a creamy onion sauce. Decadent, the way all of Baba’s versions of traditional recipes were. Ashna could make that version in her sleep, but she preferred the taste of the one her grandmother made.

After washing and sorting the produce at Curried Dreams she headed home to shower. Her restaurant and her home were separated by a cedar fence and a thicket of jacarandas, a distance of barely one hundred feet. Ashna’s father had built both buildings—the mansion-style restaurant and the Spanish stucco bungalow—from the ground up just after they moved from Sripore to California when Ashna was ten years old. Before that Ashna had only ever lived in the palace her ancestors had built centuries ago.

With Curried Dreams and the bungalow, she had watched the backhoe break ground as she stood there with her cousins, smelling long-buried earth being dredged up. She’d walked on newly laid tile and touched freshly plastered walls, watched furniture being moved in, tapestries being hung and rehung to Baba’s satisfaction.

Until he built Curried Dreams, Bram Raje had been the quintessential spoiled prince, the youngest son of the royal family of Sripore, one of India’s oldest princely states. Unlike his older brothers, Bram had lived up to the stereotype of indolent entitlement and fed his antics to the hungry media machine that surrounds royals everywhere. Until one such antic had landed him in trouble with the law and forced him to flee India.

His older brother Shree—HRH, as Ashna and her cousins called him—had rescued Bram (yet again) and brought him to California. Then he proposed (Raje code for dictated) that Bram channel his taste for decadent food and his passion for keeping the public entertained into an Indian restaurant that wasn’t the usual curry house in a strip mall.

HRH had been right, as he often was. Curried Dreams had finally given Bram the sense of responsibility his family had hoped for as they’d bankrolled business after business to help give him purpose that might save him. They had gotten it right that last time; Curried Dreams had given Bram purpose and taught him responsibility, which even having a daughter had not managed to do. But Curried Dreams hadn’t saved him.

Ashna stopped to pluck the few dandelions poking up among the roses along the side of the house. She had just enough time to get in a run before returning to the restaurant. Today was her yoga day, but there was no way her mind would stay quiet enough for yoga. Putting her phone on silent all morning had been cowardly, but she didn’t care.

The downside of choosing cowardice was that there was only so long you could hide. Problems were patient. They always waited you out. On her way to the front stoop, she finally checked her phone. Surprisingly, there was only one message from China and nothing from Trisha. Thinking about the Herculean effort that must have taken made her smile. She had agreed to take the night to think about the show. Not that there was any way she could do it. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing from Mandy either. So it seemed like that chapter was closed.

China’s message was a simple Call me.

All night Ashna had tried to think of another chef who might do the show, but she’d come up empty.

Just contemplating cooking off-script made her heart race so hard she had to breathe through it.

Dear judges, I have for you today: a giant meltdown.

Nope, never going to happen.

How tidy her life had felt yesterday. Thirty occupied tables, a sous chef who helped her find solutions for the restaurant, best friends who didn’t think she was too selfish to help them. What else could possibly go wrong?

She picked up her phone and was about to call China when the name of the last person she wanted to think about right now flashed on her screen.

Every bit of sense Ashna possessed told her to ignore the call. Another minute and she would have missed it anyway. But it had been six months since she’d spoken to her mother. A long gap even for them. That last silently destructive fight—a specialty of their mother-daughter bond—had been one of their most spectacular ones. Ashna had even wondered if they’d ever speak again.

She pressed talk.

“Hello, beta. Why does it take you so long to answer the phone?”

Why oh why had she asked what else could go wrong? Obviously she was in no position to tempt fate.

“Hi, Mom,” she said with the casualness of a daughter who didn’t care that she hadn’t heard her mother’s voice in half a year. “What’s wrong?” Not the smartest question, given that when it came to them that answer could take a while.

“Can your mother not call you without something being wrong?” Her tone was perfectly self-possessed, not a whit of emotion in those words. Shoban Gaikwad Raje probably didn’t even remember that it had been six months since she’d spoken to her only child.

The hard blast of anger in Ashna’s belly meant she needed to calm the heck down. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, and then did what she did best with Shobi: stayed silent.

Shobi gave a self-deprecating laugh, the one that always came out as a huff-cough. “Well never mind all that. How are you?”

If Shobi had been standing in front of her, Ashna would have checked over her shoulder to see if she was talking to someone else. But Ashna was an adult woman; she could handle this without regressing. She took the phone into the house and removed her shoes. “Everything is peachy with me. How about yourself?”

Her (admittedly overdone) breeziness was met with a long pause.

Shoban Gaikwad Raje, whose most recent TED Talk had tens of millions of views, was not given to pausing.

A short, almost unsure clearing of the throat followed. Another most un-Shobi-like move. Putting her shoes in the closet, Ashna made her way up to her room. If Shobi was giving her a silence to fill, it had to be a trap. Ashna had been raised by her aunt, whose first rule was: read the room before you show your hand.

Finally, Shobi went for self-deprecating laugh, round two. “Actually, I have news.” Her voice did a strange wobble. Which had to be Ashna’s imagination, because Shobi did not waste her time on displays of emotion. She wasn’t called Dragon-Raje by the Indian media for nothing. “I know we didn’t leave things in a good place the last time we spoke, but you had to be the first person I told this to.” The quiver in Shobi’s voice was unmistakable this time. “They’re giving me the Padma Shri.”

Ashna started to pace, words failing her. The Padma Shri was one of India’s highest honors for achievement in a field.

“Ashna, your mother is winning the Padma Shri! All my hard work, all my sacrifices. It’s all paying off.” The excited quiver raised Shobi’s pitch a few levels. She was entirely unaware of the fact that she was saying these words to the sum total of all her sacrifices.

This time Ashna cleared her throat. “That’s amazing,” she said, because she wasn’t a colossal enough bitch to be unkind when someone was excited about winning an award only a handful of people won.

“Thanks, beta,” Shobi said, clearly struggling with how her inexplicable daughter could be so underwhelmed by her brilliance.

There was another awkward pause, awkwardness being their default mode. Ashna took herself to the bathroom and turned on the tub faucet. A shower wasn’t going to cut it today.

“Listen, Ashna. I know this isn’t easy for you to understand, but it hasn’t been easy for me either.”

Which part?But Ashna knew the answer to that already.

The part where Shobi had to abandon Ashna to achieve what she was born to achieve. You couldn’t ask a question like that without being reminded of how dispensable you were, and even worse, how selfish you were for feeling sorry for yourself for being dispensed with for the sake of “changing the world.”

Truth was, nothing was ever hard for Shobi. She had been the star of the Indian national women’s cricket team. After retiring from that, she had singlehandedly taken sports advocacy for girls to the remote corners of India, a country that determinedly ignored all sports except men’s cricket.

As if that weren’t enough, she had transformed her sports advocacy into a weapon to change the lives of girls and women across the country by building sports-focused schools for girls. Her network of grassroots female empowerment projects brought together millions of dollars from the world’s greatest philanthropists. She made conscienceless politicians tremble, manipulated corrupt media, and managed to employ hundreds of people who truly cared about her cause in an entirely self-focused world. If anything dared stand in her path, she leveled it like the champion she was. In other words, she was the polar opposite of her daughter in every way possible.

Ashna had been struggling to keep one restaurant afloat for ten years. For the entirety of those years, Shobi had been waiting for her to fail.

“I see that you’re not going to make this easy for me,” Shobi said with the deep regret she used in fund-raising speeches. It was a tone that could guilt people into coughing up every penny they could afford.

“I’m really happy for you,” Ashna repeated in the most upbeat of her collection of upbeat tones. The emptiness that overtook her when she spoke to Shobi didn’t make it easy.

“May I say something? I know you don’t want to hear this.”

Dear God, every single time that line came out of Shobi, she followed it up with something that started a fight.

Please don’t do this today. That sense of barely holding it together that Ashna kept firmly at the edge of her consciousness closed in. Every time Shobi showed up, it pushed its way to the center of her. What kind of dumbass let someone do that to them over and over?

But of course, no one stopped Shobi from doing exactly as Shobi wanted.

“I think you’ve forgotten what it means to be happy.”

Ashna sank down to her knees next to the tub. A stray hair marred the spotless floor. She picked it up and threw it in the garbage.

“Are you going to say anything at all?”

Ashna wanted to, but her words had a way of hiding away when they sensed Shobi’s presence.

“Ashna?” She couldn’t tell if Shobi was reprimanding her or if that was concern in her voice. Not that she had any experience with recognizing concern in Shobi’s voice.

“You’re wrong, Mom. You can only forget something you knew.”

Her mother gasped and Ashna realized that she had said the words out loud.

In the moment that Shobi said nothing, relief and hope rushed through Ashna. She imagined her admission filling Shobi with regret and understanding.

“That’s not fair, Ashna.”

How could Ashna not laugh at that? Of course Shobi would make Ashna’s admission that she had never learned how to be happy about herself.

Ashna knew exactly what Shobi would say next. “Why is it so hard for you to understand your mother?” Bingo. And then . . . “You always understood your baba no matter what he did. No matter how wrong his choices.”

How many times could you have the same fight? Baba had stuck with Ashna, always. Well, until he hadn’t, in the end. But Ashna had never known Shobi as anything but a visitor who was either arriving or getting ready to leave.

Shobi had been gone a lot when they lived in Sripore, and then she hadn’t moved to America with them. Just visited. At first Ashna had tried hard to believe the visits weren’t reluctant, but over time, they grew shorter and farther apart, proving how wrong she’d been.

“Anyway, I didn’t call to have that conversation again. I was hoping maybe we could move past all that. Isn’t it time to fix things?”

Wasn’t this just precious? Now that Shobi had achieved the ultimate validation for her work, it was time to start taking stock of collateral damage.

Yes, well, Ashna wasn’t doormat enough for that. Being vulnerable in her mother’s presence was a mistake. She got herself up off the floor. The tub was full. She turned off the water. “There’s nothing to move past. I’m happy for you. And I’m proud of everything you’ve achieved.” There, she’d said what a dutiful daughter would say. “Good luck.”

“Oh, Ashna, maybe someday you’ll mean that. I have changed the lives of thousands. I’ve worked hard for it. It would be nice to have the person I gave birth to acknowledge it.”

“I’m proud of you,” Ashna repeated, trying to reach into that part of her that still remembered how proud she used to be of Shobi. The water was the perfect temperature. She dropped a capful of eucalyptus oil in. The steam rising from it turned intoxicating. She sank down to her knees again and inhaled it.

“I don’t mean repeat the lie. I mean, actually mean it. You have no idea how badly I wish you could see my life. Understand it. See me.”

“Across the thousands of miles you’ve always put between us?”

Instead of another gasp, another pause followed. A potent pause, filled with things Ashna didn’t want to hear, places she didn’t want to go with the woman who had birthed her.

Ashna skimmed a circle on the water’s surface.

“You’re right,” Shobi said, her voice determined. “Let’s fix that.”

Ashna’s hand jostled the water, disturbing the surface, splashing herself. Why hadn’t she just stayed silent? It was the only strategy that worked with Shobi.

“Actually, that’s why I was calling, I just didn’t know how I was going to ask. So I’m glad you brought it up. Why don’t you come to India?”

Ashna took her face close to the water’s surface. The tip of her nose touched the liquid warmth. The weight of her heavy bun skewed to one side of her head.

“Ashna?” Shobi pushed into her silence.

“I can’t do that.” Her whisper reflected off the water, the mint in her breath mixing with the eucalyptus. She picked out the distinct familiar scents and let her mind linger on each.

“Why? This is the perfect time to come home. Share this experience with me. They asked me to choose someone to introduce me at the awards ceremony and, naturally, I want you to be the one to do it. It’s been too long, beta. You haven’t been to Sripore in thirteen years. Come home!”

Sripore was not her home. “Palo Alto is my home,” she said quietly, “and Woodside,” she added to make sure her punch hit home. Woodside was where her aunt and uncle lived. The people who had been more parents to her than Shobi ever would.

The punch landed squarely where Ashna had aimed it and Shobi’s patience snapped. “You’re being deliberately hurtful again,” she said. “You aren’t a teenager anymore. This anger isn’t going to get you anywhere. It’s not healthy. You’re thirty. It’s not—”

“I am the least angry person I know.” The irony of her hiss did not escape her. “I have a business to run. I’d love to help you, but I just can’t.” She forced herself to regain her calm.

At least Shobi had gotten her age right this time. Shoban Gaikwad Raje had the fabulous distinction of having asked her child “So, what grade are you in?” on multiple occasions.

“Getting away from that place is exactly what you need. I can’t believe your father saddled you with—”

“Curried Dreams is my life,” she hissed again, because the only thing being upbeat would get her was a bath gone cold.

“That’s my point exactly. You need to find a life outside Curried Dreams!” said the woman who lectured all and sundry endlessly about how a woman’s work should be just as important to her as her family. “It’s time for you to break the chains that have been tying you up for years. Reset your priorities.”

Dear God, not chains! Chains were Shobi’s favorite metaphor. “Women in Chains” was the general theme of all her lectures. Once Shobi started on this topic, she’d never stop.

Ashna straightened up. Curried Dreams wasn’t what was tying her up in chains. Shobi was, and she always had with her promises of love that she kept just out of reach. Always. For Ashna’s whole life the woman had wielded those chains with ruthlessness.

Finally, in this moment, it hit Ashna why. It had been so Ashna would be here, waiting, when Shobi was finally ready to fix that neglected part of her life. Because Shobi had always set her priorities exactly the way she wanted them.

“You’re right,” Ashna said. “I do need to break the chains. Which is exactly why I’m not coming to India.”

“That makes no sense, Ashna. You’re stuck, don’t you see? You’ve been doing the same thing for—”

“I have a new job, Mom.”

No! Why on earth had she said that? Ashna wanted to wring Trisha’s and China’s combined necks for shoving stupid ideas in her head.

“You’re moving on from Curried Dreams?” The almost gleeful hope in Shobi’s voice strummed every one of Ashna’s overstretched nerves.

Baba’s been dead for twelve years, she wanted to scream. You can stop fighting with him now. “No, I’m not. But I’m going to be on a competitive cooking show as a pro chef.” Her voice sounded strong and clear for the first time since she’d heard Shobi’s hello. She leaned in and met her own eyes in the mirror.

“Reality TV? You?” The voice on the phone stretched between skepticism and outright disbelief.

Shobi’s favorite metaphorical chains stretched at the links around Ashna. “Yes. If I win I can pay down the debt on Curried Dreams. And no, I’m never giving up on it.”

The frustrated sound Shobi made was so delicious that for one lovely second Ashna didn’t care about anything else. “You are so Bram’s daughter. He was a great expert at cutting off his nose to spite his face.”

“Being Baba’s daughter is something I’m proud of.”

“Don’t I know it? But there’s no wisdom in ruining your life to stick it to me, child. Being punitive will get you nowhere.”

So, the gloves were off now. Their conversation arriving at its inevitable destination.

“Hard as it is to imagine, not every decision I make is motivated by you.”

“I know. It’s motivated by the guilt your father dumped on your head before leaving.”

Leaving. How clean she made death sound. Shobi had left. Baba had died.

“Thanks for that. I have to go.” She disconnected the call, finally doing what she should have done the moment she started to lose control of the conversation, long before letting her bath go cold. Then she pulled the plug and watched the water drain away.

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