Boom.
Trisha and China stared at Ashna with all the gleeful expectation of friends who had you perfectly cornered.
“Of course you’ll find a chef to replace DJ. Chefs have to be scrambling to get on your show.”
“Like who? We start shooting in less than a month. How will I run auditions before the announcement in one day?”
“How about . . .” Ashna racked her brains. Why oh why hadn’t she worked harder to network with her peers? She wanted to help. Truly, she did.
“You know how hot DJ is,” Trisha said.
“We need someone hot and talented,” China said.
“I can’t think of anyone—”
“We can,” they both said in a perfectly delusional symphony. “You, Ashna.”
A giant ball of laughter gathered inside Ashna and came tumbling out like an avalanche. “Very funny. No, really, you guys are hilarious,” she said between hiccupping and—bordering on maniacal—laughter. “Hil-fucking-arious.” She pressed her hands into her sternum. Her heart felt like it was going to explode. And she couldn’t stop laughing.
Identical worried frowns creased Trisha and China’s foreheads. Ashna couldn’t remember the last time this panic-fueled laughing fit had happened to her.
China brought her water.
“Do you need a paper bag?” Trisha asked.
Ashna shook her head and sucked in several deep breaths. It took a few moments, but she forced the laughter to subside. “What are you going to introduce me as? ‘Ashna Raje, owner and executive chef of the soon-to-be-foreclosed Curried Dreams?’”
“But if you do this, there will be no foreclosing. They’ll pay you a signing amount, and the prize for winning is a hundred grand. Think about the exposure Curried Dreams will get!” China swept an arm around the room. “You’ll be able to make repairs, freshen things up.”
It stands for decrepitude and dated recipes.
Another spurt of laughter burst out of Ashna. She pressed her lips together as tightly as she could.
Trisha nudged the glass of water toward her. “Calm down and think about this without freaking out.”
Too late. Ashna forced herself to focus on the cold glass in her hand, at the mosaic lamps hanging from the ceiling, the jasmine diffuser scenting the air. She grounded herself one sight, one sound, one smell at a time. The laughter died out, but her heart still galloped in her chest.
“Okay?” Trisha asked, studying Ashna’s pupils in her doctorly way.
Ashna pushed her away. “I’m fine, but you’re both insane.”
“Why is helping your two best friends in the whole world, and yourself, insane? Why?” Trisha said, her usual relentless self. “You know what’s insane?”
“If you give me the ‘definition of insanity’ line right now, I will strangle you with my bare hands,” Ashna snapped.
“Okay, I won’t. But look at you, Ashi, you’ve been doing the same things for the past ten years and it hasn’t helped. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing something. Doing just one thing differently.”
Ashna didn’t bother to hold back her groan. “I can’t.”
The idea of cooking in front of a camera made Ashna want to bring up her dinner, bring up all the dinners she’d ever eaten. She wished she could explain why to them. But how could she explain something she didn’t understand? How could she explain the ugly panic that choked her when she tried to cook anything but Baba’s recipes? All she had was how her loved ones saw her, as strong, in control. A little bullheaded, but capable. Easy Ashna. Dependable Ashna. If that went away, all she’d be was the girl to pity, to tiptoe around.
Been there. Never going back.
“I’m begging,” China said, standing up. “At least take the night to think about it.”
I can’t. But she didn’t know how to repeat it. Not with the dogged hope sparkling on their faces.
Chapter Two
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.