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.