CHAPTER 12

OJASWINI

That evening I made mushroom biryani.

Not the usual kind. Not the restaurant version I served at East to West — the one optimized for speed and consistency, the one that could feed forty covers in a night and still taste good enough for a four-star Zomato review. This was the other version. My version. The one I made on Sundays when the restaurant was closed and I cooked only for myself, with music playing and no clock ticking and no Swiggy driver waiting at the counter.

The mushrooms: porcini and shiitake, dried, rehydrated in warm water for thirty minutes. The soaking liquid — dark, fragrant, tasting of forest floor and umami — I saved for the masala. Fresh button mushrooms sliced thick, pan-seared in butter until their edges turned golden and their centers went from spongy to silky. The butter had to be real — Amul, unsalted, not the margarine substitute I used at the restaurant when costs were tight.

The rice: basmati aged eighteen months, from a shop in Crawford Market that my grandmother had bought from for forty years. Aged basmati is different from fresh — the grains are drier, harder, and when cooked they elongate without breaking, each grain separate and distinct, like tiny ivory pillars. I soaked it for exactly thirty minutes. Not twenty-five. Not thirty-five. Thirty. Because soaked too little and the grains crack when they hit the boiling water. Soaked too long and they absorb too much moisture and turn to mush.

Saffron: real Kashmiri, the threads dark red and fragrant, soaked in warm milk for exactly forty-five minutes. The milk turned the color of sunset — that specific shade of orange-gold that exists for three minutes each evening and then disappears. I measured the saffron by weight — 0.3 grams, roughly fifteen threads — because saffron is expensive and powerful and too much turns a dish from luxurious to medicinal.

Fried onions: three large onions, sliced thin, fried in oil on medium heat for forty minutes. You can't rush this. The first twenty minutes the onions go translucent. The next ten they start to color — pale gold, then amber. The last ten minutes is where the magic happens: the sugars caramelize, the edges darken to cherrywood brown, the kitchen fills with a sweetness that sits on the border between savory and confection. I spread them on paper towels. They'd keep their crunch for hours.

Whole garam masala: dry-roasted that morning in a cold pan — no oil, just heat and patience. Green cardamom pods, three. Cloves, six. A three-inch stick of true cinnamon (not cassia — true cinnamon is thinner, more delicate, rolls into itself like a scroll). A blade of mace, the color of dried blood. Two star anise, perfect eight-pointed stars that smelled like licorice and old wood.

I layered the pot — a heavy-bottomed degchi I'd found in the kitchen, the kind with a tight-fitting lid — with geometric precision. First: a layer of mushroom masala at the bottom, the gravy thick with coconut milk and the porcini soaking liquid. Then: rice, parboiled to 70% done, each grain distinct. Then: dots of saffron milk, creating islands of gold in a sea of white. Then: rose water — three drops, no more — the perfume ancient and sweet. Then: fried onions, scattered like confetti. Then: more rice. More masala. More saffron. More onions. Sealed the lid with dough — wheat flour and water kneaded into a rope and pressed around the rim, creating an airtight seal.

Dum. The lowest flame the stove could manage. The pot on a tawa to diffuse the heat further. Forty-five minutes. You don't open it. You don't check. You trust the process — the steam building inside, circulating, cooking the rice through, infusing every grain with saffron and rose and the deep, earthy sweetness of the mushrooms.

The kitchen filled with steam that leaked around the dough seal — steam that smelled like a Lucknowi wedding. Like the best memory you've ever had of food. Like someone else's grandmother's kitchen that you've never been to but somehow recognize.

Cooking is control. When everything else falls apart — when the man across the dinner table is someone who lied to your face for six weeks, when the island has no escape route and no phone signal, when the rain sounds like it's trying to dissolve the house from the outside in — you can control the flame. The seasoning. The exact moment the onions transform from translucent to gold. You can control the temperature of the oil and the thickness of the slice and the precise instant the saffron has steeped long enough. In a world that is chaotic and terrifying and full of married men who call themselves Rohit, the kitchen is the one place where the rules are fixed and the outcomes are predictable and your skill actually matters.

At 8 PM I carried the biryani to the dining room.

Tapsee had changed into a peacock-blue Banarasi sari, the zari work catching the chandelier light in threads of gold. Her hair was up. Pearl earrings. She looked like she'd dressed for a photograph — or a funeral, with different accessories. Deven wore a dark blazer over a white shirt, no tie, the collar open. His whiskey had been replaced with red wine — a Sula Shiraz, the label facing outward as if he wanted me to see the brand.

The chandelier — crystal, probably Venetian, probably worth more than my car — cast warm, amber light that softened every edge in the room. The dark wood panels. The oil paintings. The silver candelabras with new white candles. Everything looked like a painting. A painting of a dinner party where everyone is smiling and no one is telling the truth.

I placed the degchi on the table. The dough seal was golden and firm.

"Shall I?" I asked.

Tapsee nodded.

I cracked the dough seal with a spoon. The crust broke with a satisfying snap. The steam rose in a column — thick, white, fragrant — and the room filled instantly with saffron and rose and cardamom and that deep, mushroom-earth sweetness that you can't fake or shortcut. It's the smell of time. Of patience. Of forty-five minutes of dum where the cook stands in the kitchen and trusts that something beautiful is happening inside a pot she can't see into.

Tapsee closed her eyes. Her nostrils flared. Her lips parted.

"My god," she whispered.

Even Deven was quiet. His wine glass stopped halfway to his mouth. For one second, the mask dropped and I saw something genuine on his face — not appreciation exactly, but recognition. The recognition of someone who grew up with a mother who cooked.

I served them. The rice came out in layers — white, gold, brown — each grain separate, the mushrooms glistening. Raita with boondi and fresh mint from the garden. Mirchi ka salan on the side — the Hyderabadi green chili curry, peanut-sesame gravy, tangy and rich. A simple kachumber salad: raw onion, tomato, cucumber, a squeeze of lemon, a pinch of salt. The simplicity next to the complexity. The raw next to the cooked. The contrast that makes both halves better.

They ate in silence for three full minutes. Just the sound of spoons against china. The rain against the windows. The grandfather clock ticking in the hall.

"This is the best biryani I've ever had," Tapsee said. "And I've eaten at ITC Dum Pukht in Delhi. Twice."

I allowed myself a small smile. The smile of a chef who has done something worthy and knows it. "Thank you."

"Where did you train?" Deven asked. His voice had changed — softer, less performed. The food had done something to him. Food does that. Even to liars.

"I didn't. Not formally. My grandmother taught me the basics — the technique, the instinct, the andaaz. Everything else I learned by burning things and starting over."

Tapsee laughed. Real laughter — not the rehearsed social laugh from yesterday but the unguarded kind that starts in the belly and shakes the shoulders. For a moment the dining room felt warm. Safe. Like a real dinner party with real people who enjoyed each other's company.

Then Deven's phone buzzed.

Not the phone on the table — that one was silent, screen down. A different phone. From his blazer pocket. He pulled it out — a small black device, not an iPhone, something older or more utilitarian — and glanced at the screen.

His face changed. Not dramatically. A micro-expression — the kind that most people wouldn't notice but that I'd learned to read during my years of feeding people. His jaw tightened. His eyes went flat. The softness the biryani had put there evaporated like steam from an open pot.

"Excuse me," he said. Stood. Left the room. The black phone already at his ear before he cleared the doorway.

Tapsee watched him go. Her laughter evaporated with him.

"He's always doing that," she said quietly. She was staring at the empty doorway. At the space where he'd been.

"Work?"

"Who knows." She poured herself more wine. The bottle was almost empty. She'd had three glasses during dinner. "Dev has three phones. Business. Personal. And one I'm not supposed to know about."

She said it lightly. The way you say things you've said so many times they've lost their edges. But her hand was trembling. The wine sloshed in her glass.

"Tapsee—"

"Don't." She smiled. The rehearsed smile. The one she practiced. "It's fine. It's always fine. More biryani?"

I served her another portion. She ate mechanically, her eyes on the empty doorway, her jaw working through the food without tasting it. The biryani was wasted on her now. She was eating grief.

After dinner I cleaned the kitchen. Scrubbed every surface. Washed every pot. The rhythmic work of cleaning — steel wool against stainless steel, hot water scalding my forearms, the squeak of the wet cloth on marble — was meditative. Necessary. My brain needed the repetition the way a racing engine needs a lower gear.

Tapsee went to bed at 10. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, slow and uneven. The wine, probably.

Deven hadn't returned.

At 11 PM I was scrubbing the biryani pot — the degchi, heavy, copper-bottomed, the remnants of rice and masala crusted onto the sides — when I heard it.

Footsteps.

Above me. On the second floor.

Not Tapsee's room — that was on the west side. These footsteps were on the east side. Where the empty bedrooms were. The bedrooms with the locked doors and the dust on the handles and the mothball-and-lavender smell of rooms that hadn't been lived in for years.

Step. Step. Step.

Slow. Deliberate. The pace of someone who knows exactly where they're going.

Then silence.

I dried my hands on the dishcloth. Stood very still. The kitchen clock ticked. The rain tapped the windows. The house creaked around me — the sound of old wood settling, of stone and mortar adjusting to the temperature, of a building that had been standing for two hundred years and intended to stand for two hundred more.

Nothing.

Just the house breathing, I told myself. Old wood. Wind. The tunnels creating air currents that moved through the walls like the building's own circulatory system. Physics, Deven had said. Not paranormal.

But the footsteps had been real. I'd heard them — the specific, unmistakable sound of a heel striking a wooden floor, the weight transfer, the creak of a floorboard under a body. Not wind. Not the house settling. Footsteps.

I finished cleaning. Dried the degchi. Hung it on the rack. Wiped the counters one more time. Turned off the lights.

Went upstairs. The corridor was dark. My room was at the end — the last door on the left. I walked quickly. Didn't look at the other doors. Didn't think about the east wing.

Locked my door. The brass lock. The heavy, colonial-era mechanism that clicked into place with a sound like a small bone breaking.

Checked my phone.

No signal. The weather app — which had been working on cached data — showed the storm intensifying. Wind speeds 70 kmph. Rainfall 15 cm expected. The ferry wasn't running.

I put Sameer's business card on the nightstand. His handwriting. Neat, small letters. A phone number I couldn't call.

I stared at it until I fell asleep.

The last thing I thought before the darkness took me was: Who was walking in the east wing at 11 PM?

And the answer my brain offered, unbidden and unwelcome: Nobody. Because nobody else is on this island.

But that wasn't true. Was it?

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