CHAPTER 6

OJASWINI

I made dal tadka. Bhindi masala. Jeera rice. Cucumber raita with mint from the garden.

Simple. Comfort food. The kind of meal that says I'm competent but not trying too hard. The kind that lets the ingredients do the talking instead of the technique.

The dal was my grandmother's recipe — yellow toor dal, pressure-cooked until it dissolved into silk, then hit with a tadka of ghee, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, dried red chilies, hing, and garlic sliced so thin it turned to gold lace in the hot fat. The bhindi I cut into coins, salted, left to dry on a towel for twenty minutes so the slime evaporated, then shallow-fried with turmeric and amchur until each piece was crisp enough to shatter. The jeera rice was aromatic with whole cumin bloomed in ghee, each grain separate, basmati that had been soaked for exactly thirty minutes.

And the raita — simple cucumber, whisked yogurt, roasted cumin powder, a handful of fresh mint from the garden out back that Tapsee had pointed out. The mint was wild, not cultivated — smaller leaves, more potent, the kind that stung your tongue with menthol.

I set the table in the dining room at 7:30. The room was enormous — a long teak table that could seat twenty, under a chandelier dripping with crystal that caught the light and scattered it across the ceiling like trapped starlight. The walls were dark wood paneled, hung with oil paintings of ships and storms and Portuguese merchants counting money. Silver candelabras on the sideboard. A grandfather clock in the corner that ticked with the authority of something that had been counting time since before India's independence.

At 7:45 I heard footsteps on the stairs.

Heavy. Confident. The footsteps of a man who owned every surface his shoes touched.

He appeared in the kitchen doorway.

Fifty. Maybe fifty-one — the birthday was tomorrow. Expensive watch. Not a smartwatch but an Omega, the kind that cost what I made in a year, the metal catching the kitchen light. Graying temples that somehow made him look more distinguished rather than old. Linen shirt — white, expensive, rolled to his elbows to reveal tanned forearms with a gold bracelet on his right wrist.

A gold bracelet.

My heart stopped.

Not metaphorically. Literally. I felt it stutter, miss a beat, then restart with a thud that vibrated through my entire chest. My hands, which had been arranging raita in a serving bowl, went rigid.

No.

No no no no—

He smiled.

"You must be Ojaswini."

I knew that smile.

I'd seen it across a table at Suzette in Bandra, over cortado coffees and sourdough toast. Six weeks of coffee dates that turned into dinner dates that turned into one disastrous night at a restaurant in Lower Parel where he'd told me his name was Rohit and he was thirty-eight and he ran a small startup in Andheri — something about data analytics, he'd said, waving his hand vaguely, the gold bracelet catching the candlelight.

Six weeks. Forty-two days. During which he'd listened to me talk about my restaurant with what I'd thought was genuine interest. During which he'd held my hand across the table and told me I was the most passionate person he'd ever met. During which he'd kissed me once, outside Suzette, in the rain, his lips warm and his hands on my waist and the taste of coffee between us.

All lies.

Every moment. Every word. Every carefully performed gesture of intimacy.

Because I'd found out. A friend of Riddhi's had seen his photo on my phone and said, "Wait — isn't that Deven Shrivastav? The Sentinel AI guy? My cousin works there." And I'd Googled the name and seen the face and the wife and the company and the ₹450 crore net worth and realized that Rohit, 38, small startup was actually Deven, 50, married tech billionaire.

I'd confronted him at our next dinner. He'd tried to explain. I'd taken the gold bracelet he'd given me as a gift — a ₹75,000 bracelet that I'd thought was from some Andheri boutique but was actually from Tanishq — and dropped it into his dal makhani.

The look on his face. The splash. The waiter's expression.

I'd walked out. Blocked his number. Blocked his LinkedIn. Tried to delete six weeks of memory from my brain the way you delete a bad Zomato review — by pretending it never existed.

"I'm Deven," he said now. Extended his hand. "Thank you so much for coming on such short notice."

My brain was white noise. Static. The sound of every warning siren I'd ever ignored firing simultaneously.

This was Tapsee's husband.

The tech billionaire.

The man I'd dated for six weeks under a fake name.

The man whose gold bracelet was probably still somewhere at the bottom of a dal makhani bowl in Lower Parel.

The man whose face I'd tried to forget and couldn't because he was standing in front of me in a kitchen on an island in the middle of the Arabian Sea and there was nowhere to run.

"Ojaswini?" Tapsee appeared behind him. Her hand on his shoulder. Her wedding ring catching the light — a diamond the size of a pea. "Everything okay?"

I forced my throat to work. Forced my face into the professional smile I'd practiced a thousand times across the counter at East to West. The smile that said everything is fine even when the kitchen is on fire.

"Yes. Sorry. Long day. The drive, the boat — I'm just tired."

Deven's smile didn't flicker. "Of course. Well, everything smells incredible." He inhaled. "Is that jeera rice?"

"And dal tadka. Bhindi masala. Raita."

"Perfect." He clasped his hands. "Simple and beautiful. Just like my mother used to make."

He didn't recognize me.

Or he was pretending not to.

He was wearing the same cologne. That's the detail that nearly broke me — the same expensive, woody cologne he'd worn on our dates, the scent that had clung to my kurta after he'd kissed me outside Suzette. It flooded my sinuses now, mixed with the smell of ghee and cumin from the kitchen, and my stomach turned.

I served dinner in the dining room. The long teak table under the crystal chandelier. Candles lit. Tapsee had changed into a cream silk top. Deven poured wine — a Sula Chenin Blanc, like they were at a Bandra restaurant and not on a rock in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

They ate. Complimented the food. Tapsee asked about my restaurant — how long I'd been open, what my most popular dish was, whether Zomato was "killing small restaurants the way everyone says." Deven asked how I'd learned to cook. Who taught me. Where I grew up.

I answered on autopilot. Polite. Professional. The well-rehearsed answers I gave every customer who asked.

The entire time my brain was screaming.

He knows. He must know. He's sitting ten feet away eating my food and pretending we've never met and either he's the best actor in India or he genuinely doesn't recognize the woman he dated for six weeks three months ago.

They didn't touch each other. Not once during the entire meal. No hand on the arm. No shared glance. No accidental brush of fingers. They sat at opposite ends of a table designed for twenty and ate my food in a silence that felt less like companionship and more like a ceasefire.

At 9 PM I excused myself. Cleared the dishes. Washed up in the kitchen — the rhythmic scrub of steel wool against the dal pot, the hot water scalding my wrists, the simple violence of cleaning as therapy.

Went upstairs. Locked my door. The brass lock clicked into place with a sound that should have been reassuring but wasn't.

Sat on the bed.

Pulled out my phone.

No signal. No Wi-Fi. No connection to anyone or anything outside this island.

I was trapped.

On an island with no escape route, no phone signal, no way to contact anyone.

With my lying ex-boyfriend and his wife.

And no one in the world knew where I was.

I stared at the ceiling. The mosquito netting swayed in a draft I couldn't feel. The rain hammered the window. The house breathed around me — creaking, settling, the sound of old wood holding old secrets.

Get through the weekend. Get paid. Get out.

I said it like a mantra. Repeated it until the words lost meaning.

But somewhere underneath the mantra, in the part of my brain that counted onions and measured salt and knew — always knew — when something was wrong with the balance of a dish, a question was forming.

Why was I really here?

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