CHAPTER 8

OJASWINI

I didn't sleep.

Not a minute. Not a second of that merciful blackness where the brain stops replaying and starts resting. I lay on the four-poster bed with the mosquito netting draped around me like a shroud, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain, and running the same reel over and over:

Deven's face across the table at Suzette. The cortado coffees. The way he'd said Hi, I'm Rohit with that self-deprecating smile, like he was apologizing in advance for being boring. The way he'd asked me about my restaurant and actually listened — not the performative listening of someone waiting for their turn to talk, but the leaning-forward, eye-contact, asking-follow-up-questions kind of listening that made you feel like the most interesting person in Mumbai. The way he'd touched my wrist when I told him about my grandmother's puranpoli, his thumb pressing the thin skin over my pulse point, and said, "You don't just cook. You remember."

All of it calculated. All of it a performance. Every question designed to extract information. Every touch calibrated to build trust. The entire six-week courtship was a con job — and I'd fallen for it because I was lonely and broke and twenty-eight and nobody had looked at me like that in years.

The humiliation was worse than the betrayal. The betrayal I could rationalize — married men lie, water is wet, the sun rises in the east. But the humiliation? That was mine. I'd let myself believe. I'd told him about the restaurant debt and my father's disappointment and the Swiggy commissions eating me alive. I'd given him ammunition.

And now I was on his island, in his house, cooking his food, and the ammunition was loaded.

I got up at 5 AM. The sky was still dark — that pre-dawn darkness that in Mumbai would be broken by streetlights and auto headlights and the glow of a million phones, but here was absolute. Complete. The kind of darkness that existed before electricity, when people navigated by the feel of walls and the memory of rooms.

I went downstairs. The staircase creaked under my bare feet. Every step sounded like a confession — here I am, here I am, here I am. The house was dark and silent except for the rain, which had eased from last night's assault to a steady, persistent drizzle. The kind that feels permanent. The kind that makes you wonder if the sky forgot how to stop or simply decided not to.

The kitchen was my safe space. Always had been.

When my parents fought about money — which was every Sunday after my father checked the bank statement and found another Swiggy bill, another Amazon order, another ₹500 my mother had given to the temple without asking — I cooked. When my first boyfriend, Akash, left me for a girl from his CA coaching class who was "more serious about her career" — I cooked. When I dropped out of my MBA program at Symbiosis, two semesters in, ₹4 lakhs of tuition already spent, and my father didn't speak to me for three weeks — I cooked.

Cooking was the only thing that had never betrayed me. Heat is honest. Salt doesn't lie. The Maillard reaction happens at 140°C whether you're heartbroken or not.

I pulled out flour, ghee, cardamom from the pantry. Found the chana dal in the glass jars on the spice rack. Started soaking it in warm water.

Puranpoli. The Maharashtrian flatbread stuffed with sweet chana dal paste, flavored with cardamom and nutmeg, the dough enriched with turmeric and a thread of saffron if you had it (and this kitchen had it — the real Kashmiri kind, not the fake Iranian stuff they sold at Crawford Market). My aaji — my grandmother — used to make puranpoli on Ganesh Chaturthi in her Kolhapur kitchen, the stone floor cool under my bare feet, the brass lamps lit in the puja room next door, the smell of jaggery melting into the dal filling so sweet it made my eyes water.

I pressure-cooked the chana dal. Three whistles. Drained it. Mashed it with jaggery — not refined sugar, never refined sugar, my aaji would have disowned me — until the mixture was smooth and fragrant, the jaggery caramelizing slightly against the heat of the dal. Cardamom. A pinch of nutmeg. A thread of saffron dissolved in warm milk.

The dough was simple: wheat flour, turmeric, salt, oil, warm water. I kneaded it until it was soft and pliable, the kind of dough that forgives bad technique — you can roll it too thin or too thick and it still works, still puffs on the tawa, still holds the sweetness inside without breaking.

I rolled. Filled. Sealed. The rhythm was meditative — ancient, repetitive, the muscle memory of a hundred Ganesh Chaturthis. Roll the dough into a circle. Place a ball of filling in the center. Fold the edges over. Seal. Roll again — gently, gently, the filling wants to escape but you hold it in, flattening with steady pressure until the circle is thin enough to see light through but thick enough to hold.

Fry on the tawa with ghee. The sizzle when the dough hits the hot surface. The bubbles forming, browning, the smell of ghee and jaggery and cardamom filling the kitchen until the air itself tasted sweet.

By 6:30 I had a stack of twelve puranpolis — golden, fragrant, each one slightly different in shape because handmade things carry the signature of the hands that made them. A pot of masala chai — Assam tea, boiled with ginger sliced thick, crushed cardamom, a cinnamon stick, milk, sugar. And a plan.

The plan was: cook. Get paid. Leave. Never speak of this weekend again.

I heard footsteps. Light ones. Hesitant. The footsteps of someone who wasn't sure they wanted to be where they were going.

Tapsee appeared in the doorway. She was wearing silk pajamas — pale blue, clearly expensive, the kind that had a matching robe you were supposed to wear but she hadn't bothered. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, dark and thick, not the sleek blow-dried curtain from yesterday but the real thing — slightly wavy, slightly frizzy from the humidity. Without makeup, she looked younger. And older at the same time. Tired. Dark circles that concealer usually hid were visible now, purple-grey shadows under her eyes like bruises.

"Is that chai?" she asked. Her voice was small. Morning-voice small.

"Fresh. Want some?"

She sat on the kitchen stool. Folded herself onto it — knees tucked up, arms wrapped around herself, making herself as small as possible. I poured her a cup. Our fingers touched on the handoff — hers were ice cold. Not cool, not room temperature. Ice cold. Despite the June heat. Despite the kitchen warmth from the tawa.

"Can't sleep," she said. "I never can in this house. The noises."

"What noises?"

"The house talks." She blew across the surface of her chai, her breath making tiny ripples in the brown liquid. "Old wood. The sea underneath the cliffs. Sometimes I think I hear footsteps upstairs when no one's there. Moving through the empty bedrooms. Back and forth. Back and forth."

I watched her. The way she held the cup — both hands wrapped around it, fingers interlaced, like she was praying to the chai for warmth.

"Have you been coming here long?"

"Seven years. Since Dev bought it." She sipped. Winced. "He loves it. Says it's his sanctuary. I hate it. Too far from everything. No signal. No people. No restaurants. No galleries. No life. Just him and the sea and this—" She gestured at the walls, at the ceiling, at the entire two-hundred-year-old colonial edifice surrounding us. "This monument to his ego."

Something flickered across her face. Not boredom. Not annoyance. Contempt. Pure, concentrated contempt, the kind that takes years of marriage to distill.

"Why host his birthday here then?"

Tapsee smiled. It was the smile of someone who'd been rehearsing. The smile you practice in the mirror before a party where you'll see your husband's ex-colleagues and have to pretend you're happy.

"Because he asked. And I'm a good wife."

The silence between us was filled with things she wasn't saying. I could feel them — the words pressing against the inside of her throat like steam in a pressure cooker.

"These are wonderful," she said, biting into a puranpoli. Her eyes closed. "My god. The sweetness. It's not sugar?"

"Jaggery and chana dal. My grandmother's recipe."

"You're Maharashtrian."

"Pune. Born and raised."

"That explains it." She looked at me properly for the first time — not the quick social scan from yesterday but a real look, the kind that takes in more than appearance. "You have that Pune thing. That... stubbornness. That refusal to pretend things are fine when they're not."

I almost laughed. "My mother calls it pagalpan."

"My mother calls it survival." Tapsee's eyes softened. For a moment — just a moment — the mask slipped and underneath was someone I recognized. Not a socialite. Not a billionaire's wife. Just a woman drowning in something she couldn't name, reaching for the surface with fingers that were too cold to grip.

Then Deven walked in.

"Good morning." His voice preceded him — rich, confident, the voice of a man who'd never entered a room wondering if he belonged there. He was in a crisp white kurta, hand-stitched, probably Fabindia's premium line. Hair combed. Face freshly shaved. Smelling like expensive aftershave — the same woody, spiced scent from last night. From three months ago. From six weeks of lies.

"Is that puranpoli? I haven't had proper puranpoli since—"

He stopped.

His eyes locked on mine. And this time there was no pretending. No performance. No billionaire smoothness. For one second — one raw, unguarded second — I saw recognition. Not surprise. Not confusion. Recognition. The slow, settling awareness of a man who is looking at something he expected to find exactly where he put it.

"Since my mother used to make it," he finished. But the pause had been too long. The sentence had cracked in the middle, and what leaked through the crack was the truth.

He knew who I was.

He'd known all along.

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