Chapter 2: Anushka / Tayyari (Preparation)

# Chapter 2: Anushka / Tayyari (Preparation)

Argument with Tara happened that evening, over reheated dal and cold rotis.

"She said come alone," Anushka repeated for the third time, pressing her thumb against a grain of rice stuck to the steel thali. The kitchen's single tube light buzzed above them, casting that particular blue-white glow that made everything look slightly clinical. Tara's frown deeper, Anushka's dark circles more pronounced, the crack in the wall behind the gas cylinder more jagged than it actually was.

"And you're just going to listen? Some stranger tells you to come alone to another state and you're like, haan ji, bilkul?" Tara tore a piece of roti with more force than the bread deserved. "Anu, this isn't a Netflix show. You don't just hop on a bus to Goa because a woman you've never met tells you to."

"She's not a stranger. She's my maasi."

"She's a DNA match on a ₹4,999 app. That's not the same thing."

Anushka pushed her thali away. The steel scraped against the Formica tabletop. A sound that always made her teeth ache, like nails on a blackboard but domestic. "What do you want me to do, Tara? Ignore it? Pretend the email never came?"

"I want you to be smart about it. Take me with you. Or at least tell Aai."

"She said alone."

"She said a lot of things in a two-minute phone call. That doesn't make them gospel."

They ate in silence for a while. Through the kitchen window, the one that opened onto the building's light well, offering a view of the opposite flat's bathroom ventilator and nothing else, Anushka could hear Mrs. Kulkarni on the third floor yelling at her son about his board exam marks. The sound carried in these old Dadar buildings, travelling through pipes and shafts and the gaps between window frames, so that everyone knew everyone else's business whether they wanted to or not.

"I'll tell Aai I'm going to Goa for a short holiday," Anushka said finally. "She doesn't need to know the rest. Not yet."

"And if something goes wrong?"

"What's going to go wrong? I'm going to a restaurant in Fontainhas. It's literally the most tourist-heavy area in Panjim."

Tara put her fork down. She'd been eating dal-chawal with a fork since she was twelve, one of those small rebellions against tradition that their mother had given up fighting. "Promise me you'll share your live location the entire time."

"Done."

"And call me every night."

"Obviously."

"And if this Sulochana woman says anything that feels off, anything at all, you leave. You get on a bus and come home."

"Tara."

"Promise me."

Anushka reached across the table and hooked her pinky finger around Tara's. The way they'd done since they were children. Before Anushka understood what adoption meant, before Tara understood why her sister looked nothing like either parent, before any of it mattered. "Promise."

---

The next morning, Anushka cancelled three days of piano lessons.

This required six phone calls, each more uncomfortable than the last. Mrs. Mehta was understanding ("Take rest, beta, you work too hard"). Mrs. Joshi was annoyed ("Again? This is the second time this month"). Mrs. Kapadia was suspicious ("You're not sick, are you? My Riya can't afford to miss lessons before the Trinity exam"). Mrs. Patwardhan didn't answer, which was a mercy. The Deshmukh household, Charu's parents, required a fifteen-minute conversation with Charu's grandmother, who wanted to know if Anushka was getting married ("At your age, it's time, na?").

The sixth call was to Aai.

Mandakini Bhosale answered on the first ring, as she always did, because she kept her phone in the pocket of her housecoat at all times and had the ringer volume set to maximum despite having perfectly adequate hearing. "Anu? Everything okay? It's only nine o'clock. You never call before your first student."

"Everything's fine, Aai. I'm going to Goa for a few days."

That pause. Anushka could hear the television in the background. Some Marathi serial with dramatic background music and a woman sobbing. "Goa? With whom?"

"Alone. Just a short trip. Change of scenery."

"Alone? Since when do you go anywhere alone? You don't even go to Crawford Market alone."

"That's because Crawford Market is terrifying, Aai. Goa is different."

"Goa is full of foreigners and cheap liquor."

"It's also full of churches and bebinca and beaches. I'll be fine."

Another pause. The sobbing woman on TV had been replaced by what sounded like a plate breaking. "Is this about the DNA test?"

Anushka's stomach dropped. She gripped the phone tighter, feeling the silicone case press into the ridges of her fingers. "How did you, "

"Tara told me. Months ago. When you sent the sample." Mandakini's voice was even, careful — the voice she used when discussing her own health with doctors, when she wanted to appear calm despite being anything but. "I'm not upset, Anu. I told you years ago — if you ever wanted to find them, I'd support you."

"I know. I just. I didn't want you to worry."

"I'm your mother. Worrying is my full-time job. The dialysis is just my side hustle." A small laugh, the kind that was mostly breath and barely audible. "Did you find someone?"

"An aunt. In Goa. She wants to meet me."

"Then go." No hesitation. No wavering. "Go and meet her. And Anu?"

"Yes?"

"Take a sweater. The buses are always too cold."

---

A Kadamba Transport Corporation bus departed from Mumbai Central at 10:30 PM and was scheduled to arrive in Panjim at 8:00 AM. Anushka had booked a sleeper berth — ₹1,800, upper section, window side — because she knew she wouldn't sleep and at least the window would give her something to look at.

She packed light. One backpack: two kurtas, one pair of jeans, underwear, her phone charger, a paperback she'd been meaning to read for six months (Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, because something about islands and water and searching for things felt appropriate), a packet of Parle-G biscuits, and a water bottle. She wore her most comfortable kolhapuri chappals, the ones with the worn-down soles that Tara kept threatening to throw away.

Tara drove her to Mumbai Central on the back of her Activa, weaving through the late-evening traffic on Senapati Bapat Marg. The air was thick with exhaust and the last heat of the day, the kind that rose from asphalt and clung to skin like a film. They didn't talk much during the ride. Tara's helmet pressed against the back of Anushka's head at every red light, a familiar, steadying weight.

At the bus stand, Tara killed the engine and sat on the Activa with her arms crossed while Anushka checked her ticket on her phone. The departure bay was crowded — families with too much luggage, young men in groups heading somewhere loud, a grandmother in a nine-yard saree being helped up the steps of a non-AC bus by a granddaughter who looked about sixteen.

"Location sharing is on?" Tara asked.

"On."

"Phone charged?"

"Ninety-two percent."

"Pepper spray?"

"In the front pocket."

"I love you."

"I love you too. Stop acting like I'm going to war."

Tara's mouth twitched. "You're going to meet someone who might tell you things that change how you see yourself. That's harder than war."

Anushka didn't have a response to that. She hugged her sister — tight, the kind of hug where you can feel the other person's ribs and heartbeat through two layers of cotton — and then climbed the steps of the KTC sleeper bus without looking back, because if she looked back she'd see Tara's face doing that thing where it tried to be brave and wasn't, and then she'd lose her nerve entirely.

Her berth was narrow and smelled faintly of phenyl and old upholstery. The window was smudged with fingerprints from a hundred previous passengers. She lay on her back with her backpack as a pillow and watched Mumbai dissolve — first the streetlights of the Western Express Highway, then the dimmer glow of Thane, then the scattered lights of Navi Mumbai, and finally, darkness.

The bus hummed. The engine vibrated through the thin mattress and into her spine, a low-frequency tremor that should have been uncomfortable but somehow wasn't. Anushka pressed her palm flat against the berth's surface and felt the vibration travel through her hand, up her forearm, into her shoulder. She was moving. Toward something. Away from something else.

She didn't sleep, as predicted. She lay in the dark with her eyes open, listening to the bus's mechanical breathing and the occasional snore from the berth below, and tried to imagine what Sulochana Naik looked like. Was she tall? Short? Did she have Anushka's nose. The slightly too-wide nose that didn't match Mandakini's sharp Brahmin features, the nose that had been Anushka's first clue, at age nine, that something about her family's story didn't add up?

The Konkan coast unspooled outside the window. She couldn't see it in the dark, but she knew it was there. The Arabian Sea somewhere to the left, the Sahyadri ghats to the right, and between them the narrow ribbon of Highway 66, threading through towns with names that sounded like they belonged in songs: Chiplun, Ratnagiri, Sawantwadi.

At 3 AM, the bus stopped at a highway dhaba for a fifteen-minute break. Anushka climbed down on stiff legs and stood in the gravel parking lot, breathing air that smelled different from Mumbai. Less diesel, more earth, with a salt undertone that meant the sea was close. She bought a cutting chai from a sleepy-eyed boy behind a counter, the glass so hot she had to hold it by the rim. The chai was too sweet and too strong and exactly what she needed. She drank it in five sips and the warmth spread through her chest like a hand pressing against her sternum from the inside.

She got back on the bus. The remaining hours passed in a blur of half-thoughts and highway noise and the slow lightening of the sky outside her smudged window. First grey, then pink, then the pale gold of a Konkan morning.

At 7:47 AM, the bus crossed the Mandovi River bridge and entered Panjim.

---

Panjim in the morning was nothing like Mumbai in the morning.

Mumbai woke up screaming — horns, vendors, trains, the city hitting the ground running at five AM and never stopping. Panjim woke up slowly, like someone stretching after a good night's sleep. The streets were quiet. The buildings were painted in colours that shouldn't have worked together, ochre and sky blue, terracotta and mint green, salmon pink and cream — but somehow did, as if the entire city had been designed by someone who understood that beauty didn't require permission.

Anushka stood outside the Kadamba bus stand with her backpack on one shoulder, blinking in the early light. The air here was different. Lighter. It carried the Mandovi River's brackish smell, the distant tang of fish markets, and underneath it all, a sweetness she couldn't identify — frangipani, maybe, or ripe jackfruit from someone's garden.

She pulled out her phone and opened Google Maps. Fontainhas was a twenty-minute walk from the bus stand, according to the blue dotted line on her screen. She could take an auto, there were several idling by the stand, their drivers calling out destinations like auctioneers, but she wanted to walk. She wanted to arrive at Sulochana's Kitchen on her own feet, having crossed the distance herself, so that when she walked through the door she could tell herself she'd earned the right to be there.

The walk took her through the heart of Panjim — past the Immaculate Conception Church with its white zigzag staircase climbing the hill like a wedding cake, past the Mahalaxmi Temple where an old woman was already lighting incense, past small shops just beginning to raise their shutters. The shopkeepers moved with that particular unhurried Goan rhythm that Anushka found both alien and deeply appealing. Nobody was rushing. Nobody was elbowing past anyone else. A man on a bicycle pedalled slowly down the middle of the road, and a car behind him simply waited, without honking once.

She turned into Fontainhas and the world shifted again.

The Latin Quarter was a maze of narrow streets lined with Portuguese-era houses, their facades painted in shades of blue and yellow and red, their balconies dripping with bougainvillea and ferns. The doors were tall, taller than any doors Anushka had seen in Mumbai's matchbox flats, with ornate iron knockers and wooden shutters thrown open to catch the morning air. Through the open windows, she could see ceiling fans and old furniture and the occasional flash of a television screen.

Sulochana's Kitchen was on Rua de Natal, a street so narrow that two people walking abreast would have to turn sideways to let a third pass. The restaurant occupied the ground floor of a yellow house with green shutters and a hand-painted sign, SULOCHANA'S KITCHEN in red letters on white, with smaller text underneath in Konkani script that Anushka couldn't read.

A front door was closed but not locked. A laminated sign taped to the glass read: Open 12 PM – 10 PM. Closed Mondays.

It was 8:23 AM on a Thursday.

Anushka stood in front of the closed door and felt the accumulated courage of the ten-hour bus ride begin to drain out of her, pooling at her feet like water from a wrung cloth. She'd arrived too early. Of course she'd arrived too early. She always arrived too early. For concerts, for lessons, for doctor's appointments. Tara called it her "anxious punctuality."

She stepped back from the door and looked up and down the street. The lane was empty except for a ginger cat sitting on a windowsill two houses down, watching her with the supreme disinterest of all cats everywhere. A clothes line strung between two balconies overhead held a row of white cotton bedsheets that stirred in a breeze Anushka couldn't feel at ground level.

She could wait. She could find a cafe, drink coffee, kill three and a half hours until noon. That was the sensible thing to do.

But her feet didn't move toward sensible. They moved toward the restaurant's side alley, a narrow passage between the yellow house and its neighbour, just wide enough for a person to walk through. She didn't know why she went that way. Instinct, maybe. Or curiosity. Or the sound she'd just heard, the clatter of pots, faint but unmistakable, coming from somewhere behind the building.

The alley opened into a small courtyard. A door to what was clearly the kitchen stood ajar. Through the gap, Anushka could see stainless steel surfaces, a massive gas burner, and the back of a woman who was doing something rhythmic with a knife, thak thak thak thak, the sound of onions being reduced to submission.

Anushka knocked on the doorframe. The woman didn't turn around.

"Kitchen band aahe," the woman said in Marathi without looking up. Kitchen is closed. "Baara vaajta ya." Come at twelve.

"Sulochana ji?"

Knife stopped.

Woman turned.

She was perhaps sixty. Perhaps older — it was hard to tell. She had the kind of face that had been beautiful once and was now something better: lived-in, textured, a face that held stories the way a riverbed holds stones. Her hair was mostly grey, pulled back in a loose bun held with a single pin. She wore a faded cotton saree, the kind Goan women wore at home, draped in the Kunbi style with the pallu tucked at the back — and a cooking apron over it. Her hands were wet with onion juice. Her eyes, when they met Anushka's, were the colour of dark coffee.

And they were, unmistakably, Anushka's eyes.

The same shape. The same depth. The same way the left eye narrowed slightly more than the right when processing something unexpected — a trait Anushka had always thought was uniquely hers, a glitch in her personal wiring, until this moment, when she saw it mirrored in a stranger's face across a kitchen that smelled of onion and coconut oil and something green, like curry leaves just pulled from a branch.

Sulochana set the knife down on the cutting board. Wiped her hands on her apron. Looked at Anushka for a long time without speaking. Not the stare of someone who didn't know what to say, but the gaze of someone who was deciding, carefully and deliberately, where to begin.

"Tu Anushka?"

"Haan."

Sulochana's jaw tightened. Her nostrils flared once — a single, controlled breath. Then she crossed the kitchen in four strides, took Anushka's face in both her hands, hands that were rough and warm and smelled of raw onion and hing — and held it the way you hold something fragile that you've been looking for.

"Tujha awaaz," she said again, the same words from the phone call. Your voice. "Tujha awaaz ekdum Shalini sarkha aahe."

Your voice sounds exactly like Shalini's.

Anushka's throat closed. "Who is Shalini?"

Sulochana's hands didn't leave her face. Her thumbs traced Anushka's cheekbones — left, then right — as if confirming something by touch that her eyes had already verified.

"Shalini is my sister," Sulochana said. "Your mother."