Chapter 17: Anushka / Neela Darwaza (Blue Door)

# Chapter 17: Anushka / Neela Darwaza (Blue Door)

The café was called Casa do Bolo.

It occupied the ground floor of a Portuguese-era house on Rua de Natal. The same street where Sulochana lived, three houses down, close enough that Anushka could see the yellow paint and the ginger cats from the café's window. A door was blue, as Prahlad had promised. The cat on the windowsill was grey and white and asleep, as cats on windowsills universally were, performing the ancient cat duty of occupying a sunny surface and doing nothing on it.

Anushka arrived at 10:55. Five minutes early, because she was a person who arrived five minutes early for everything. Lessons, appointments, trains, dates that were not dates but were also, possibly, dates. She was wearing the green kurta (Tara had won, as Tara always won in matters of clothing) with silver jhumka earrings that Mandakini had given her for her twenty-fifth birthday, and she had sent Tara a photograph from the bus, and Tara had responded with a string of thumbs-up emojis and the text: Green was right. Earrings were right. I am always right. Report back by noon or I'm calling the Goa police.

The café interior was small. Six tables, mismatched chairs, walls the colour of old cream. A glass counter held pastries, bolo de coco (coconut cake, the Goan kind, dense and sweet and golden), bebinca slices, dodol, and something that looked like a Portuguese pastel de nata but was, according to the handwritten card in front of it, a Goan pastéis de Santa Cruz, which was the same thing with a different name and a centuries-old argument about origin.

Prahlad was already there. Sitting at the table by the window, next to the sleeping cat, with two cups of coffee in front of him. Not the espresso-machine coffee of a Mumbai café but the filter coffee of a Goan café, dark, strong, served in ceramic cups that had been in service since approximately the fall of the Portuguese Estado da India.

"You're early," he said.

"You're earlier."

"I've been here since ten. I come here every Tuesday. Bosco — the owner — knows my order. He had the coffee ready before I sat down." He pushed one of the cups toward her. "I ordered for you. If that's presumptuous, blame Rhea. She told me you drink your coffee black."

"Rhea told you correctly. Rhea tells everyone everything. She has the information security of a public library."

"An apt metaphor. She also told me you play Chopin when you're thinking, Debussy when you're sad, and Satie when you're pretending to be fine." He tilted his head. "Which one are you today?"

"Today I'm — none of the above. Today I might be something new."

"That sounds like Ravel."

"Ravel?"

"Ravel is the composer you play when you don't know what you're feeling but you know it's interesting. Debussy is water. Chopin is longing. Satie is distance. Ravel is — curiosity."

"You've mapped the entire Romantic and Impressionist canon onto emotional states."

"I've had a lot of Tuesdays at this café. A man has to occupy his mind somehow."

She drank the coffee. It was good, bitter in the way that good coffee was bitter, the bitterness that was not unpleasant but essential, the flavour that told you the beans had been roasted with attention and brewed with patience. The ceramic cup was warm in her hands. café was warm. Sun came through the window and fell on the table and on the sleeping cat and on Prahlad's hands, which were resting on the table, the pianist's hands that she'd watched for ninety minutes at the Kala Academy and was now watching again, in a different context, at a different distance.

"Tell me about your students," Prahlad said. "The Starbucks story. You promised context."

So she told him. About Pallavi Joshi, thirty-four, IT professional, who had heard a piece in a Starbucks in BKC and cried. About the search for the crying piece. The process of elimination, the narrowing, the detective work of playing snippets on the phone and asking "Was it this? Was it this?" until Pallavi's eyes widened and her hand went to her chest and she said: "That. That's the one."

"What was it?"

"Satie. Gymnopédie No. 1."

"Of course it was. Satie is the gateway drug. Everyone's first classical music cry is Satie."

"What was yours?"

"Chopin. Ballade No. 1 in G minor. I was fourteen. My teacher played it at a recital in Mapusa. I sat in the audience and I felt my chest, " He put his hand on his sternum, the same gesture Shalini had made that morning. "Contract. Like the music was physically squeezing my heart. I went home and told my mother I wanted to play piano. She said: 'You already play piano.' And I said: 'No. I want to play piano the way that man played piano. I want to make someone's chest do what mine just did.'"

"And? Have you?"

"Last night. Your mother. During the bridge of the mando. Her voice broke open and I saw the audience's bodies change. Their posture shifted. They leaned forward. Their faces. Opened. That's the chest thing. That's what the Chopin did to me. And your mother did it with a Konkani folk song and no formal training."

"She'd hate that description. She'd say she was just singing."

"That's what makes it true. The people who make your chest contract never know they're doing it. If they knew, they'd be performers. They're not performers. They're — conduits."

"Conduits for what?"

"For the thing that music carries. The emotion that has no name. The feeling that exists before language, the one that babies feel before they can speak, the one that old people feel after they've forgotten how. Music is the, the pre-verbal and the post-verbal. It's the thing that exists on both sides of language. And your mother's voice accesses it."

Anushka looked at him. The coffee cooled in her hands. The cat on the windowsill shifted, resettled, resumed its committed unconsciousness.

"You're very articulate about this."

"I teach at a university. Articulacy is a professional requirement."

"No. I mean — you're articulate about the emotional part. Most musicians can talk about technique. Fingering, dynamics, pedaling. But the emotional part, the part where music does the thing — most people can't describe it. They just, feel it."

"I feel it and I describe it. Occupational hazard." He paused. "Also: I spent six years in a music PhD programme writing a thesis about the neuroscience of musical emotion. Specifically, the physiological responses, heart rate, skin conductance, respiratory changes, that occur when listeners hear music that moves them. My conclusion, after six years and 247 pages, was essentially: music does something to the body that we can measure but not explain. Which is a very expensive way of saying: it's magic."

"You wrote 247 pages about magic?"

"I wrote 247 pages about the measurable correlates of magic. There's a difference. The magic itself remains. Unmeasured."

She laughed. The coffee was lukewarm now. The bolo de coco arrived — Bosco brought it himself, a man in his sixties with a moustache that looked like it had been cultivated since birth, who set the plate down with the reverence of a person presenting a sacrament. cake was golden, dense, dusted with desiccated coconut. It smelled of coconut milk and jaggery and that specific sweetness of something made in a wood-fired oven, the sweetness that had smoke in it.

They ate. That cake was extraordinary, not because of technique but because of time, the time that had gone into making it, the slow process of layering and baking that produced a texture that was simultaneously firm and yielding, that crumbled in the mouth and then dissolved, leaving the coconut-sweet-smoke taste on the tongue like a memory of a place you'd been.

"Prahlad."

"Hmm?"

"I go back to Mumbai in five days."

"I know."

"Five days is, not a lot of time."

"No. But it's also not no time. Five days is one hundred and twenty hours. That's seven thousand two hundred minutes. In musical terms, that's enough time to play the complete Chopin Nocturnes forty-seven times."

"You calculated that."

"I calculated that while you were eating cake. My brain does unhelpful math when I'm nervous."

"You're nervous?"

"I'm a pianist sitting across from a pianist in a café in Fontainhas on a Tuesday morning, and the pianist across from me is wearing earrings that catch the light and has coconut crumbs on her lip, and I am nervous, yes. Acutely."

Anushka brushed the crumbs from her lip. The gesture was reflexive. Embarrassment converted to action. "I have crumbs."

"You had crumbs. Past tense. crisis has been resolved." He put his hands flat on the table. The pianist's gesture — the grounding gesture, the way you centered yourself before the first note. "Anushka. I don't want to be presumptuous. And I don't want to rush something that shouldn't be rushed. But I want you to know that this, " He gestured between them. The space. The coffee. The cake crumbs. The sleeping cat. " — this is the best Tuesday I've had in three years of Tuesdays at this café."

"Better than the bolo de coco?"

"The bolo de coco is exactly the same every Tuesday. You are. Not the same as anything."

She felt the warmth. Not the coffee-warm, not the sun-warm, but the internal warm, the warm that came from being seen and being liked and being told about it by a man whose hands made Clair de Lune sound like water missing the rain.

"Five days," she said.

"Five days."

"That's enough time to figure out if you're very good for me or very dangerous."

"I remember. You said that at the tinto."

"And you said you'd wait."

"I did. And I am. But waiting is easier when the thing you're waiting for is sitting across from you with coconut cake."

She smiled. He smiled. And the café held them, the blue door, the sleeping cat, the warm sun, the two cups of coffee growing cold, and outside, the Rua de Natal was quiet, and Fontainhas was painted in its impossible colours, and somewhere in a yellow house three doors down, three ginger cats named after saints were sleeping on a balcão, and Sulochana was probably watching from her window, because Sulochana watched everything and missed nothing, and the morning was doing what Goan mornings did best: holding still long enough for something important to begin.