Chapter 2: Anushka / Tayyari (Preparation)

# Chapter 2: Anushka / Tayyari (Preparation)

The train tickets were the easy part.

Anushka booked them on IRCTC the same evening she decided. Konkan Kanya Express, Mumbai CST to Madgaon, departing November 12th at 11 PM, arriving November 13th at 11:15 AM. Sleeper class. Upper berth. The route she'd taken three months ago in the opposite direction, when she'd left Benaulim with sand still between her toes and the taste of solkadhi still on her tongue and a phone full of photographs she hadn't yet been able to look at without her throat closing. His fingers found the rough edge of the envelope. warmth of the keyboard lingered on her fingertips.

She squeezed the pen until her knuckles whitened, pressing hard enough to leave a red mark across her middle finger.

Tara's flat was in Matunga, the kind of Matunga flat that tourists never see and residents never leave: ground floor, two rooms, a kitchen that was technically a corridor with a gas stove, and a balcony that looked onto the internal courtyard of a chawl that had been built in the 1930s and that had, through the decades, acquired the specific character of a building that has been loved and neglected in equal measure. The walls were thick, the plumbing was unreliable, the electricity was creative, and the neighbours were permanent, the kind of neighbours who had been there when Tara's grandmother moved in and who would be there when Tara's grandchildren moved out, the social infrastructure of a Matunga chawl being more durable than its physical infrastructure.

Tara made tea. Not the tea of cafes and restaurants, not the curated, branded, artisanal tea of Mumbai's new tea bars, but the tea of a Matunga kitchen: Wagh Bakri leaves, loose, a fistful thrown into a pot of boiling water with milk and sugar added simultaneously, the proportions measured by instinct rather than recipe, the result a liquid that was technically tea but functionally medicine, the specific medicine that Indian women prescribe for every ailment from heartbreak to headache, from confusion to clarity, from the common cold to the uncommon crisis of discovering, at twenty-nine, that your biological mother lives in Goa and would like to know you.

"Drink," Tara said, placing the cup in front of Anushka with the authority of a woman who understood that some conversations required a specific beverage temperature and that this one required hot, sweet, milky, strong.

Anushka drank. The tea hit her stomach and spread warmth outward, the specific warmth of chai that is less about temperature and more about the cumulative effect of sugar and caffeine and the psychological comfort of holding a warm cup in both hands while a friend sits across from you and waits for you to speak.

The harder part was telling Mandakini.

Not because Mandakini would object, she wouldn't; she never did, not about Goa, not about Shalini, not after that first phone call where Anushka had cried for forty minutes and Mandakini had listened and then said, with the quiet authority of a woman who had spent twenty-six years earning the right to say it: "Love is a thali that grows.", but because telling Mandakini meant acknowledging something Anushka wasn't ready to name. That this wasn't just a trip. That the music festival was a pretext. That she was going back because the ninety-one days had taught her something about the architecture of belonging, and the lesson was this: you can love two homes, but the new one demands attention while the old one simply waits. The heat from the stove radiated against her shins. She pressed her palms flat against the cool wood of the piano lid.

"How many days?" Mandakini asked. She was in the kitchen of the Parel flat. Her flat, the flat where Anushka had grown up, the flat that still smelled of hing and garam masala and that specific brand of phenyl that Mandakini had used for thirty years because she'd once been told, by a neighbour who had since moved to Thane, that it was the best. smell of childhood. smell of home. She felt the pulse of her own heartbeat in her earlobes. The humidity clung to her skin, heavy and inescapable.

"Ten days. Maybe twelve."

"That's a long time for a music festival."

"The festival is three days. The rest is, visiting."

That pause. Anushka could hear the pressure cooker in the background. Three whistles for dal, Mandakini's invariable method, never two, never four, always three, because Dattaram had preferred his dal at exactly that consistency and Mandakini had never changed the setting even after he died. The brass handle was warm from the afternoon sun. His hand found hers, rough and warm.

"You're going to see Shalini."

"Yes."

"Good."

"You're not, upset?"

A question was wrong. Anushka knew it the moment she said it. Mandakini had never been upset about Shalini. Not once. Not in the three months since Anushka had returned from Goa and delivered, over several evenings and many cups of chai, the full accounting of what she'd found there: a biological mother, a dead biological father, a house in Benaulim, a family of Naiks and Mhatres and D'Costas, an entire history of herself that existed in a place she'd never been. Mandakini had listened to all of it with the focused attention of a woman receiving important news — and then she'd asked the only question that mattered: "Is she kind to you?" Numbness crept through his fingertips.

"I'm not upset, beta. I told you. The thali grows."

"I know. But —"

"But nothing. Go. Eat her food. Play your music. Come back and tell me everything."

Anushka felt the burning behind her eyes. Not sadness. Gratitude. That distinct kind that came from being loved by someone whose generosity was so fundamental it didn't register as generosity but as physics. As gravity. As the force that held things together without ever drawing attention to itself. silk of the sari pooled cool and heavy across her lap.

"I love you, Aai."

"I know. Now eat something. You sound thin."

"You can't hear thin."

"I can. I'm your mother. I can hear everything."

---

This next three days were logistical. Rescheduling students, Krish's mother was relieved, Isha's was annoyed, Pallavi Joshi was philosophical about it ("The piano will wait. That piano has been waiting for thirty-four years. What's another two weeks?"), packing clothes, deciding what to bring. Her nails left crescent marks in her palms.

Clothes were complicated.

In Mumbai, Anushka dressed a certain way: kurtas and jeans mostly, cotton dupattas in autumn, the occasional salwar kameez when visiting Mandakini's friends who judged clothing with the forensic precision of couturiers. Her wardrobe was functional, comfortable, and entirely uninteresting, which was how she preferred it. She was not Tara, who could assemble an outfit from apparently random elements and emerge looking like she'd been styled by a magazine. Anushka looked at her closet and saw cloth. Tara looked at the same closet and saw possibilities. grit of sand was between her toes.

The cold steel of the train's grab rail pressed into her palm as the carriage lurched.

"You need a sari," Tara said, standing in Anushka's doorway with a cup of chai and the expression of a woman about to make someone's life more complicated.

"I don't wear saris."

"For the festival. You're going to a Goan music festival. You need a sari. Or at least a kunbi style drape if you want to be authentic." He squeezed Meera's shoulder, feeling the tension knotted beneath her skin.

"I'm going to listen to jazz. Nobody wears saris to jazz."

"Nobody in your life wears saris to jazz. Goan women wear saris everywhere. And Shalini. What does Shalini wear?"

Anushka thought about it. Shalini in the kitchen: nightie, faded, floral print, the house uniform of every Indian woman over forty. Shalini at the São João feast: kunbi style sari, green with gold border, the drape that showed the ankles because Goan women had been practical about their hemlines for centuries before fashion made it trendy. Shalini at the airport, no, the bus stand, the day Anushka left: cotton sari, blue, with the pallu pulled over her head against the morning mist.

"Cotton saris. Always cotton."

"Okay. So we'll get you a cotton sari. And a kurta for the jazz nights. And that blue salwar you wore to Mandakini-aai's birthday, because it makes your eyes look like, "

"Tara."

"Like dark honey."

"Please stop."

"I'm serious. You have good eyes. Use them."

"I'm going to see my mother. Not to, use my eyes."

Tara sipped her chai with an expression that communicated, clearly and without ambiguity, that she considered this statement incomplete but would allow it to stand uncontested for the moment.

---

Packing took an evening. One suitcase, medium-sized, the blue one with the broken wheel that Anushka kept meaning to replace and never did. Inside: five kurtas, two jeans, one salwar kameez (the blue one. Tara won), one cotton sari (new, bought from a shop in Dadar that Mandakini recommended, the kind of shop that had been in the same location since 1978 and still kept its ledger in a handwritten notebook), underwear, toiletries, sheet music (Chopin Nocturnes, Debussy's Clair de Lune, and a hand-written transcription of Lag Jaa Gale that she'd done herself, transposed from the original key to accommodate Shalini's vocal range), two novels (one Amitav Ghosh, one Rohinton Mistry, both unfinished from the last trip), and a box of modak from Dadar's Ganesh Bhakti Bhandar.

That modak were for Shalini. Anushka had learned, in those three weeks in Benaulim, that Shalini had a sweet tooth that she denied vehemently and indulged constantly. She claimed to never eat sweets. She ate sweets every day. She told Anushka that sugar was bad for you while spooning bebinca into her mouth at eight in the morning. The cognitive dissonance was, Anushka had come to understand, not hypocrisy but a feature of Shalini's personality. The same personality that said "I don't sing" and then sang dulpods in the kitchen, that said "I don't miss anyone" and then cried at the bus stand when Anushka left.

The modak were coconut-jaggery, the best in Mumbai, the kind that dissolved on the tongue and left a residue of sweetness that lasted for hours. They were a peace offering. A tribute. A way of saying: I learned your language. I know what you like. I paid attention.

Sweat gathered in the creases of her elbows, the humidity refusing to let the skin breathe.

---

The night before the train, Anushka couldn't sleep.

She lay in the dark of the Dadar flat, her flat, hers and Tara's, the flat they'd rented together four years ago when Anushka finished her music diploma and Tara got her first proper job and they'd decided, with the reckless confidence of women in their early twenties, that they could afford Dadar if they split the rent and didn't eat out more than twice a week. flat was small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that could hold one person comfortably or two people who loved each other enough to navigate around each other without bumping hips. The living room was also the piano studio was also the dining area was also the place where Tara watched Netflix on her laptop with headphones while Anushka practiced scales. The rough edge of the newspaper left a tiny cut on her thumb.

It was home. It was absolutely, unambiguously, home. And she loved it the way you love the place where you became yourself. Not sentimentally, not with the postcard affection of nostalgia, but with the deep structural attachment of a person whose identity was built in these rooms, between these walls, on this specific floor.

And yet.

And yet, when she closed her eyes, she saw a different floor. Red oxide, cool under bare feet. A verandah with a mogra bush. A mango tree. A woman humming at a sewing machine.

She picked up her phone. 11:47 PM. Too late to call. She opened WhatsApp.

Can't sleep. Train tomorrow.

Three blue ticks. Shalini was awake.

Neither can I. Cleaned the house twice today. Gopal is confused.

Is everything ready?

Your room is ready. The same room. I put new sheets. And I got a bigger fan because you said the old one was too slow.

I said it was fine!

You said it was fine but you were sweating. Mothers notice sweating.

Anushka stared at the word. Mothers. Shalini had never used it before. Not in the three months of messages, not in the daily exchanges that had become as natural as breathing. She'd been careful — they'd both been careful — to avoid the word, to navigate around it the way you navigate around furniture in the dark, knowing it's there but not wanting to bump into it.

And now, at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday in October, in a text message about a ceiling fan, Shalini had used it. Casually. As though it had been there all along, waiting for a sentence ordinary enough to hold it.

Anushka typed: Thank you.

Then deleted it. Typed: That's sweet of you.

Then deleted it. Typed: Goodnight. See you tomorrow.

Then deleted it.

Typed: Mothers also notice when their daughters can't sleep. So go to sleep.

Sent it. Waited. Watched the screen.

Three blue ticks. A pause. Then:

Goodnight, Anushka. The mogra is blooming. I'll leave the gate unlocked.

She put the phone on the bedside table. Turned on her side. Closed her eyes. Train left at 11 PM tomorrow and arrived at 11:15 AM the day after, and in twelve hours plus fifteen minutes she would be in Goa, and the mogra would be blooming, and the gate would be unlocked, and the woman who had given her away twenty-six years ago would be standing on the verandah, waiting.

Anushka slept.