CHAPTER 5

OJASWINI

The kitchen was a dream.

Not the kind of dream you have in a 450-square-foot restaurant in Bandra where the exhaust fan rattles and the tandoor hasn't been serviced since 2023 and the walk-in fridge sounds like it's having a midlife crisis. This was the other kind. The kind where you walk in and your hands go still and your brain recalibrates everything it thought it knew about what a kitchen could be.

Marble countertops — not the cheap Rajasthani marble they sold at Hinduja Hardware in Bandra but something European, white with grey veins, cool to the touch. A Wolf range — six burners, two ovens, the kind of stove that cost more than my restaurant's entire equipment budget. A Sub-Zero refrigerator humming quietly in the corner, the interior organized with military precision. A copper pot rack hanging from the ceiling, each pot polished to a mirror finish.

And the spice rack. My god, the spice rack.

Floor to ceiling, built into the wall like a library. Glass jars with brass lids, each one labeled in neat handwriting. Not just the basics — not just turmeric and chili powder and coriander. This was curated. By someone who understood food at a cellular level. Fresh curry leaves, still glossy with oil. Whole nutmeg, the shells intact. Mace — the crimson webbing still clinging to the nutmeg seed. Dried kokum from the Konkan coast, the dark purple slices curled like sleeping butterflies. Black cardamom pods the size of my thumbnail. Star anise. Long pepper. Dagad phool — stone flower, the lichen that gave Maharashtrian goda masala its earthy, prehistoric depth.

I picked up a jar. Opened it. Dagad phool. The smell hit me like a memory — my grandmother's kitchen in Kolhapur, the stone grinding wheel where she made goda masala from scratch every Diwali, the way the house smelled for days afterward.

"My husband's mother was very particular," Tapsee said from the doorway. She was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read — amusement, maybe. Or recognition. The look of someone who understood what it meant to find the right spice in the wrong place.

"She passed three years ago. Dev inherited the island. She used to spend every monsoon here, cooking for whoever visited. Fishermen. Neighbors from the mainland. Temple priests. Anyone."

"She sounds wonderful," I said. And meant it.

"She was." Tapsee's voice went soft. "The only good thing about this family."

Before I could ask what she meant, she straightened. Rearranged her face into the socialite mask.

"I'll let you settle in. Your room is upstairs — second door on the left. Dinner is at eight. Just my husband and me. Something simple? We've been eating rich food all week in Mumbai. Restaurants. Parties. I'm tired of being impressed."

"I can do simple."

She smiled. "I knew I liked you."

Then she left. Her footsteps faded down the hallway — light, quick, the footsteps of someone who moved through this house like she was trying not to disturb it.

I stood in the kitchen for a long moment. Listening to the rain drum against the windows. The house groaning around me — the sound of old wood expanding and contracting with the humidity, of joints and joists that had been absorbing moisture for two hundred years. The sea crashing against the cliffs below, a steady, rhythmic violence that made the floor vibrate under my feet.

I ran my hand along the marble countertop. Cold. Smooth. The kind of surface that forgave mistakes — no scratches, no stains, no history of failures baked into the stone.

Not like my countertop in Bandra, which had a burn mark from the time Riddhi left a hot pan unattended and a chip from the time I slammed a meat tenderizer too hard during a panic attack about Swiggy commissions.

My phone had one bar of signal. Barely. The kind of bar that flickered like it was deciding whether to exist.

I pulled up Riddhi's number.

Me: Made it. Place is gorgeous. Hosts seem fine. Kitchen is literally porn.

Sending...

Sending...

Failed.

I tried again.

Failed.

The signal bar disappeared. Not flickered — disappeared. Like someone had reached into the sky and pulled the plug.

"Fuck," I whispered.

I tried Wi-Fi. Nothing came up. No networks. The island was a dead zone — no cell towers, no fiber optic, no satellite internet that I could find. Just the rain and the sea and two hundred years of silence.

I climbed the stairs. The wood creaked under my feet — not the pleasant creak of a lived-in house but the deep, resonant creak of a structure that was talking back. Warning me, maybe. Or just complaining about the weight of another body in a house that had carried too many.

The walls were covered in old paintings — Portuguese nobles with starched collars and suspicious eyes, Maratha warriors on horseback with swords raised against an invisible enemy, ships in storms that looked like they'd been painted by someone who'd actually drowned. Between the paintings, sconces with half-melted candles. The electricity was on — I could see the yellow glow of a bulb at the end of the hallway — but the house felt like it preferred fire.

My room was on the second floor. Small by this house's standards, which meant it was roughly the size of my entire Bandra studio. A four-poster bed with white mosquito netting draped like a wedding veil. A window overlooking the western cliffs — rain-streaked glass framing a view of grey sea and grey sky merging at the horizon. A writing desk. A wooden wardrobe with a brass latch. A bathroom with an ancient claw-foot tub that could fit three of me and a mirror with spots of corrosion eating the mercury.

I dropped my bag on the bed. Sat down.

The mattress was firm. The sheets smelled like naphthalene and lavender — the combination of someone who cared about preservation but not quite enough to update the method. My grandmother used the same combination. Mothballs and flower essence. The smell of old things being kept alive by stubbornness.

The silence was so heavy I could taste it. Not the absence of sound — the island was loud with rain and wind and sea. But underneath that, in the spaces between the noise, a quality of stillness that felt deliberate. Watchful.

I pulled Sameer's business card from my pocket. The ink had run but the number was readable. His handwriting was neat — small, even letters, no flourishes. The handwriting of someone who'd been taught precision by a father who tied knots for a living.

I saved the number in my phone. Then stared at it.

If I couldn't call. If I couldn't text. If the signal never came back.

What exactly was this number worth?

I put the phone down. Went back downstairs. Started prepping dinner.

The kitchen was mine now. Whatever this weekend was — whatever Tapsee was hiding, whatever this island was keeping quiet — the kitchen was the one place where I was in control. Where my hands knew what to do without my brain's permission. Where the world made sense in increments of heat and salt and time.

I turned on the Wolf range. The flame caught instantly — blue and clean, nothing like the sputtering gas burner at East to West.

I started cutting onions.

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