“You’re walking on your toes. You checked behind you twice. You’re carrying your chappals so they don’t slap against the marble.” He falls into step beside me, his own bare feet making soft, heavy sounds on the floor. He is wearing his grey sweatpants and the Maple Leafs t-shirt and his hair is a catastrophe and he looks like he just rolled out of bed, which he did, because I apparently woke him during my extremely stealthy yet reluctant exitfrom under his arm. “You’re sneaking. Where are we sneaking to?”
“The kitchen.”
“Oh, thank God.” The relief in his voice is so profound, so genuine, that I almost laugh. Almost. “I’m starving. I ate nine hundred samosas at the party and I’m still starving. I think the stress is burning calories faster than I can consume them.”
“That is not how caloric metabolism works.”
“I’m a doctor, Arjun. I know how it works. I’m telling you, my body is in deficit. I need carbohydrates. Real carbohydrates. Not the fancy kind with edible flowers on them. The kind that come in large quantities and don’t require a sommelier.”
We reach the kitchen door. I retrieve the key from behind a small portrait of my great-grandmother that hangs beside the service entrance, a hiding spot I discovered when I watched one of the kitchen staff replace it after locking up. I have never told anyone about this key. It was mine, my one tiny secret rebellion in a house where everything was monitored and managed and controlled.
I am sharing it with Casey now because he is here, and he is hungry, and his bare feet are warm on the cold marble beside mine. And at two in the morning, in the dark corridor of my family’s ancestral home, the usual rules do not seem to apply.
The kitchen is enormous. During the day, it is a battlefield of professional-grade equipment, copper pots the size of bathtubs, tandoor ovens, prep stations, cold storage, and a spice wall that runs floor to ceiling and contains roughly four hundred labelled jars arranged in an order that only the head cook fully comprehends. At night, it is dark and quiet and smells of the ghosts of a thousand meals: cumin, cardamom, charred onion, the deep, residual warmth of tandoor clay.
I switch on the lights. The fluorescent tubes flicker and buzz to life, turning the copper pots to dull gold.
Casey walks in and his whole body changes. Something shifts in his posture, a loosening, a settling, the same thing I’ve seenhappen when he walks onto the ER floor at Lakeshore. He moves toward the prep station and runs his hand along the butcher-block surface with an expression of quiet, instinctive recognition. He opens a cupboard, peers inside, then opens another. He is orienting himself the way a surgeon orients to a new operating room: finding the tools, mapping the space, understanding the layout.
“You seem to know your way around a kitchen,” I say, leaning against the doorframe with my arms crossed. This is unexpected. The man eats Uncrustables for lunch.
“I am full of surprises,” He grins over his shoulder, then opens the cold storage and his eyes go wide. “Arjun. There’s enough food in here to feed a battalion. There’s leftover lamb, paneer and there’s... is this ghee? This is real ghee. Kavita’s ghee?”
“Almost certainly.”
“This is the promised land.”
He is bent at the waist, head and shoulders inside the cold storage unit, and the grey sweatpants are a problem of a different magnitude than they were the morning he opened his apartment door to me in Toronto. They are a problem with geometry. They are a problem with topography. I find a spot on the spice wall that requires my full and immediate professional attention, and I attend to it with the focus of a man reviewing a complex MRI, and when I look back, Casey has straightened up and is holding a container of paneer aloft like a trophy, and I have, I tell myself, simply been admiring the kitchen architecture.
He continues pulling ingredients out with the focused, methodical energy of someone who has found his element. Containers of leftover meat, fresh vegetables, a bowl of yoghurt, a bag of something green and leafy. He lines them up on the prep station with the organized efficiency of someone who may have undersold his culinary capabilities.
“You can cook? I distinctly remember you telling me you couldn’t cook,” I say, and the surprise in my voice is genuine. Thisman has a coffee mug that says World’s Okayest Doctor. Nothing about his public persona suggests culinary competence.
“I don’t bother when it’s just me. Cooking for one is depressing, and I can never get the portions right. You end up eating cereal over the sink at midnight and questioning your life choices.” He’s rummaging through the spice wall now, pulling jars down and opening them with an ease that suggests he has spent considerably more time in kitchens than his Uncrustables habit would show. He holds a jar of dried red chillies up to the light. “My mom taught me the basics. She’s a feeder. I spent every summer in Huntsville helping her prep for the regatta potluck. You learn things. Knife skills, mostly. How to chop an onion without crying. How to make enough coleslaw to feed two hundred people from the Baptist Church basement.” He pauses, grins. “Give me someone to cook for and I’m a different person.”
I file this information away. I file it in the same category as his coffee preference and his first memory of me and the way his hand feels when it wraps around mine, which is a category that has grown alarmingly voluminous as of late and does not have a clinical label.
“So, what are we making?” I ask, and I realize, as the words leave my mouth, that I said “we.” Not “what are you making.” We.
Casey hears it too. His eyes flick to mine, just for a second, and something warm and quick passes between us, there and gone.
“I have no clue,” he says cheerfully. “But there’s lamb and there are chillies and there’s ghee, so I figure we can’t go too far wrong.”
He moves to the spice wall and reaches up for a jar on a high shelf, and the grey hem of the Maple Leafs t-shirt rides up, and there is a strip of skin at his lower back, golden and warm-toned and dusted with the same fine blond hair that I cannot stop noticing on his forearms, and I look at it for the duration of one heartbeat before I turn to retrieve a copper pot from the rack with the brisk efficiency of someone who has not justexperienced a small, focused detonation in his peripheral nervous system. Casey hands me the spice jar without comment. The jar is cumin. I do not need cumin. I take the cumin.
“LAAL MAAS!”
The voice comes from the doorway and is loud enough to reverberate off the copper pots. We both spin around. Casey grabs a wooden spoon in a grip that suggests he is prepared to defend the kitchen with culinary force.
In the entrance, Karan, barefoot and in a slept-in kurta, stands with his hair sticking up in six directions. His eyes, wide with manic delight, reveal the energy of a man who, having discovered the party continued without him, is outraged at his exclusion.
“You’re making Laal Maas!” he announces, striding into the kitchen with his proprietary confidence as he considers this his personal domain. He is tall, athletic, with a wide, handsome face and the kind of restless energy that suggests he has never once in his life sat still for longer than four consecutive minutes. He claps Casey on the shoulder with a force that would stagger a smaller man. Casey barely moves. “Bhai! The lumberjack! I was there for the speech, you know. I was standing behind Auntie Kavita, who was weeping so hard she got tear marks on her sari. Ananya is still furious because she doesn’t know how much the suit cost. You’re a legend.”
“I’m Casey,” Casey says, grinning.
“You’re a legend named Casey. I’m Karan, the fun cousin. Every family has one and I am ours, despite what the rest of them will tell you. Now move over, you’re holding the chillies wrong.” He takes the jar from Casey’s hand and begins pulling out dried red Mathania chillies with the confident, practised movements of someone who has made this dish many, many times. “Laal Maas is the dish. Basically red meat curry. Rajasthani specialty. You cannot come to this house and not have it. It’s the law. I think it’s actually the law. Daadi may have had it written into the estate charter.”
“Is Daadi legally allowed to do that?” Casey asks.