“Daadi is legally allowed to do anything she wants. She oncehad a cousin removed from the family WhatsApp group for bringing store-bought gulab jamun to Diwali. The man now lives in exile in Pune. We don’t speak of him.”
Casey laughs so hard he has to put down the wooden spoon. I find myself leaning against the prep station, watching, and the clinical monitoring part of my brain, the part that never stops assessing, cataloguing, calculating risk, is noticing something unprecedented.
I am relaxed.
Not performing relaxed or strategically relaxed. Not the controlled approximation of relaxation that I deploy during hospital social functions when Gabriel is watching and expecting me to ‘play nice’. Actually, genuinely, physiologically relaxed. My shoulders are down. My jaw is unclenched. My hands are resting on the counter in front of me, not clasped behind my back, not gripping anything, just resting.
Karan is telling Casey the history of Laal Maas while simultaneously dicing onions at a speed that would be alarming if it weren’t so clearly practised. Casey is listening with his whole body, the way he listens to everything, leaning in, nodding, asking questions, laughing in all the right places. He has tied a kitchen towel around his waist as a makeshift apron and he is stirring a pot of ghee with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who understands that good food cannot be rushed.
“The Mathania chillies are the whole thing,” Karan is saying, crushing a handful into the pot with evangelical intensity. “They give you the colour, the heat, the smokiness. My grandmother’s grandmother brought the seeds to this estate two hundred years ago. Every batch we use is descended from those original plants. Daadi guards the supply like state secrets. If you waste a single chilli, she will find out, and she will punish you terribly. I once dropped a jar when I was twelve and she made me hand-sort lentils for three hours.”
“Three hours for one jar?” Casey asks.
“It was a large jar. And Daadi holds grudges with the dedicationof a woman who has nothing but time and an excellent memory.” Karan grins, adding yoghurt to the pot. “She liked you, by the way, at the tea. Sunita told Kavita, who then shared it in the family WhatsApp group, that she told Mother you had ‘capable hands.’ This is the highest compliment she has given a non-family member since 2006, when she told our tailor he had ‘adequate posture.’”
“Adequate, that reminds me of how someone else talks,” Casey repeats, and his eyes slide to me, and the warmth in them is so specific, so loaded with shared meaning, that I have to look away.
“Did she do the thing with the cane?” Karan asks. “The single tap?”
“Yeah. Just once.”
Karan whistles. “That’s the approval tap. She has a whole taxonomy. One tap is approval. Two taps is ‘I’m thinking about it.’ Three taps is ‘you have displeased me and should consider leaving the room.’ If she starts using the cane as a pointer, you’ve been summoned. And if she lifts it off the ground entirely...” He draws a finger across his throat. “Exile. Pune. Gulab jamun shame.”
Casey is laughing again, and the sound fills the enormous kitchen like something warm being poured into a cold space. The lamb is simmering now, the Mathania chillies turning the ghee a deep, fiery red, and the smell is extraordinary, a rich, complex, layered heat that wraps around the room and settles into the stone walls like it belongs there.
Karan hands Casey a spoon. “Taste.”
Casey tastes. His eyes close. His head tips back, exposing the long, tanned column of his throat, and his lips part around the spoon, and a low, involuntary sound comes out of him that I feel in places I cannot acknowledge while standing next to my cousin in my family’s kitchen. His entire face transforms, a slow expression of pure, sensory pleasure, and I am watching his mouth with what I am choosing to classify as clinical detachment and what is, in fact, nothing of the sort. I know the precise curve of his lowerlip. I have known it for longer than I care to admit. I have spent two years not looking at that mouth during case consultations and I am looking at it now, and the heat that floods through me has nothing to do with the scent of the Mathania chillies.
“That,” Casey says, opening his eyes, “is the best thing I have ever tasted. I am having a spiritual experience. I think I can see God. He’s holding a Mathania chilli.”
Karan beams with the pride as he has just converted a foreigner to the one true faith: fine cuisine. “Welcome to Rajasthan, bhai. This is the real stuff. Not the restaurant garbage they serve dumb tourists. This is family Laal Maas. Daadi’s recipe. You’re part of the family now, so you’re allowed to eat it.”
The words land in the kitchen with a weight that Karan doesn’t intend and Casey feels and I absorb like a blow.
Part of the family.
Casey glances at me. Just a glance, quick and careful, checking. I keep my expression neutral. I keep my shoulders down and my hands on the counter and my breathing even, and I give him nothing. The truth is if I give him anything right now, in this warm kitchen at three in the morning with the smell of family recipes in the air and my cousin calling him bhai, I will give him everything.
We eat at the kitchen table. It is a massive, scarred oak thing, stained with decades of spilled turmeric and chai, and we sit around it on short wooden stools, Karan on one side, Casey and me on the other, with a pot of Laal Maas between us and a stack of freshly heated rotis that Karan produced from somewhere with the casual magic of someone who always knows where the bread is in the kitchen.
Casey eats like he means it. He eats with his hands, because Karan showed him how, tearing the roti and scooping the lamb with those big, capable fingers, and I am watching his hands the way I watch hands in my operating room, with total focus, except the focus is not professional. The focus is on the way his forearmsflex when he tears the bread. The way ghee glistens on his fingertips. And then he licks his thumb.
It is not a deliberate act. There is no performance in it, no awareness that he is being observed. He simply lifts his hand and draws his thumb across his lower lip and then into his mouth, slow and easy, cleaning the ghee from the pad of it with a slick, unhurried pass of his tongue, and his eyes are half-closed with unselfconscious pleasure as all he is thinking about is absolutely nothing except how good the food is.
The bottom drops out of my stomach so fast I have to grip the edge of the table with both hands. My medical training, which has provided me with a functional framework for processing every physical sensation I have experienced in thirty-three years of life, offers me nothing. There is no clinical term for what just happened to my central nervous system. There is no diagnostic code. If I attempted to chart this in a medical file, the entry would simply read: CAUSE OF DEATH: THUMB.
Casey, oblivious, reaches for another roti. He does not know what he has just done to me. He does not know that I am calculating the exact distance between my elbow and his elbow on the kitchen table (eleven centimetres), or the exact distance between my knee and his knee under the table (six), or the exact angle at which I would need to turn my head to be looking directly into his eyes if he turned his head toward me at this moment, which is approximately twenty-three degrees, and I know this because I have already turned my head twenty degrees, and I am at this moment three degrees away from a contingency I have absolutely not authorized.
I straighten my spine. I add eight centimetres to the elbow gap. I do not, under any circumstances, look at Casey’s mouth.
I look at Casey’s mouth.
It is a brief glance. The duration of a heartbeat, perhaps two. He is chewing, his lips closed, his jaw working with the unselfconscious focus of a man enjoying his food, and I look at his mouth,and his mouth is right there, and then I look away with such violence that I nearly give myself a cervical injury.
Karan is talking about his plans to open a restaurant in Jaipur, which his mother considers a waste of an engineering degree and which Daadi has covertly been funding through a trust she thinks no one knows about. Everyone knows the truth, but Karan’s mother is unwilling to confront Daadi regarding this. Casey is asking about the menu, the location, whether Karan has considered bringing Rajasthani street food to a fine-dining format, and the two of them are talking over each other with the enthusiastic, overlapping energy of two people who have discovered a shared passion and do not care that it’s three-thirty in the morning.
I am eating Laal Maas at my family’s kitchen table, and it tastes the way it tasted when I was eight years old and Daadi let me sit on her lap while the cook made it, and the warmth of the spice and the memory are tangled together in a way that makes my throat tighten.