Chapter 13
The Kapoor Kitchen
Arjun
The stomach is winning.
My mother’s engagement party catering was, by any objective measure, extraordinary.
There were seven courses. There were appetizers that had their own appetizers.
There was a dessert table that stretched the length of the courtyard wall and included a chocolate fountain that my cousin Karan, who has never met a source of chaos he didn’t immediately befriend, nearly fell into while reaching for a second dipping skewer.
The food was abundant, and everywhere, and I ate almost none of it because I was too busy maintaining a flawless performance of romantic composure in front of seventy-two relatives while my fake fiancé delivered an off-script speech that dismantled my emotional architecture in real time.
The result: I am hungry. Not mildly peckish or gently inconvenienced.
I am the specific kind of hungry that comes from twelve hours of sustained psychological crisis on an empty stomach.
The particular kind of hungry that wakes you from a dead sleep at nearly two in the morning and informs you, with the blunt authority of a biological imperative, that if you do not eat something in the next thirty minutes, your body is going to start making choices you will regret.
The palace kitchen is on the ground floor, at the end of a long corridor that runs past the drawing room, through the service wing, and into a sprawling, high-ceilinged space that is, during the day, the operational heart of the Kapoor estate’s hospitality machine.
At night, it should be empty. The staff retire by eleven.
The kitchen is locked, but I know where the key is kept.
I have been stealing food from this kitchen since I was nine years old, which is the first and possibly only act of rebellion I committed before the age of twenty-two, when I brought my first boyfriend home to meet my mother.
Trevor lasted eleven hours. He was a perfectly pleasant junior barrister from Cambridge with excellent manners and a firm handshake and no capacity to withstand a Meera Kapoor dinner interrogation.
She asked him about his five-year plan, his pension contributions, and his views on the astrological implications of a Gemini-Scorpio pairing, and he excused himself to the bathroom and climbed out of a ground-floor window.
I found his apology text the next morning.
It contained the phrase “your family is a lot.”
After Trevor, there was James, who made it to day two before developing a stress migraine during high tea.
And David, who held on for an admirable four days until Auntie Sunita cornered him in the garden and asked whether his parents’ divorce had been amicable and whether he had been screened for hereditary conditions.
He drove himself to the airport without saying goodbye.
Three men, all during my first year at Cambridge.
Three retreats. After David, I stopped bringing anyone home.
It was simpler. It was safer. If no one meets the family, no one fails the family’s test, and I do not have to stand in the aftermath cataloguing the precise moment the light went out behind their eyes.
Casey, who has spent the better part of a week enduring everything this family has thrown at him and has not so much as flinched, is not relevant to this pattern.
The fact that he has outlasted Trevor, James, and David combined is a statistical observation, not a meaningful comparison.
The fact that he held my hand in front of seventy-two relatives and his palm did not sweat is a physiological detail, not an admirable one.
The fact that my mother called him “too thin” and he grinned like she had handed him a trophy is not endearing.
It is a misreading of the social dynamics at play.
I am noting these things because I notice these things. It is a professional habit. It has no emotional significance whatsoever, and I am going to stop thinking about it now and focus on the fact that I am hungry and this kitchen has leftover lamb.
I am halfway down the corridor when I hear footsteps behind me. Large, unmistakable footsteps. The kind of footsteps that belong to a person who takes up an unreasonable amount of physical space and cannot move through a building without the building being aware of it.
“You’re sneaking,” Casey says.
I do not jump. I do not startle. I turn with the composed dignity of someone who was absolutely not creeping through his own family’s palace at two in the morning in bare feet.
“I am not sneaking. I am walking. In my own home. At a time of my choosing.”
“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 exit from 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 seen happen 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. This man has a coffee mug that says World’s Okayest Doctor. Nothing about his public persona suggests culinary competence.