Chapter 13 #2
“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 just experienced 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.
“Daadi is legally allowed to do anything she wants. She once had 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 dedication of 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 lower lip.
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.