16. Aarti
AARTI
The ride back to the studio is a blur of Noa frantically typing notes into her phone while I text Madge that she’ll need to send a PA to fetch my car from Arjun’s.
Just like the old days. Uncle Arjun’s mango lassi concoctions definitely got me, though not quite as hard as they hit Noa, whose enthusiasm has reached a fever pitch.
We burst through the writers’ room door like we’re being chased.
“You know how shitty that segment was this morning?” Noa announces, sweeping her hand out dramatically and knocking over Rohan’s coffee. Dark liquid floods his origami collection. “Never again!”
Madge’s eyes bulge with horror, darting between Noa’s flushed face and my probably-not-much-better one.
“We figured it out,” I jump in before Madge can intervene. “How to make this work.”
Syd spins in her chair, waving her hand in front of her nose. “Are you two drunk?”
“Tipsy,” Noa corrects, then hiccups. “But brilliant.”
“The five senses,” I say, pulling focus back. “We’re going to explore LA through each of the five senses, one per segment.”
Blank stares all around.
“I don’t follow,” Freya says slowly. “How does that relate to your ice cream?”
Noa sways, but there’s a fervor in her eyes. “It’s never been about the ice cream itself. Ice cream is just–it’s the vessel.”
She searches for the words. “When I’m brainstorming a flavor, I’m not just thinking about emulsifiers and fat content.
I’m thinking about the person who’s going to taste it.
I’m imagining them at their kitchen table at midnight, or on a park bench after a breakup, or–” hiccup , “celebrating something they thought would never happen.”
Her words gain momentum. “Every flavor I create is a translation. I take someone’s sensory world: their memories, their longings, what makes them feel safe or wild or homesick, and I distill it into something you can taste. I’m not a food scientist. I’m a… a medium. Between people and flavor.”
The room holds its breath. Thank god LA people don’t scoff at mediums.
Then Rohan, still clutching paper towels to his coffee-soaked origami, ventures, “But how do we film that? The translation part?”
“We don’t film the translation,” I jump in. “We film the source material. My LA. The city that raised me. Noa…” I glance at her. “Noa does what she does. Takes all of that and alchemizes it into ice cream.”
On Midnight Live, I was an idea machine.
There was nothing like that propulsive motion of the lightbulb moment when I shared it with my writers, and how we could write all night, looking at the clock at six p.m. and then suddenly realizing it was four a.m., but knowing it was all going to be worth it come Saturday.
The adrenaline and drive that a body delivers at the thought of something so pertinent, so human, so vital that the only thing one can do is execute… there’s nothing like it.
And Noa is feeling it.
I’m feeling it.
Madge might not be feeling it yet , but she looks more curious than skeptical, which means the scales have begun to tilt. “Where is your LA, Aart?”
Noa looks at me. “You said you wrote your best material on the buses.”
“But also in my car,” I add, remembering. “Once I bought my first piece-of-shit Honda, I’d drive where the buses didn’t go. Windows down, music loud. I’d pull off the road to write, of course.”
Freya looks up from her laptop, interest piqued. “What kind of music?”
“Everything. Bollywood from my parents’ cassettes.
Alternative from KROQ. Hip-hop rattling the doors.
” I can feel myself back in that car, nineteen and invincible.
“I’d drive these winding roads up in the hills, finding cul-de-sacs with views of the Hollywood sign.
There’s this spot in Beachwood where the mist rolls off the Santa Monica Mountains around five p.m., and I’d just sit there, writing. ”
“That’s your sound segment!” Syd exclaims, already scribbling. “‘Carpool Karaoke’ but make it an LA mixtape roadtrip.”
Within minutes, the whiteboard transforms into a sensory map of my LA. The one built from night drives and bus transfers, from my grandmother’s jasmine to the morning marine layer.
I’ve grown accustomed to the rhythm of our writers’ room.
How Syd is always there to summarize, Freya to lend her analytical eye, Rohan to throw us curveballs.
But Noa introduces a new element to our creative process.
Maybe it’s taught in ice cream school, but I suspect it has more to do with her special gift as a… what was it? …flavor psychic?
She keeps asking things that catch me off guard: Do certain sounds make you nostalgic or anxious? Is there a texture that feels like home? When you smell the ocean, what age are you?
I humor her cerebral questions, though, because she’s lit from within with a sense of purpose and a confidence I had yet to see in her until now.
“I haven’t felt like this since my Shakespeare group project in ninth grade,” Noa whispers to me during a brief lull, her eyes bright.
“You’re killing it,” I tell her, leaning back in my chair. “This should be your show.”
She giggles. “Couldn’t have gotten here without you by any stretch of the imagination. Or Arjun.”
“Genuinely, the world would not spin without Uncle Arjun.”
“He definitely made my world spin,” Noa cackles adorably.
Madge pops the tab of her energy drink, breaking our moment.
She looks at me with her tongue over her teeth, trying to hold back a grin.
I shoot her a pinched brow. What could you possibly be so smug about right now?
She shrugs, shooting a quick glance at Noa, and I glare, our nonverbal shorthand so quick and practiced that no one else clocks it.
By the time we wrap, we’ve mapped out our first segment for Friday’s shoot and everyone’s buzzing with possibility.
This feels different from the forced concepts we’ve been pushing.
This feels real.
Hours later, Madge and I are the last ones out. The parking lot is empty except our two cars under the harsh fluorescents. She’s uncharacteristically quiet.
“I can hear you thinking,” I say as we walk.
She shrugs a shoulder. “Doesn’t matter what I think as long as the job gets done. And it’s getting done.” She shoots me a little smirk.
I roll my eyes. “You saw it first. Noa and I have creative chemistry.”
She bites her bottom lip and nods. “Mhmm.”
“That’s all it is.”
We’ve operated under this silent treaty for years.
Madge is meticulously observant, a necessity in her line of work.
So I’ve never doubted she was clocking every lingering glance I gave a woman, every pronoun I carefully edited out of a story.
She’s also too good a producer–and too loyal a friend–to name it out loud.
Usually that discretion feels like a gift.
But tonight, her knowing smile irritates me.
“I’m serious!” I say. “You should just be glad we came up with something better.”
“I am. Very.” She unlocks her car, but I can see the look in her eyes. The same look she had years ago, standing outside that bathroom stall at Midnight Live. Like she sees something I’m not ready to see yet.