22. Noa
NOA
We’re on our way to what should ostensibly be my favorite shoot day of all–Taste–but I find myself bending to the residual sadness emanating from Aarti, even though she’s trying her darnedest to hide it.
Her longing looks out the pass van window grip my heart.
This recognition that her life is going to change in a mammoth way, for her to achieve her dreams but simultaneously be trapped in this box of her own making… It weighs on me.
And maaaaaybe a bit of that is my own disappointment.
The moments where my thoughts slip out of their safeguards and I let myself imagine what that kiss would have felt like.
What it could’ve become. How Aarti showed me a side of herself that she rarely shows anyone–her softness, her tenderly fierce alertness for someone she cares about when they’re in trouble.
She didn’t even have to say it, but I know she cares about me.
I take to my own window and yearn, hoping no one–especially Aarti–notices.
The love I so desperately hope for, a love like the one my parents shared, isn’t even safe from the brutality of the world.
They were so adoring of one another, a piece of each other’s puzzle that could only come unhooked by something as clawing as death.
I equally crave and fear feelings that big entering my life.
When a love so deep and pure can be lost so easily… is it even worth it?
I am jolted from my melancholic thought-spiral as the pass van makes its way down the bumpy wooden trail of the Santa Monica Pier.
The typically tourist-lined path is blocked off for our show and is instead filled with LA’s finest food trucks, handpicked by Aarti.
I roll down my window to breathe in the mouthwatering aromas from each truck as we pass, which seems to improve both of our moods.
“Food trucks from all over the city, parked together for just one massively expensive, Gretch-the-wretch-had-to-approve-this-twice location shoot.”
“All for us?”
“You and me, baby,” she says, promptly flinching at her casual term of endearment.
After we’re mic’d, Aarti leads me toward a faded orange truck with MUMBAI NIGHTS painted on the side.
She speaks in rapid Hindi, and the elderly man behind the window breaks into a grin.
“Aarti beta! Still doing the comedy, I see?”
“Always, Uncle.” She switches to English. “This is Noa. She’s helping with the new show.”
He tsks. “You too skinny. Both of you.” He disappears into the back.
Aarti smirks and shakes her head at his comment, and… is that a once-over she gives me?
Mr. Patel returns with a feast: pav bhaji, vada pav, and something wrapped in newspaper that smells like heaven.
“Bhel puri,” Aarti unwraps it reverently. “Off-menu special.”
“Eat, eat,” he waves us away.
We find a spot by the railing, and Aarti demonstrates the proper way to eat bhel puri–quickly, before the sev gets soggy. It’s an explosion of textures and flavors: crispy, tangy, spicy, sweet.
“Every week after temple, my parents would bring us to his truck.” She takes another bite.
"Mr. Patel learned to make bhel puri exactly how my parents remembered it from Juhu Beach in Mumbai–the tamarind vendors, the sunset over the Arabian sea, how they’d share one plate between them when they were dating. ”
She gets that look again, the one where the armor cracks just a little.
We move to a truck with a mural of roses adorning the Filipino flag on the side. The woman running it breaks into a huge smile when she sees Aarti.
“Ay! Anak! Look at you, all grown up and fancy!”
“Rosa used to park up on Foothill Boulevard,” Aarti tells me. “Right by the old comedy club that’s a Starbucks now.”
Rosa prepares two plates of lumpia and garlic rice with tocino. “Extra pineapple, no green onions. I remember.”
“She’d save me food,” Aarti recalls. “When I was a tween, sneaking out to open mics. I’d perform for seven minutes, bomb spectacularly, then cry into her ube halaya in the parking lot.”
“Ube–what?”
Rosa holds up a finger, ducking down beneath the window.
She pops back up, handing over two ice-cold frozen purple drinks.
Aarti watches me take a sip. It hits like velvet cake through a straw–creamy, nutty, almost floral.
I close my eyes in utter bliss and when I open them, Aarti wears a proud smile.
“Did you know she was thirteen?” I ask Rosa.
Rosa laughs. “Half the titas and taqueros in LA knew. We had a whole network. Someone would text that Aarti’s at The Laugh Track and we’d make sure one of us was there to feed her, walk her to the bus stop.”
“They just…” Aarti shrugs, her voice thick, “let me be. Fed me. Made sure I got home safe.”
Rosa hands us our food, then pauses. “You know, I never told you this, but your papa came by one night.”
Aarti freezes. “ What?”
“Oo. You were asleep in my truck.” Rosa looks at me. “I let her nap there sometimes when the bus was late. Two in the morning, this man walks up, and I’m ready to fight, you know? But then he asks if I seen his daughter.”
“My dad?” Aarti’s voice is barely a whisper.
“I think he is going to yell, drag you home. Instead, he looks through window at you sleeping, and his face…” Rosa shakes her head. “Like his heart break and fill up at the same time. He said, ‘thank you for watching her. How much I owe you?’”
I can see Aarti processing this new information, rewriting her history.
“I tell him he owes me nothing, you are a good kid, and he say, ‘I know. I know she can’t stop. This thing inside her, this comedy, it’s bigger than me. Bigger than be in bed at ten p.m.’ Then he give me his number. Said, ‘Call me if she ever doesn’t make it to your truck.’”
“He knew?” Aarti’s voice cracks. “The whole time?”
Rosa nods. “Every week. He drive by, make sure you get on the bus. Never let you see him.”
Aarti turns away from the cameras, and I can see her struggling to keep it together.
My hand twitches at my side, every instinct screaming to reach out, to offer comfort through touch.
To tell her it’s okay that she was a complicated kid with complicated dreams, that it’s okay to not have known your parents could hold nuance when you were so young.
But I know that crossing that line now, here, would only make things harder for her.
So I hold it in.
When she turns back, she’s reassembled her TV smile.
Only the slight redness around her eyes gives her away.
I catch Madge’s eye over Aarti’s shoulder.
She gives me the smallest nod–part acknowledgment, part thank you.
At that moment, I understand that Madge has been doing this far longer than me: standing guard over Aarti’s heart while she gives pieces of it away for public consumption.
“Shall we move to the next truck?” Madge suggests gently.
Aarti nods, grateful for the redirect. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s keep going.”
At the pupusa truck, Aarti orders before I can even read the menu. “Queso con loroco, and one revuelta,” she tells the vendor, then turns to me. “This truck? Changed my life.”
“How so?”
“The Hayworth. Pico-Union. Talent scouts were in the audience, but I didn’t know.” She accepts the hot pupusas. “I’d been surviving on coffee and anxiety for three days. Couldn’t afford food, too proud to ask for help. Classic broke comic spiral.”
She tears into the pupusa, and I watch the cheese stretch.
“So I’m backstage, dizzy from hunger, and Dona Carmen–” she gestures to the woman in the truck, who waves, “–shows up with a bag of pupusas for her daughter who was also performing that night. Just walks into the green room like she owns the place.”
“You all needed to eat!” Dona Carmen calls out.
“I’m trying to be professional, right? Can’t eat before my set. But my stomach growls so loud it would be actually rude to refuse her at that point. So fuck it. I grab a pupusa and walk on stage with it.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. Took a huge bite and said–” she switches into her stage voice, “–‘my white friends’ parents say ‘I love you’ but my parents say ‘Did you eat?’ Dona Carmen shows up to comedy shows with pupusas like other people’s moms show up with flowers.
’” She takes another bite, remembering. “I think I ended with: ‘This pupusa is priceless. It’s handmade by someone who’d cry at my funeral.
Your Erewhon smoothie doesn’t care if you live or die as long as you part with your life savings to pay for it. ’”
“Brilliant.”
“Scouts thought so, too. Came backstage after, but all I remember is being mortified that I met them with curtido on my shirt.” She grins. “First meeting with an agent and I smelled like fermented cabbage.”
Dona Carmen leans out of her truck. “I told you that night, when you’re meant for something, it doesn’t matter if you’re perfect. It matters if you’re real.”
“Thank you, Dona,” Aarti says, squeezing Carmen’s hand.
I press my hand to my stomach. “I’m stuffed.”
“Well, make room, cuz I saved the best for last! Don Chente’s, the one I mentioned to you.
The one truck we’re visiting today that actually lives right by the pier.
” She walks down the boardwalk and I follow.
“He makes his chorizo every day from scratch. His wife taught him the recipe forty years ago in Guadalajara, and he’s never changed it. Not once. He says–”
But where a taco truck should stand, there’s only a gleaming silver vehicle with “LA’s Best Lobster Rolls” in a hip retro font.
Her brow furrows. “This can’t be right.”
Madge hurries up.
“Aarti, I’m so sorry, I mean to tell you,” she says. “We tried to track him down, but–”
It hits her.
“How long?” Aarti’s still staring at the brand-new truck.
“We called his old number but it was disconnected–”
“How long?”
“The lobster guy took over Don’s usual spot six months ago, he came highly recommended.”
“Six months.” Aarti laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I haven’t been to see him in six months.”
The lobster truck owner, oblivious to the tension, waves at our cameras. “Want to try the special? We’re famous on Gramsta!”
I see her TV training kick in again–the smile appearing like armor, professional courtesy overriding personal heartbreak.
She orders one roll to split. When she takes a bite, her expression shifts. “Goddammit.”
“Good?”
“Incredible. I hate it.” She passes it to me.
“Twenty years. Don Chente was in Santa Monica for twenty years. He let me practice my Spanish crowd work on his customers at three in the morning. Drunk people wanting tacos, and this teenage kid trying out jokes in eighth-grade-level Spanish.” Her voice cracks slightly.
“They were the kindest audience I ever had.”
“I’m sorry, Aarti.”
“All the people who worked all day and night, who fed me, who kept me safe–they’re disappearing. Priced out. Replaced by…” she waves at the lobster roll, “artisanal butter and tripled rent.”
“Cut,” Madge calls softly.
As the crew scatters, Aarti turns to me. “Want to know something pathetic?”
I nod.
“I kept a map. Every person who fed me when I was starting out. Every truck, every auntie, every late-night counter. I thought when I made it, I’d go back. Pay them back somehow.” She laughs bitterly. “But I was so busy making it, I forgot to check if they’d still be there.”
“You’re honoring them now,” I point out. “By telling their stories.”
“Am I? Or am I just another opportunist with a TV show, mining my community for content?”
“Hey.” I wait until she looks at me. “You’re not mining anything. You’re remembering. There’s a difference.”
She studies my face for a moment, then puffs out her cheeks in an exhale. “How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Make me feel like less of a fraud.”
Before I can answer, Madge is calling us back to base camp, and the moment passes. But as we walk back, Aarti links her pinky with mine, just for a second, so quick our onlookers wouldn’t possibly catch it.
“Thank you,” she murmurs.
I can tell she means it.