Chapter 1 Dina
Dina
‘Reading smutty fan fiction again?’
I nearly jump out of my chair at the sound of the door opening and quickly slam my laptop shut before anyone can get a look at what’s on there.
Deen sets down the dish that he has come armed with. The spicy scent of chicken biryani makes my stomach gurgle with hunger. I hadn’t even realised that it was way past time for lunch.
We’re not really supposed to eat in the restaurant’s office – it’s reserved for business meetings.
But nobody else comes in here except for me and Deen these days, so there’s no one to bust us for breaking the rules.
It’s not like Baba’s around, pretending to be annoyed at us running into the office during rush hour to play hide-and-seek, or doodling all over his envelopes full of overdue bills.
‘I don’t read fan fiction; I’m pretty sure that’s you,’ I accuse teasingly, though, in truth, we both know who reads the smutty fan fiction in our family. Putting my laptop back into my bag, I eagerly accept a plate of the steaming-hot biryani from Deen.
‘It’s an old Bengali recipe,’ Deen says, as he sits down at the other end of the table with his own plate. ‘Apparently, it was derived from the Mughal era, and they used to serve this in an old Dhaka restaurant back in the day.’
‘Where do you even find out this crap?’ I ask, while digging into the rice and chicken.
Of course, it’s the best biryani that I’ve ever had in my life.
Somehow, Deen has the ability to make anything he touches taste like God’s gift to humanity.
I’m not envious of his gift, considering I would rather eat my own arm off than spend all my day in the kitchen, but I am a little envious of the fact that he’s so damn talented at what he does.
‘A little research goes a long way,’ Deen says with a grin. ‘So … what were you looking at then?’ He nods to the laptop peeking out from my backpack under the desk.
I don’t want to talk about it, but I know Deen won’t let it go.
‘Job applications,’ I admit, reluctantly.
‘It’s grim out there, did you know that?
’ I don’t admit that it’s less about the prospect of jobs and more about how little I want to actually do any of those jobs.
There are plenty of HR positions going, but the financial firm that I worked at before felt like it was sucking my soul dry.
I’d applied to other HR positions, and a few had even invited me to interview, but they all had the same putrid smell of corporate greed behind their sheen of fancy office buildings.
I didn’t quit only to jump back into the corporate world again, no matter how well it paid. The depression was not worth it.
It’s not like things are much better now. I’ve been doing a few waitressing jobs here and there to make ends meet, but that’s not exactly the pinnacle of my dreams. It truly sucks to be trying to start over at twenty-eight, when I thought I’d have my life all figured out by now.
‘You’ll find something,’ Deen says with uncharacteristic optimism as he shovels biryani into his mouth.
‘This is good,’ I say, nodding at the half-full bowl still on the desk between us. ‘You should put this on the menu. We could have an old-Bengali cuisine theme. Go back to the world of the Mughals. I bet people will be intrigued by that, huh?’
‘Yeah, I can imagine it.’ Deen nods along, and I note the familiar glint in his eyes.
‘We could redo the walls and ceilings with that Mughal flair, get some paintings from that era.’ Deen quirks his head at me, as if he is thinking it through.
‘Hm, it’ll be mood lighting, romantic and sophisticated.
But it’ll still have that cosy, homey feel at the same time.
So that people who come here can feel, you know …
like this is their place. A home away from their own homes. ’
He pauses, and I can almost see the restaurant the way that he’s described it, instead of the one on the other side of the office door, with chipped paint and furniture that creaks every time someone uses it, which is rare these days.
‘We could get some old-timey chairs and tables, some kerosene lamps,’ I suggest, noticing how Deen comes to life when he talks about the restaurant. About his dream. ‘You know Mustafa Uncle? Ma told me he has a new place at Whitechapel Market, selling second-hand furniture. We could go sometime.’
‘Maybe someday,’ Deen says with a sigh.
Just like that, we snap out of the dream and see it how it is.
He has big dreams about the restaurant but has yet to bring up any of them with our mum.
She’s never been one for shiny new ideas.
She likes the fact that the restaurant’s menu hasn’t changed in decades.
She likes that she hasn’t updated the decor; that the chairs squeak when you sit on them, and that the tables wobble whenever you set down a dish.
She likes that all the customers are regulars and that we never get busy enough to need more than one person running the place.
Or, at least, she pretends that she likes all of those things, and she won’t hear a single word about updating anything.
‘Why put more money into a money pit?’ is her tried-and-tested mantra.
By the time Deen and I finish with our lunch, it’s time to prepare for the dinner rush. If you can call our slow trickle of customers a dinner rush.
Deen grabs the bowl of leftover biryani, while I gather our plates, and the two of us make it out of the office, through the deserted restaurant, and into the kitchen.
‘Maybe you could serve the biryani as a chef’s special,’ I suggest while I scrub the dishes, and Deen gathers cauliflowers and carrots from the fridge.
‘Maybe,’ Deen mumbles, though we both know that he won’t.
Despite his teenage years of rebellion, which earned him quite the reputation, Deen has the utmost respect for our parents, especially when it comes to the restaurant.
It might be dilapidated and a money pit now, but it’s still what’s kept us afloat for all of our lives.
The restaurant and our parents’ hard work are the clothes on our back, and the food on our plate.
Besides, it’s Ma who taught Deen how to cook, when he got suspended from school for smoking weed in the bathrooms. She forced him to make dinner for the family for a whole month as punishment, birthing his lifelong love for cooking.
So, if Ma doesn’t want Deen to serve his food here and change up the menu, then he won’t.
No matter how much he wants to.
I leave Deen to his cooking, since I would probably only help set the kitchen on fire, and start making my way back to the office, pondering whether I should even bother to go back to LinkedIn or if I should spend the rest of my day hiding in the office and binge watching whatever I can find on Netflix.
But then the restaurant door opens, and in comes a horde of teenage girls, along with their buzz of talk and laughter.
They’re led in by a woman who looks strangely familiar.
‘OK, guys, grab a table, and I’ll go up to the—’ The woman’s voice is drowned out by the increasing sounds from the group of girls, who are now rushing to the empty tables by the corner, pushing them together until they make one long line.
I look back towards the kitchen door, expecting that Deen will come back out, ready to wrangle the kids, but when he doesn’t, I march towards the woman in charge of the group with a frown.
‘Sorry, they really shouldn’t be rearranging the furniture like that,’ I say, though I can’t muster up enough energy to actually be frustrated. The girls have drawn up their chairs to the tables now, sitting elbow to elbow as they grab at the menus and shout over each other to be heard.
‘Dina?’ the woman asks.
When I turn to look at her – really look at her – I place her immediately.
‘Jen?’
Jen smiles, and it almost feels like I’m suddenly transported back to school.
Back to the football field, where Jen’s encouraging smile led me to every victory that I ever had.
It’s been so many years since I saw her – too many years – but somehow, she looks almost exactly the same.
Only her brown hair is a little shorter, and she looks a little older, like age and experience have settled into her youthful face.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ Jen says, extending her arms out towards me. I wrap my arms around her too, almost out of instinct.
‘You too. What … what are you doing here?’ I ask. ‘Those … aren’t all your kids, are they?’ I ask with a hesitant laugh, nodding at the group of girls that are still shouting to be heard by each other, despite the fact that the rest of the restaurant is completely deserted.
Jen chuckles. ‘No. Not my kids. I’m coaching a football team for the local council, and we just had training.’
‘Wow.’ Now that I look at the girls a little closer, it’s easy to see that they’re wearing what could almost constitute football attire. They’re not decked out in matching jerseys and football boots, but there’s an array of loose T-shirts, shorts and brow-beaten trainers.
‘Yeah, I’m sorry they’re … a little excitable,’ Jen says. ‘I’ll try to get them to calm down, and I can have them put the tables back if—’
‘No, no. It’s fine,’ I say, shaking my head. It’s not like any other customers are going to use those tables anyway. ‘It’s good to see that you’re still coaching.’
‘I like doing it.’ Jen shrugs. ‘I had to step away from the school to take care of family, but honestly, I had kind of missed coaching.’
I glance at the girls from her team again, and wonder what she missed about it. It couldn’t have been dealing with teenage girls all day.
‘Well, you were good at it. I bet the school misses you.’ I still remember all the times she cheered me on from the touchline, and how she always fought for the school to fund the girls’ football team when it was often only interested in the boys’ team.