Recipe for Persuasion Read online

  Dedication

  For Aie and Baba for disregarding the “in-law” in

  daughter-in-law from the very start, but more importantly

  for doing away with all the patriarchal nonsense that

  goes with it. Without your unconditional love and

  support this journey would not be half as joyful.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Also by Sonali Dev

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Ashna Raje couldn’t remember the last time her restaurant had thirty occupied tables. The gentle hum of customer conversation drifted into the kitchen from the dining area. It was nowhere near the nightly five-hundred-person din from when her father ran Curried Dreams, but it kindled the tiniest glimmer of hope inside Ashna. She snuffed it out. Hope terrified her. Ashna didn’t credit her parents with much humor, but giving someone like her a name that meant “filled with hope” was definitely a cruel joke.

  “Angry customer at table twelve, boss.” One of the servers ran to her just as Ashna finished plating an order of biryani and slid it onto the counter. “She’s demanding the crisp fried okra we served last week. I told her we took it off the menu. But she won’t listen.”

  Ashna released a breath, expelling whatever scraps of hope she had left, and patted the server’s arm. “Thanks. I’ll take care of it.”

  She made her way into the tastefully ornate, albeit slightly run-down, dining room, stopping to ask the two tables on her way if they were enjoying their meal. She got one noncommittal shrug and one enthusiastic “Everything is delicious!” from a couple celebrating their engagement. She stayed to hear the story of how he had proposed in a hot-air balloon, then signaled the waitstaff to bring the couple complimentary champagne and the noncommittal table complimentary gulab jamuns.

  By the time she reached table twelve, the customer demanding the fried okra—which Ashna had removed from the menu and was never putting back on—looked in no mood to be placated.

  “I have to have that okra,” the woman said as soon as Ashna introduced herself. She didn’t seem used to being denied things.

  The man sitting next to her patted her hand, earning himself an impressive glare for his effort. “We’re pregnant,” he declared, ignoring his wife’s glare and the fact that he was, obviously, not in the least bit pregnant.

  “How lovely,” Ashna said pointedly to the woman. “Congratulations.”

  She was about to add that they were no longer serving the special menu when the woman threw Ashna the most tortured look. “Thank you. It’s been a rough two months. I haven’t been able to eat anything.”

  “Anything,” the husband echoed, rivaling her desperation.

  “James brought me the bhindi last week and it’s exactly how my mother made it when I was little. It’s literally all I can keep down.”

  “Literally all she can keep down.” Another echo.

  The okra recipe was one Ashna’s friend DJ had created when he helped her come up with a menu to resurrect her failing restaurant. Why oh why did her friends have to be so good at what they did?

  The couple blinked up at her, matching pleading looks widening their eyes.

  “Of course.” Ashna smiled, even as her heart raced. “We can prepare the okra for you. I’ll send out jal jeera. My cousin says the mint and cumin settle her nausea. She’s pregnant too.”

  The woman jumped up and hugged Ashna, then sat back down and dabbed the sweat off her husband’s forehead with her napkin.

  Any other time, Ashna would have found the man hilarious. But as she hurried back into the kitchen, she could barely breathe. Fortunately, her sous chef hadn’t left yet. Ashna had promised Mandy that she could leave early today, but seeing that she was still here filled Ashna with relief.

  Mandy paused in the act of putting on her jacket and the attention in the kitchen shifted to them like a spotlight. Two line cooks, the prep staff, the dishwasher, the bussers carrying trays, everyone pretended a little too hard to focus on their tasks.

  When Ashna had returned from culinary school in Paris ten years ago and taken over the restaurant, she’d been buzzing with new recipes. But the first time she’d tried to cook something that wasn’t Baba’s recipe in this kitchen—his kitchen—the panic attack had knocked her off her feet, literally. It had felt like a truck driving onto her chest. Fainting and waking up surrounded by her staff staring down at her on the kitchen floor was an experience she’d sworn she would never risk repeating.

  Then a few months ago DJ had helped her revamp her menu and she’d forced herself to try again, only to find that nothing had changed. For a month Ashna had relied on Mandy to prepare DJ’s new recipes. Then her sous chef had asked for a day off and Ashna realized that she had to be able to cook her menu herself, without passing out. She had reverted to Baba’s original menu.

  Now, the panic truck revved close to her chest as she retrieved okra from the pantry and turned to her assistant. “The customer’s pregnant. Can you take care of the okra?”

  Mandy took off her jacket and tied her smock back around herself just a little more forcefully than necessary. “Sure, boss.”

  Ashna resisted the urge to fall to her knees in relief. Instead, she put her heart into a simple “Thank you,” and got back to the next drop.

  Her hands flew over sautéing garlic for the dal makhani. The act of preparing Baba’s recipe loosened the panic in her chest, along with the congealed grief lodged deep inside. It had been twelve years since Baba put a bullet through his head. Ashna had heard the shot seconds before she found him facedown on his desk, a month before her eighteenth birthday.

  After his death, Ashna had left Curried Dreams in the care of his two most trusted employees and gone to Paris to fulfill Baba’s dream of attending culinary school there, and to lick her wounds. It had been an indulgence she’d been paying for ever since she returned to find her father’s legacy destroyed and buried in debt. The two men had siphoned five million dollars from Curried Dreams and made off with the money.

  Baba’s life had ended in a single deafening blast, but his restaurant had continued to bleed out for the past ten years. And Ashna was responsible for both.

  With Curried Dreams she was determined to stem the bleed. So, thirty tables was definitely a victory, foreclosure notices notwithstanding.

  After the last customers left, including one v
ery grateful pregnant couple, Ashna thanked her staff, saving the announcement of the budget cuts for another day.

  Mandy, who had stayed on after missing the baby shower she’d been headed to, pursed her lips as Ashna waved goodbye to Khalid and Wilfrieda. Her line chefs grabbed each other’s hands as soon as they were out the kitchen door, making Ashna smile. Ah, fresh young love! It was like the smell of cumin roasting in butter: you couldn’t hide it for anything.

  “Which one of them are you going to fire, then?” The sharpness in Mandy’s eyes nipped Ashna’s sigh in the bud.

  “I have a plan,” Ashna lied cheerily.

  “Of course you do.” Recently Mandy’s cynical gruffness had morphed more and more into bitterness, something Ashna refused to allow into her own heart.

  Filling the copper kettle with water, she put it on the stove. What Mandy needed was a good tulsi oolong tea to relax her.

  Mandy ignored the overture, hung up her smock, and for the second time that evening grabbed her jacket from the closet. Mandy was always the last of the staff to leave. There was something comforting about their nightly routine of taking stock of the day and planning tomorrow together.

  Except tonight, Mandy didn’t throw Ashna her usual: “Get some rest, how will you catch a man if you look this exhausted?” Instead, she placed a hand on her hip and paused as though she didn’t quite know what to do.

  Ashna dropped the tea leaves from her jars into a tea ball, and waited.

  “You’ve been promising me a raise all year,” Mandy said finally.

  Ashna forced herself not to squeeze the tea ball too tight. Fidgeting made her look helpless, and she was anything but helpless. She dropped her arms loosely at her sides and acted as though this didn’t feel like being kicked in the gut.

  “We had thirty tables today, and we’ve had twenty-five a few times this week. It’s an upward trend.” More than anything, she wanted to give Mandy a raise, give her entire staff raises.

  “You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, right?” Her assistant’s hand on her hip was a familiar pose, but Mandy had never taken that tone with her.

  Ashna had hired her five years ago, after Mandy’s teenage daughter left her month-old baby sleeping in Mandy’s house one night and disappeared. When Mandy came in for the interview, her desperation wrapped tight in the cloak of cheery optimism had felt only too familiar to Ashna. She’d let Mandy set up a cradle and playpen for the baby in the room behind the kitchen. As someone whose mother had walked away from her without a backward glance, anyone who did not abandon a child had Ashna’s full support.

  Then two years ago Mandy’s daughter returned for her baby, setting the harried grandma free, but Mandy had stuck with Ashna. The look on her face said that the statute of limitations on that obligation had come to an end.

  “You wouldn’t be the first person to call me insane for holding on to Curried Dreams,” Ashna said gently.

  “If you hadn’t reverted to the old menu, our thirty-table dinner rush might be a hundred-person rush by now.” Mandy was never going to let that go.

  Ashna squeezed the bridge of her nose, then pulled her hand away. “I understand that our financial condition is frustrating to you.” She sounded imperious, much like her royal ancestors, and tossed in a smile, because she had to stay upbeat. “But Curried Dreams stands for something.”

  Irritation flooded Mandy’s face, freckles darkening against her pale skin. “It stands for decrepitude and dated recipes, Ashna.”

  Ashna’s hands squeezed into fists. “Where I come from, we call it history and tradition.” And respect for the dead.

  That last part stayed unsaid. Nonetheless, it echoed through the spotless (not decrepit, thank you very much) kitchen, and Mandy’s eyes softened in response.

  She sighed, half remorseful, half giving up the fight. “Where I come from, there’s no trust fund to indulge my need to stay stuck in the past.”

  Ashna’s smile slid off her face. She unclenched her fists. “I have to run Curried Dreams the way I want to run it,” she said quietly, surprising herself with how calm she sounded.

  Mandy buttoned her jacket. “Even if it means running it into the ground?”

  Ashna took a step back. Mandy had never spoken to her this way. Something was very wrong.

  Ashna’s mind started racing. Mandy had taken a day off last week and uncharacteristically not told Ashna why. Suddenly it was obvious what this was. An image of Mandy going to an interview at another restaurant formed in her mind. She imagined the sharp stab of abandonment when Mandy told her she had found a new job. It was inevitable, surprising that it hadn’t happened already.

  “When were you going to tell me you had an offer?” The words were out before she could stop them.

  Embarrassment colored Mandy’s cheeks, proving Ashna right.

  The familiar discomfort of being left behind ballooned inside Ashna too fast. She swallowed it down. “You should take the job,” she said.

  Mandy raised her chin, hurt and indignant. “Do you really want me to take it?”

  If Mandy had gone looking, it was just a matter of time before she moved on. “You deserve to do what’s best for you.”

  “Fine.” Mandy’s voice was too soft for what was happening. “Consider this my two weeks.” She opened the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The door creaked shut behind her. It needed a fresh coat of paint. The gray had peeled, exposing white patches of primer.

  Decrepit.

  Ashna ran to the door and pushed it open. Cool night air whipped her face. Mandy was halfway across the parking lot to her car. The lampposts painted ominous halos around everything. The idea of two weeks now, with the connection between them damaged—Ashna couldn’t imagine it.

  “Mandy,” she called, making her turn around. “I know you deserved much more than I could pay you. So . . . so why don’t you take two weeks. Paid. Take that trip to Sonoma. Take a break before the new job.”

  Relief suffused Mandy’s face. She didn’t want two more weeks of awkwardness either.

  “Thanks, Ashna,” she said.

  “Thanks, Mandy.”

  As simply as that, it was over.

  Back inside, the kitchen wrapped around Ashna, unchanged over the years. Bricks, mortar, steel. Solid, dependable, predictable. Not fragile and breakable like the connections between people.

  Sure, the appliances needed updating and the exhaust fans had become maddeningly loud—to a point where they sounded like a dead animal was stuck in the vents and screaming for mercy—but the steel countertops gleamed. Not a spot of grime anywhere.

  Evidently, Ashna didn’t have as hard a time with pride as she had with hope. Plugging in her headphones, she turned on her playlist. To the power blast that was Alicia Keys’s voice belting out “Girl on Fire,” she made her way to the storage area and pushed out the janitorial cart. Then, snapping on the bright orange rubber gloves, she got to her nightly vacuum, dust, spit-shine routine.

  Letting the cleaning service go a year ago had been an easy decision. It’s how she had avoided cutting Mandy’s salary or hours. Mandy, who thought there was a trust fund to cover all this. Well, that wasn’t how royal wealth worked.

  The physical exertion of cleaning made Ashna feel alive.

  The mosaic floors needed a good buffing, the velvet jacquard on the chairs was frayed in places, and the teakwood tables could use a coat of varnish, but as she wiped and scrubbed, everything got a little brighter and took on the familiar gleam of long-owned artifacts. New things were overrated anyway.

  Baba had hand-selected every fitting and fixture to his exacting standards. Every little thing here was a handprint he’d left behind. With Bram Raje at the helm, Curried Dreams had been Palo Alto’s hottest spot, the Bay Area’s first fine dining Indian restaurant. Reservations had been a coveted prize, favors Ashna’s father handed out in his magnanimous Prince Bram way.

&n
bsp; Ashna switched the vacuum cleaner off and wrapped up the cord. She refused to turn toward the half flight of stairs that led to Baba’s office, where she had found him in a rapidly growing pool of blood. If she let the darkness knock her down, who would keep Curried Dreams alive?

  “What are we going to do?” she whispered to the beloved walls. She was all out of options.

  A ping sounded in her ear, interrupting Alicia’s rapture over New York City.

  We’re at the door. A text from her cousin Trisha.

  In a mad dash Ashna put away the cart, rubbed rose-scented lotion into her hands to cover the chemical smell, and ran to the door.

  It was just past midnight, but a visit after closing time from one of her cousins or her best friend, China, was a common occurrence. Everyone Ashna knew worked too hard and too late, and after all the restaurants in the area closed she was everyone’s favorite food source. She opened the door and found herself to be right twice over. Both China and Trisha pushed their way into the kitchen.

  “We’ve been knocking for five minutes!” Trisha said accusatorially.

  “You’re still here, thank God!” China added.

  “Where else would I be?” Ashna headed for the fridge. “You hungry?”

  They shook their heads. “We ate,” they said in unison.

  Very strange. A midnight visit without a food agenda.

  “We’ll take some tea,” Trisha said, even as she found Ashna’s cup and took a sip. “I can never drink chai anyone else makes. You’ve ruined me for substandard chai.”

  Ashna smiled. Most people did murder tea. They didn’t understand how spices interacted with leaves and basically just threw stuff together and called it a blend. Some even had the gall to call it “tea” when there was no tea in it.

  “Don’t drink it cold.” Before Ashna could finish the sentence, the cup in Trisha’s hands had been drained.

  Ashna sighed and refilled the kettle. China and Trisha exchanged a speaking look. Something was definitely up. Trisha might be Ashna’s uncle’s daughter, but they had grown up together and were more sisters than cousins. Also, Trisha had the world’s most transparent face.

  “Anyone want to tell me what this is about?”