“Why?” It was all Ashna could manage.

Shobi’s face was a negotiator’s mask—blank but not unyielding. “Because I think it’s time we got to know each other.”

Laughter bubbled out of Ashna. Not anxious laughter, but mirth, because this was hilarious.

Shobi ignored her and barreled on, a bowler staring down the pitch at a batsman. “When you’re free and at home, we have some of this amazing chai and talk. That’s all I’m asking.”

She was good.

Did she know this was Ashna’s chai? Was her praise part of her strategy?

Ashna placed her hands on her father’s countertop, cold and hard against her palms. “Are you sure you’re not ill?”

Her mother shook her head. “I’m as healthy as a forty-nine-year-old who walks five kilometers on a polluted beach every day can be.” Now they were both standing with their palms on the granite, mirrors of each other, gauging, opaque, exposed. “There’s so much I need to tell you. It’s the kind of stuff daughters go in search of after their mothers die. Maybe we can do it now while we’re both still here?”

The lump in Ashna’s throat was painful, but she swallowed it down. If she’d ever had any doubts about how Shobi had gotten her nickname of Dragon-Raje, they were gone now.

“Okay. But know that I’m only doing this for Curried Dreams. And for Baba.”

Shobi bit her lip and nodded. Ashna had to be seeing things in her exhausted state, because for the first time in Ashna’s life she saw tears shimmer in her mother’s eyes.

Chapter Sixteen

Shoban had always found tears tiresome. The fact that she was crying in an ornate five-hundred-room palace made them mortifying. She was captive in a palace like some archaic fairy-tale princess—humiliating—and it was making her cry—beyond humiliating.

Her boarding school nickname was Heartless Shoban, because for some reason, the girls at her school equated having a heart with being a watering can. Her classmates cried when they watched movies; some even cried while watching ads. The last time Shoban remembered crying was when she said goodbye to her mother in the hospital, before her father had told them to take her off life support and then left the room before they did.

Shoban had cried incessantly then, the rivers flowing from her eyes obscuring her mother’s body. Then at the cremation, she had realized that crying didn’t ease the pain, it just displayed it for others to see, and she stopped, because it had felt wrong to do that to Ma’s memory.

Now, alone in this room with enough carved teak furniture to turn a forest barren, there was no one to display the pain to. So she let it out.

What she needed to do, instead of indulging herself with tears, was to contact Omar. But how?