There was plenty of bitter melon today, glossy and lime green with lush scalloped ridges. Ashna let Charlie, her favorite farmer’s son, sell her everything he had left, an extra five pounds, so he could go home early. He was taking care of business while his father recovered from colon surgery—which Charlie felt the need to explicate in lurid detail as he helped Ashna carry her bags to her car.

Apparently, the pre-surgery “bowel clean-out” hadn’t gone as smoothly as they had hoped.

Ashna patted the poor boy’s shoulder and asked him about high school, and they bonded over every Asian child’s favorite topic: their family’s obsession with grades and college applications. Charlie’s parents were Vietnamese, and Ashna much preferred the image of Farmer Dang as an exacting parent to any sort of bowel clean-out association.

“You’re a good son,” she told him, and he blushed, which was incredibly endearing given that talk of bowels hadn’t embarrassed him in the slightest.

Ashna dropped off the produce at Curried Dreams. Extra bitter melon was never an issue. The unpopular vegetable was a favorite with the Rajes, none of whom were daunted by the bitterness that sat atop the other, more complex underlying flavors. She would take some over to her aunt and uncle’s house later.

Her grandmother could make magic with bitter melon, stuffing it with fried onions and then frying the entire thing to a buttery, salty crunch. Baba’s recipe at the restaurant was derived from Aji’s recipe, but he’d made it richer with cashews added to the stuffing and a creamy onion sauce. Decadent, the way all of Baba’s versions of traditional recipes were. Ashna could make that version in her sleep, but she preferred the taste of the one her grandmother made.

After washing and sorting the produce at Curried Dreams she headed home to shower. Her restaurant and her home were separated by a cedar fence and a thicket of jacarandas, a distance of barely one hundred feet. Ashna’s father had built both buildings—the mansion-style restaurant and the Spanish stucco bungalow—from the ground up just after they moved from Sripore to California when Ashna was ten years old. Before that Ashna had only ever lived in the palace her ancestors had built centuries ago.

With Curried Dreams and the bungalow, she had watched the backhoe break ground as she stood there with her cousins, smelling long-buried earth being dredged up. She’d walked on newly laid tile and touched freshly plastered walls, watched furniture being moved in, tapestries being hung and rehung to Baba’s satisfaction.