Part 2 of 9 · 2 minCooking Back

I started cooking properly on the ninth day.

Not for me. That is the part I need you to understand before the rest of it. I stood in a kitchen I had barely used since my mother died and I made something for a person I had never met, and I was happier than I had been in a year.

I made pappu with fresh gongura, because they had given me gongura first and it seemed like the polite reply. I burned the tadka. I threw it out and did it again. It was eleven at night and I was standing over a pan at eleven at night, for a stranger, laughing at myself.

The next day my box came back empty. Wiped clean. Not rinsed — wiped, with a cloth, so the steel had no water marks.

And in return: chicken, done slow, the meat coming off the way it only does when somebody has stood there and not hurried it.

That was the shape of it for three weeks. I cooked at night, badly and then less badly. Something came back that was always better than what I sent. I stopped eating breakfast so I would be hungry at twelve-forty. I started going to the market on Sundays. The vegetable woman learned my face.

I did not tell anyone at work. I would like to say I kept it private. The truth is smaller and worse: I did not want it to stop, and I thought that if I said it out loud somebody would put a stop to it.

On the twenty-second day I asked the office boy anyway, in a voice I made casual. Who else uses the pantry fridge. He said nobody, sir, only the second floor.

I am on the fourth floor.

I asked Facilities whether the pantry had a camera. It did not. It never had. There was a proposal in 2019 and it was denied on cost.

That night I made chapatis for the first time in my life. They came out like maps of countries that do not exist. I packed them anyway, and with them the first thing I ever wrote to her, though I did not know then that it was a her. Four words on a torn page.

*Sorry about the shape.*

The next day my box came back with the note still inside, and under it, in a hand I did not know, on the same torn page:

*You are getting better.*