The Art of Inheriting Secrets Read online

  I had been living in jeans and sweaters (jumpers, I reminded myself) since I arrived. From the closet, I pulled out the single dress I’d brought, a simple black jersey with a deep V-neck, long sleeves, and an empire waist. The hem and sleeves were embroidered ever so slightly with turquoise and silver thread. The best part was that I could look halfway decent in it even if I was twenty pounds over the weight I should be—which was probably not far off, considering how long I’d been unable to exercise.

  Checking my reflection in the long mirror behind the door, I was happy to see that it still fit. It draped my too-generous behind with some kindness, but the low neck was almost scandalous. I tugged the two sides of the V closer together, and it seemed okay, but just in case, I draped a bright scarf in abstract splashes of turquoise and navy around my neck. Didn’t want to stir the gossips my first evening out.

  With a swath of bright-red lipstick, I felt ready to meet the world. Standing back from the narrow mirror, I approved my reflection—a countess, I told the woman in the mirror, and she gave me a nod. This was what this countess looked like. It would have to do.

  Rain was spitting as I walked to the market square and Coriander. Again, it was quite busy, most of the tables full even on a Tuesday night. Evocative fingers of spice hung in the air, waving me inside.

  It was larger than it looked from outside, and the space had been divided into more intimate sections with screens printed with peacocks.

  A young woman approached. “Hello. You must be Lady Shaw.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Amika. Pavi gave specific instructions for your service tonight. If you would follow me.”

  She led me through the restaurant, and I could feel eyes on me, hear slight whispers as I passed. I channeled my mother and pretended I didn’t notice. I did notice the family-style service, the tasteful tableware, the flowers tucked into glass vases.

  At the back of the restaurant were three alcoves set on a ledge a foot higher than the rest of the floor. Intimate, for lovers or a small party of friends, which was exactly what two of them held. The last was empty, and of course, it was meant for me. As I settled, pleased to have the view over the restaurant, Amika said, “Pavi will be out momentarily. Can I bring you a glass of wine?”

  “Yes, that would be wonderful. Did she tell you what it should be, by any chance?”

  She smiled. “Yes, ma’am, she did.” With a little bow, she headed for the kitchen.

  A second later, Pavi hurried out, dressed in chef’s whites with a turquoise apron, her hair caught back from her face beneath a tight scarf. “Hello! I’m so happy to see you!” she cried, taking my hands as she stepped into the booth. “Everything is ready. I just have to slip out of these clothes, and I’ll be right with you.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Again she squeezed my hands, bringing an aura of warmth and welcome to the space. “I’ll be right back.”

  The wine arrived, and I took a sip—a pretty, pale rosé, ordinarily only served in the summertime in California, but I could immediately understand how it might be brilliant with Indian spices. I swirled and tasted, and it was light and dry and fruity. It was also the first glass of wine I’d had in weeks, and it hit my tongue like a dance troupe, tapping all my taste buds, waking me up.

  Pavi appeared, hair smoothed into a bun, wearing a simple floral dress with a floaty skirt and flat shoes. “How is the wine?”

  I laughed. “Amazing.”

  “My father is going to join us, too, if you don’t mind. He’s been a bit agitated about it all day, so I think he’s a little shy.” Her eyes glittered, exactly the same way her brother’s did, and I felt a pang. “He’ll probably be overly formal at first, but he’ll warm up.”

  “It sounds like he knew my mother and grandmother. I’m really excited to talk to him.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Samir told me.”

  For the space of a breath, so short a moment that I almost could not say for sure that it happened, she paused. “Have you become friends?” She broke a piece of popadam and swirled it in a tiny crystal dish of mint-coriander chutney.

  “Yes, a little.” I decided to confront the subtext head-on. “Is there a problem?”

  “Oh, no! I’m sorry. He tends to be a bit of a loner—that’s all.” Her smile was generous. “I’m the more outgoing of the pair of us.” She plucked up a small dish of riata and set it down in front of me. “Try this one. I’ve been perfecting it. Coriander.” Her smile flashed. “Naturally.”

  I smiled and did as I was told. The riata struck my tongue, filled my mouth with crisp and cool, sharp and soft. “Marvelous,” I said. “I could eat it by the spoonful.”

  She nodded.

  “Is Samir the oldest?” I dipped another piece of popadam in the mint coriander. “This is always my favorite,” I commented. “And this one is delicious.”

  “Yes, he’s my older brother by three years. I’ve just turned thirty.”

  A ping like a thorn stuck in my throat. That meant Samir was only thirty-three. I was thirty-nine, forty this summer. Reaching for my wine, I managed a half smile. “Honestly, I thought you were about twenty-three. I’d kill for your skin.”

  “Genetic.” She shrugged. “My mother looks forty, and she’s over sixty.”

  “My mother looked every minute of her years,” I said, “but she smoked, always. Never gave it up even when it made her a social pariah in San Francisco.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  I didn’t even have to stop to calculate. “It will be six weeks on Monday.”

  “Oh, dear!” She covered my hand on the table with her own. The warmth weighted me, kept me from flying away into my grief again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks.” I turned my hand over and gave her fingers a grateful squeeze, and as I did so, I realized I felt as comfortable in Pavi’s presence as I did in Samir’s. “And your mom has gone back to India—is that right?”

  Again, a slight, startled pause, but she recovered quickly. “Samir told you that too. I’m so surprised. He doesn’t talk about her.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Amika and another young server, this one a boy with the long neck and big hands of a teenager, arrived with a plate of what looked like prawns and vegetables on sticks. “Paneer prawn tikka,” the boy said and eyed his boss. “With mango chutney and red onions.”

  The fragrance wafted over us, spice and heat, and I couldn’t wait to try it. “Tell me about your journey,” I said as she used tongs to fill my plate. The serving dish was brass with carving on the edges, and I took out my phone. “Do you mind if I post things to Instagram?”

  “No.” She laughed, nudging the low, flat bowl of chutney my way. “I seriously do not mind if one of the most respected food editors in the US Instagrams my food.”

  I grinned and shot the prawns, the edge of the dish, and the pot of chutney, then leaned back to get a good shot of Pavi, who easily smiled just enough to look intriguing. I put my phone aside. “Now, tell me.”

  “Wait—here comes my father. He’ll weigh in on this too.”

  A tall, broad-shouldered man approached the table. His face was timeworn, with deep grooves along his mouth and a definitive stamp of sadness on his brow. He’d given his children his strong nose and wide mouth, but their eyes must have come from their mother. His were slightly hooded beneath thick, heavy brows. “Good evening,” he said in a strong British accent. “I am Harshad Malakar, and you are Lady Shaw. You look so much like your grandmother; it is as if you stepped out of a photograph.”

  “So I have been hearing,” I said and started to half stand, but he waved me back into place. “I’m so happy to meet you, Mr. Malakar.”

  “Please, call me Harshad.”

  “Then I insist you must call me Olivia.”

  “Oh, no. I could not.”

  I glanced at Pavi, who ever so slightly shook her head. “Will you eat, Dad?”

  “Sure, sure.”
He waved a server over, asked for a place setting and tea. “How do you find us so far, Lady Shaw?”

  “The town or you and your family?” I asked, a prawn between my fingers. “The town is bewildering. Somehow, your family is grounding me.”

  “Ah, very good. That is because our families have known each other for many, many years, a century, perhaps.”

  “Really, that long?” The prawn was perfectly cooked, the spice a masterpiece of layering. I widened my eyes at Pavi. “This is amazing.”

  “Thank you.” She inclined her head. “Dad, I was just about to tell Lady—”

  “Ugh! Please call me Olivia!”

  She smiled. “I was just going to tell Olivia the story of the restaurant. Do you want to start?”

  “No, no. You go ahead.” The girl brought his tea, and he gestured for her to bring more of the tikka, for which I was grateful. It was layered with paneer and perfectly seared onions, and I couldn’t identify all of the spices but could definitely pick out the coriander and fresh ginger.

  “Dad spent his salad days in London, as you do, and met my mother at a wedding. They came back here to start a family, and he took over the takeaway from a friend of his father’s.”

  “Good business,” Harshad interjected. “Always busy. People came from all around to eat at the Curry Pot.”

  “It was,” Pavi agreed smoothly. “Sam and I went to university in London. I started with economics”—she gave me an amused lift of a brow—“but halfway through my third year, my roommate was a chef, and she just kept dragging me around to all these restaurants. I fell in love with food and the food scene and restaurants. All of it!”

  Her father shook his head, muttering, “Threw away their educations! Both of them!” But it was an old complaint and held no heat.

  Pavi gave him a pat on the hand. “My father would have liked going to university.”

  The plate of tikka was picked clean. Amika arrived to take it away.

  “Did you drop out of school, Pavi?”

  “No. I finished my degree and dutifully went to work at a research firm.” She shook her head and, as if the memory caused discomfort still, took a sip of wine. “But I could not bear it and left after three months.” She glanced at her father. “The howling! Good lord.”

  “I wanted to go to art school, and my mother wouldn’t allow it. That’s how I ended up in magazines. Funny how that goes.” I leaned in. “Did you go to culinary school?”

  “Yes. Worked in London for nearly four years, and then both Sam and I came home when my mother got sick three years ago. I had a lot of ideas for the restaurant, and my dad listened to my proposal—and voila! Here we are.”

  As if she’d pressed a button below the table, the two servers arrived with more dishes—meat and fresh green peas topped with chopped mint and served with a bowl of cumin-studded rice.

  I bent my head a little to take a deep breath. “This smells fantastic.” As ever, I began a deconstruction, picking out ginger and cardamom in the fragrances rising from the dishes, but not which came from which. “Did your brother come home to help with the restaurant too?”

  She snorted. “No way.”

  But she didn’t offer anything more. Instead, she began dishing up the food onto our heavy plates. “This is one of my experiments, an adaptation of a lamb kheema with jeera rice.” She smiled. “What could be more Indian and more English than lamb and peas in the springtime?”

  “Wonderful.”

  Next to me, Harshad nodded almost prayerfully over the dish.

  “Is this one of your favorites?”

  “Everything she cooks is this good,” he said gruffly, taking a hearty bite. “When she first started telling me what she wanted to do, I thought, ‘Who would want that? People like Indian food to be familiar, curries and the like.’ But she’s right.” He waved his hand to the full dining room. “We never had such crowds before.”

  “You must be proud of her.”

  “Yes. She always has her own ideas, but she has the intelligence to go with them.”

  “I can see that.”

  We ate in silence for a time, reverently. The lamb, roasted with spices and garlic, was as tender as butter, the peas only steamed long enough to heat them through. “The timing on the peas must be challenging.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Yes! We steam them quickly, then keep them cold and only heat them and add them to the lamb just before serving.”

  “Kheema is usually ground meat, if I recall.”

  “Again, right. Fresh-roasted lamb with ginger is much healthier and lighter. The jeera rice, however, is very traditional.”

  “I love it,” I said, taking another careful mix of everything. Cumin kissed ginger; ginger embraced the umami depth of lamb; peas and mint and coriander leaves crowned it all with bright spring. “It’s amazing, Pavi. Like, so incredible.” I touched my lips. “Thank you.”

  She laughed and reached over to touch my wrist. “The pleasure is mine, Olivia. I’m so pleased.”

  When we’d feasted through the lamb and naan and three small vegetable dishes, along with more wine—and laughter, because Harshad liked jokes and told them with a sly eyebrow—we all leaned back. I was slightly tipsy, definitely high on the food and the pleasure of an evening out.

  Harshad said, “I knew your mother, you know.”

  I blinked the sudden well of tears from eyes. “Sorry,” I said and looked away to take a breath.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “If it is too emotional to speak of her—”

  “No, no, no! Please. I’d love to hear.” I swallowed. “I just . . . miss her.”

  “As a daughter would,” Pavi said, and it was not my imagination that she moved a little closer, as if to protect me.

  “Did you know my grandmother too?”

  “‘Know’ is not exactly the word.”

  I nodded. “Here’s the thing: I had no idea who my mother was until she died. I didn’t know I had a grandmother. Or an uncle—wherever he is—or that my mother was English nobility. Nothing. I knew nothing of any of this until a few weeks ago. Anything you know is more than I do.”

  “My mother and your grandmother were good friends,” he said. A certain heaviness weighted his brow. “They spent their lives together in India, and my mother still looked after her, even after they both married. It used to make my father angry, I think, but he didn’t stop her.” For a moment, he tapped a spot on the table, lost in memories. “We would go to the big house, and my mother would visit with Lady Violet—that’s what I always called her, Lady Violet. And while they drank tea, we children played hide-and-seek or duck, duck, goose. Later, we climbed trees or tried to catch fish in the stream.”

  “You and my mother?”

  “And Sanvi, my little sister. She was five years younger than me.”

  I nodded, aware that I hardly even knew what to ask, where to begin. “Was my mother happy in those days?”

  He pushed out his bottom lip, considering. “No. She was never a happy girl. She missed her father.”

  “Did he die too?”

  “He divorced Lady Violet when Caroline was a small girl. I never saw him.” He took up his fork and ate a little, and I followed suit, aware of Pavi’s alert attention beside me. “Your mother . . . she wasn’t unhappy either. We didn’t think so much about that in those days, you know.” His smile was wry, and I saw Samir in the expression. “We just were.”

  “Did she draw and paint then?”

  “Always.”

  I would have to stop—it was feeling like an inquisition—but a couple more questions. “And my grandmother? What was she like?”

  He shot a glance toward Pavi, who nodded. “It doesn’t matter, Dad. She’s been dead for more than forty years.”

  “Mmm. We were a little afraid of her, all of us children, including Caroline. She could be generous and full of laughter, or she could be mean and petty, and you never knew which one it would be. I once saw her slap my mother so hard it left a m
ark for hours.”

  “What? Really? And your mother continued to go visit her?”

  “They had been quarreling about something, something old, maybe, back in India, and it made my mother angry, but she said that Lady Violet had demons and we weren’t to judge.”

  I thought of the photograph, the unsmiling, straight-on way she looked at the camera. “She didn’t want to leave India.”

  “No. She was freer there, but she inherited the title, so she had to come back.”

  My mind whirled. “So why did everyone leave, if the inheritance was so important that Violet gave up the life she wanted to come back here?”

  “She did her duty. That’s what people did then. She stayed until she died, but my mother said she never got over missing India.” He pierced a stray pea with the tine of a fork. “She’s buried in the churchyard.”

  “I didn’t know that. I’ll have to go look.”

  Something passed between father and daughter, and I rushed to ask one more question. “Were you still friends with my mother when she left?”

  “Things were different for us then. We’d grown up, and I was grieving my sister, and it was all . . . just a very dark time.”

  “Your sister? What happened to her?”

  “Disappeared.” He wiped his face as if to erase the memory. “She went to the market one day, and we never saw her again. No one ever confessed to killing her or kidnapping her. She just vanished.”

  “That must be excruciating,” I said slowly, “to never know.”

  “Yes.” He carefully tucked his napkin next to his plate. “You must excuse me.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories . . . I just don’t know how to get answers to all of this.”

  He paused. “Maybe you don’t really want the answers. Sometimes it’s better to let dead dogs lie.”

  As he walked away, his shoulders hunched as if under a great weight, I said to Pavi, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked all those questions.”