The restaurant on Bidhan Sarani, at a stone’s throw from Star Theatre was crazily busy and Shreyoshi’s entire head was engulfed in the heat and steam and smell of all the dishes being cooked and handed over to the waiters for serving. Saturdays were always hectic. The din of hawkers for ‘Chaitra Sankranti sale’ and the stifling humidity of Kolkata made her sqeamish. Shreyoshi was tired beyond words, but this is what she liked doing for the last ten years.

 

When her husband died ten years back all of a sudden, due to heart-attack, she utilized the insurance money to start this venture, ‘ Tomake Chai.’. She left her job as a dance teacher in a secondary school and followed her first passion. She was always a good cook and then innovative ideas spun out of her mind. Since she was childless, this restaurant became her baby. From a meagre ten-seater with home delivery, it is now a 50 seater restaurant and she had taken the first floor with the balcony on lease three months back, when the earlier tenant became bankrupt. She had planned  an open air restaurant in the balcony from September. She wished her application  for the bar license should come through by then. Renovations were  on. She looked fondly at the Panchforon Chicken being placed on the counter for Table number 5.

 

There was a whole lot of opposition from her relatives when she started the business. In particular, her husband’s elder sister spewed venom at her. The said sister in-law was much older to her husband and had a young son, but she wanted the ancestral property at Bhowanipore of her in-laws, when her husband died. Both the siblings were joint owners. Shreyoshi never relinquished her share, when all the assets of her husband were transferred to her on his death. A lawyer friend drew up an agreement in which the rent from the three old tenants of that house were divided equally between her and her sister in-law. The particular elder sister cut off all ties. Then her own parents and brother, but then that’s all in the past. She had struggled relentlessly.

 

She was always tired at this age of forty four years, but this is where she would like to be.  Everything seemed to be as it always is, but when she looked up from the Koi Mach that she was just about done sautéing, she saw someone she didn’t recognize, standing where the waiters stand while waiting to pick up their orders. She thought she was hallucinating.

 

He was young, maybe late twenties, toned body and not smiling. But his lips are parted and his teeth—very white—were clenched down in a hard bite. He was too handsome. There was a way of a deep admiration mixed with awe, in the way he looked at her.

 

“Madam, you advertised for a cook,” he said.

 

Oh yes, she had. Wiping the sweat from the back of her neck with the small towel, she remembered putting the ad in social media and also in classifieds on ABP and TOI. She wanted a Chef knowing Italian and French cuisine. She had two cooks but they are hardly capable of thinking themselves and would just follow the instructions she would give them. It’s time she employed a professional. She wanted someone with knowledge of Continental cuisine and in particular French cuisine and wines. French had that eclectic mix of crispy, crunchy and creamy element. She longed to experiment a dish of mutton, braised with burgundy wine, mushrooms, onions, garlic, with a sprinkle of fried Boondi and then add a drop of Kahlua. Bengalis love to spend on good food. Her home delivery orders all the way from Salt Lake also and ‘ Tomake Chai’ is now tied up with Swiggy.

 

Waiters used their hips to back him out of the way as they reached for plates and he disappeared, but then like a wave, he rolled back up after they had gone, in his red tee and blue jeans. Shreyoshi closed her eyes, opened them fast and there he was. She wanted to swallow but her breath was in the way.

 

“Ma’am , you advertised for a Chef. I passed out of Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development. Have been with Le Meridien at Gurgaon for a couple of years now. My name is Anirban Adhikary. My father expired two weeks back and was looking for something here, when I saw your ad. I had called up and the lady who picked up the call gave me this address  to meet you. Here, I am.” He said, morphing through the steam this time into a lost boy, his forehead the kind you want to brush hair off of.

 

She heard herself saying, “I don’t know, if I can afford you. Yes, I do  need help. But you seem to be too qualified for Tomake Chai.” She blushed a bit while saying this and she had forgotten the last time she had this mushy feeling. The Ilish Bhapa  was overcooked, beyond saving.

 

His face relaxed a bit, “ Ma’am, don’t worry. My mother is here and we have a flat at New Town. My needs are simple. Try me out. It looks like you can do with some help. “

 

There have been some things she wished she had had the prescience to understand before acting on and when she remembered them, she wanted to set herself on fire. Like she should have never listened to her parents and got married right of college. But right now time was moving too fast for memory to intrude. When she didn’t answer, he said, “I have brought my CV. Also some references.”  Then he looked around the madhouse that was her kitchen and said, again, “You look like you need some professional expertise.”

 

What did she look like? It had been so long since she had thought about it, since she was pretty. She had been sweating in front of the electric stove for two hours, for too many years, and sweat made her small face wet and a bright purple. At the end of every lunch shift, when she would go to the employee bathroom to splash cold water on her face, she would find her morning mascara, that small homage to vanity, had left her lashes and settled into the deep cups of skin beneath her eyes. For her it was a happy sexless marriage to her cooking and a 24 by 7 , with Mondays off, relationship with her teenage daughter ‘ Tomake Chai’, entering it at 10 am and leaving it near midnight. She wore chef whites everyday stained with grease and haldi. She never goes out to any party or wedding, so that she never sees what she was supposed to look like and compare herself to others. Only last year she got the award from a media house for the most ‘ Innovative Fusion Food of Kolkata’ and she had dressed up for the occasion at Marriott Hotel. Some journalists in this line had taken her interview then and that was the last time she had applied make-up.  She knew exactly what she looked like and felt a bit ashamed. She told him to come at 10 am the next day, a Sunday.

 

That day, she paused a bit in the morning and shampooed, put on the forgotten Christian Dior perfume, and wore the Salwar she had got stitched at Meena Bazar. Before she entered the restaurant, he was there in a proper Chef’s uniform. Shreyoshi  liked him – really liked him. Then she started explaining him about the restaurant and bit of her life. How she hadn’t talked to anyone like that in such a long time. How happy she had felt flirting with someone who was flirting back and she had forgotten how great that excitement of something potentially new was. Her life was, as a rule, a blur of endless routine, But meeting Anirban made her remember how good it was to feel something and it did not go as per the script she was to follow. As a woman, it made her feel alive.

He was wearing the same jeans and red t-shirt he’d had on yesterday and his uniform on top looked miraculously clean.  She looked at his application and said, “ Listen, to start with I can pay you only Rs. 35,000 per month. “

“ That’s fine. Lets review after three months if you are OK.”

She nodded. Then said like a punishing mother, “ Now come to the kitchen and start making your hands dirty. Its Sunday and within an hour the calls and rush will begin.”

Anirban mixed with the staff like a fish in water. He started suggesting new recipes. He even started taking Shreyoshi’s photos on his mobile while she was engrossed in work, much to her chagrin. She didn’t know him, didn’t know who he was or who he had been, so she tried to watch him when she could. But it was clear he was a professional, by the way he handled the equipment in the kitchen, by his movements and his focus, by the fact that he never asked anyone any questions on food. But there was so much to do when you own a restaurant and Shreyoshi had to be all over the place—in her small back office planning menus, then working on the books, in the stock room taking inventory, and much of the time she didn’t know what he was doing. In two weeks he suggested new equipment for the kitchen, like ‘ Electric Chicken Rotisserie’  and a ‘Pressure Fryer’. It made sense and orders were placed.

In the late afternoon of a Friday, she found him engrossed with the mixer. He had made a shimmering pea mousse to serve under the house Hilsa. He had put a fried taler bora on his mousse and the taste blended to make it exotic. It was not one on the menu but he quickly changed it on the ipad, making it the desert of the day that evening on the LED outside. Shreyoshi was surprised but then she was angry. She asked him how he had made the mousse and he wouldn’t  tell her and that was how she discovered he was a trained chef. A trained chef  never shares the recipes invented with anyone. She knew all about the relationship between privacy, thievery and pride. Still, she found the secrecy insulting until Anirban gave her a bite and she was whisked away on the pleasure of peas. That evening they sold 20 plates of the mousse priced at Rs. 200. The next day was double and there was no looking back.

 

Next he made the classic ‘French Opera Cake’. It is a time tested French desert with layers of almond sponge cake, coffee buttercream and dark chocolate ganache. As a topping Anirban put a baked Pantua. A food critic made a blog out of it, and it became the next sizzler on their desert menu. Anirban made four such hot selling dishes in a month. In the city of Dwarik’s, Nakur, Ganguram, K.C.Das, Bancharam and Balaram Mullick, ‘ Tomake Chai’ created a fusion of Continental desert with ethnic sweets.  Old customers raved, new customers—younger and hip ones—formed a line , willing to wait however long it took to be seated. Swiggy guys created a small traffic snarl outside.

 

Anirban was quiet, never late over the last two months. He was at the restaurant during every shift, even when there was not much crowd during the lunch hours of a working day. He pestered her to buy some desert making equipment : ‘ Breville Pie Press’, ‘Ice Cream and Gelato maker’, ‘Waffle Cone express’. Durga Puja was approaching and it made commercial sense. He had complete control over his dishes more so that Shreyoshi started feeling jealous, though she was the owner. When asked questions, he used to answer too vaguely. He thought his life was none of Shreyoshi’s business.

Then one day, out of the blue, he said that when they were closed from 4 pm to 7 pm, the staff should have a meal together. He had already prepared it—lentil soup, spinach salad, grilled chicken with roasted tomatoes and baby corn. The food was so good, comfort food but with an indefinable touch. He told Shreyoshi to sit down, next to him at the table with the staff, and she did.

 

She had started to like him, and then she discovered she liked having him there. Everyone else liked him, too. He did his job in the back kitchen but then when Shreyoshi was not looking, he helped everyone else with their jobs. He showed the waiters a new, more sophisticated way of laying the napkins on the tables.

 

He asked for the status of the liquor license. Then he took a day off and next day came back with a guy who had strong connects in the municipality and government. The guy looked every inch a broker and he took Rs. 50,000 from her in cash. Anirban just nodded to give her the assurance. The license was in, within a fortnight. Anirban himself interviewed some bartenders and recruited two. Then he recommended her to buy the bar stuff. The first floor was ready by then. The first rains of monsoon was making Kolkata smell the earth. He taught the bartenders to make a drink with vodka, shaved ice and shards of fresh ginger; they started to offer it as a house specialty and Shreyoshi couldn’t  keep up with the demand. Anirban told her to think of starting a franchise model.

 

One night he saw her struggling over the books in the office and he told her he could help. They had to file their GST by next week. Also the books of accounts needed to be finalised by August. He was right from the start, Shreyoshi needed help. He got a new accounting package in a week which made the job easier on the Laptop.  He smiled when complemented. At night he greeted the customers,  sometimes walked them to their tables – a ritual unheard of in the North Calcutta culture. Shreyoshi couldn’t explain why she didn’t know why he was doing this, how he managed to do so many things without her knowing even though she knew he was there. She was not sure why she was letting it happen except that she was so much less tired than ever. And business was booming.

 

On a Sunday night in end of July, he accompanied her to her house and stayed over. She requested him as it was late and he wouldn’t get public transport. That day they got a catering contract for a party and everyone in the team was overworked. He slept in her drawing room on the sofa. She woke up  to the sound of  water running in her shower and wondered what had happened to her own life. He came out of the shower with his towel. Then he walked up to her bed and embraced her.

 

He kissed her. First on her forehead and then on her cheeks, then on her eyelids, on her flat nose, on her ear lobes. He was desisting myself to kiss on her lips. Gradually he did . Upper lip first and then the lower one. She started reciprocating by a slight peck at first. A bit hesistant. Reminded her of a sparrow pecking at its food – hesitatingly, while glancing all round. The pecks increased in frequency and gradually turned to kisses. He started to pull her top and then fumbled with her hooks of her bra. She smiled and unfastened them herself. They kept on working on each other’s body in frenzy. She felt an ecstasy that she lost awareness of surroundings. The smell and closeness of a man engulfed her senses. She continued to unfold the future events in his imagination.

 

They drank their tea . He shampooed her hair, read sexy jokes out loud from his mobile, made love to her as if she was something precious, rare and fragile, something he must take care not to break, as if he knew her. Thankfully that was Monday, when ‘ Tomake Chai’ was closed. He moved in to her flat on Tuesday saying her mother had gone to visit his ‘ Masi’ at Benares for quite some time now and he was living all alone.

 

 

Instead of wondering how on earth she had let a stranger, practically a boy, infiltrate her small life, she fell headfirst into the supreme relief of not having to do everything herself in order to keep everything going. Like a genie , he appeared without warning beside her wherever she was—the kitchen, beside the burner, the microwave,  the salad station—put his arm around her waist and pressed into her. Kissed her on the mouth, in a moment of solitude. He was a wizard with numbers and took over the purchasing, negotiating and haggling with the registered suppliers and very often managing a substantial discount. He changed the fish vendor, leading to a huge savings. Anirban was a whirlwind of energy and was sometimes everywhere at once—the bar, the walk-in, the kitchen, the front of the restaurant, which he had decorated with a fountain and put a candy floss machine for the waiting customers. Shreyoshi had started to forget that he was not always been there, that they did not build this restaurant together.

 

Before he came, once in a while a guest would request to see the chef, and she would tuck the wet sweaty hairs back into her headband, wiped her hands on her apron, and go out into the dining room to accept the compliments. Now it had become a regular phenomenon and Anirban was asked time and again to go to a table. Sometimes he forced her to come with him.  

 

He had even made some friends. A group of guys who ate dinner in the restaurant every Saturday late night. He joined them . They were all unemployed chefs. She asked him if he thought they should hire any of them but he said they were looking to start their own restaurant.

 

One morning, over tea before work, it hit Shreyoshi.

 

“Are these the people you are going into business with?” she asked.

“Shreyoshi darling,” he said, “I’m with you, aren’t I?” He frowned, as if she was hurting him. “You’re having funny ideas.”

 

Yes, she was crazy. She was living with someone fifteen years younger than her. And he had made her superfluous in the restaurant. Nowadays she did get to meet her long lost college friends and ventured infrequently to a movie with them, something unthinkable a couple of months back. She even got time to visit the parlour every week.

This man had brought some lustre in her thin, bony face and touched her wrinkles, moved the stray hairs from her forehead and kissed her whenever he got an opportunity.

 

But it made her nervous to hear about these guys he was having dinner with on every Saturday night, made her wonder who they really were. She became afraid for him, wary that Anirban might be conned. She told him to be careful.  

 

He said, “Don’t worry. I think people are basically good. You gave me a chance, didn’t you? And I know them better than you knew me.”

 

That’s true. He had made her loneliness disappear. Abracadabra !

 

Just like a thief, while she wasn’t looking, he took away all of the things she had been afraid of. And he replaced them with the things she had forgotten ever wanting, like coming home and having a glass of wine and listening to music with her aching feet in someone’s lap instead of falling asleep on the couch in her chef clothes. Like having someone to walk home with after work, someone to touch, who wanted to touch her. Slowly, subtly, bit by bit, he had taken her and left her fearless.

 

She made sense of him. He was young but already too tired. He wanted stability. He wanted to make a life with someone in an industry he loved and understood. He knew how to operate every piece of equipment, how to increase profits, how to train cooks and servers. During that Puja, ‘ Tomake Chai’ became a rage. For Shreyoshi, Anirban was her Asthami, when they had champagne and barbequed prawns while lying in each other’s arms the entire night. They hardly slept the five days of Durga Puja. He made naru of  sugared coconut layered with a sweet mayonnaise for Bijoya and made boxes of ten which were priced at premium. It got featured in Zomato. He was a fabulous, inspiring, inventive cook. He could butcher meat, he could skin a Bhekti fillet in one move, he could suspend curd to make it sour as easily as he could make grilled cheese. These things made him happy and they made sense to her. He knew that by just giving her a bite of something she hadn’t had before, she would cave. That her heart would take over. He knew how to get there.

 

So when she got  to the restaurant this morning, after having been with him for over six months, and her key wouldn’t  turn in the main lock to open the shutters, she thought she was dreaming. He did not sleep with her the earlier night as he needed to take his mother to the doctor in the morning. She tried the key again and again and then so hard that it actually snapped in the lock. She cupped her hands to either side of her face like blinders and peered inside. It was only ten o’clock in the morning and the hawkers had not yet blocked the footpaths. She looked like a thief, trying to break into her own restaurant. The lights were all out inside and so it gave the illusion that nothing was there, that her restaurant was an empty room. Like when she first started, when the space had been emptied out so that she could fill in her dreams. The tables and chairs seemed to have vanished. Maybe Anirban had moved them. Maybe he was redecorating the dining room or washing the carpet. He would sometimes take the spare key to open the restaurant early and prepare for the day. She knocked. And waited. She knocked again, and called out his name. No one came. So she knocked again and again and again, each time harder and then harder than that so that he would hear her, emerge from wherever he was and would make the fear starting to smoke and smoulder inside her, curl back into ash.

 

The security guy of the area came. Her own security goes off at 7 am and she had kept one only for the night shift. The area is anyway so crowded with a Cinema Complex, Theatre, Hawkers, Shops and small restaurants, that there was hardly room for silence to reign to commit any theft. A Police Jeep stopped and an officer got out. She said that this space is hers and her key  was broken in a lock where it didn’t fit. Her face was wet so she knew she was crying and her teeth were clenched and they hurt—everything hurts—and then she started screaming, appeared delusional. The police guy patted her shoulder and asked her to calm down. Her other assistant cook, Rima,  came at that point and three of them became a crowd. The known Pan shop guy joined in. Soon the middle class traders gathered for some excitement. 

 

The police forced open the shutter and broke the next lock. The space looked like Eden Gardens. With nothing in there. No chairs and tables, no ovens and fryers, no glasses or crystals, no inventory, no refrigerators. Everything had been cleaned off.

 

“Nothing at all, Ma’am. Is there someone we can call?” asked the cop.

 

Of course ! Call Anirban. We’ve been robbed! He was probably tied up somewhere in the restaurant, waiting to be saved. Why didn’t she think of this before? How much time had she wasted? He trusted everyone. He would have let anyone in. He could be dead in there!

 

She recited his cell phone number and while the officer dialled, she wiped her eyes and gathered her strength and stood up straight. A message on his cell phone said it had been disconnected. She had paid the bill last week. The night security was called but with the same result. The Security Services agency was called by the Police and they were ignorant of the whereabouts of their own guy.

 

“Is there anyone else?” The policeman asked her and then looked at the assistant cook, Rima.

 

Anyone else? No, no one. There was no one else.

 

“Uh, ma’am?” he said, because Shreyoshi had not answered him and was staring into the black window.

 

Another policeman came and all them took a tour of the empty spaces.  Rima went on saying, “ Oh Durga, Dugga “ over and over again. Shreyoshi started walking around the dining room, touched the walls, moved one hand over the other as if the missing tables, chairs, linens, vases, glassware would miraculously reappear from behind the dusky thematic wallpaper of Sesher Kobita. Everything had disappeared. There was nothing in the dining room, the bar, the lounge. All the plates and glasses, the pitchers, the bowls, the knives, strainers, shredders, pots and pans, the curd and sugar. Gone. The kitchen was an empty stainless steel vault. The food was gone, the fish and fillets, potatoes and onions and garlic, all the oils and vinegars, the spices and herbs, the truffles, flour, butter, curd, milk, the meat. In a corner there was a crate of rotting lemons.

 

Shreyoshi sat down on the floor, with a rotten lemon in her palm, trying to turn magic to sense. Sleight of hand might just work out a miracle.

 

The police were asking her questions, but their words were jumbled and meaningless, so she couldn’t answer. They turned to Rima, who was crying. Shreyoshi heard her say his name, described him, but the description didn’t sound like anyone she knew. Soon the other staff members came and had the vacant look in their eyes.

 

But what can you pull out of thin air?

“Can we call someone else?” the officer asked. She tried to conjure up the image of his Saturday night friends, men she had never met. He could not have done this alone. He had bribed the security guy. She heard Rima rattling off names and numbers.

“Ok. Good.” She heard the officer say. “We’ll call them. In the meantime, do you want to go get your boss something? A cup of coffee? She needs something.”

What do you need when everything was gone? In one stroke she lost five years of her business. The cash of last night was also gone.

 

Shreyoshi started all over again, on a muted scale, revamping , rebuilding the tarnished image.

 

A few months down the line she got a message on her mobile from an unknown number, “ Hi Honey, I know you are strong and will again rebuild your business. Had to start my own in Mumbai and took a fancy on your ‘ Tomake Chai’. By the way, my maternal uncle was your husband. A sweet revenge on the way you treated my mother after my uncle’s death. You never recognised me and it was also not meant to. I have left the recipes of my dishes at the back of the second drawer on the left side of your wardrobe as a reciprocation of the beautiful days we spent together.”