“Chithra learned tempering the way she had learned everything else on the estate — through repetition, failure, and the specific, physical knowledge that accumulated in the hands before it reached the brain. The first tempering produced chocolate that bloomed within two days. The second produced chocolate that snapped but lacked gloss. The third — the third was right. Glossy. Dark. The surface caught the light like a mirror. The snap was clean. The melt was immediate — the chocolate dissolving on the tongue at exactly body temperature, the flavour arriving in stages: the initial bitterness of the cocoa, then the jaggery sweetness, then the citrus note from the Forastero beans, then something that Chithra could only describe as the mountain — the altitude, the mist, the specific terroir of Munnar encoded in a piece of chocolate the size of her thumbnail.”