CHAPTER 15

OJASWINI

At 2 PM someone knocked on the kitchen window.

Three quick raps — knuckle against glass, a pattern that suggested familiarity rather than formality. I was elbow-deep in lamb marinade, the yogurt-and-spice paste coating my forearms to the wrist, and the sound made me jump. My nerves had been stripped raw since last night — the footsteps outside my door, the wet prints leading to the east wing, the hours I'd spent lying in the dark with a knife under my pillow, counting the minutes until daylight.

I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and turned.

Sameer.

He was drenched. Absolutely soaked through — his cotton shirt plastered to his chest, his hair streaming water down his face, his cargo shorts dark with rain. He was standing in the garden between the frangipani bushes, grinning like a boy who'd caught his first fish. Behind him, the monsoon was doing its worst — sheets of grey water falling at a 45-degree angle, the wind bending the coconut palms until their fronds touched the ground, the sky so dark it could have been evening.

I opened the window. Rain blew in immediately — warm droplets hitting my face, the counter, the stack of clean plates I'd laid out for the evening. The wind carried the smell of the sea — salt and kelp and something mineral, the deep-ocean smell that comes only during monsoon when the waves churn up sediment from the seabed.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Brought supplies for the Shrivastavs. Generator fuel. Also—" He held up a brown paper bag, soggy at the bottom but still intact. "Modak from the Malvan temple. The coconut-jaggery ones. My mother made them this morning."

I reached through the window and took the bag. Our fingers brushed. His were freezing — the cold of someone who'd been in the open sea for forty minutes — and rough with salt and calluses. The roughness of a man who pulled ropes and tied knots and hauled boats for a living. I held on a second too long. Half a second. Just enough for him to notice.

"You crossed the sea in this weather for modak?"

"And generator fuel. The modak was a bonus." He pushed wet hair off his forehead with the back of his wrist. Water ran down his temple and caught in the stubble along his jaw. "Also I wanted to check on you."

"I'm fine."

The word came out flat. Dead. The vocal equivalent of a wall with no windows.

"You look like you haven't slept."

"I'm a chef. We never sleep."

He didn't laugh. He was studying my face with an intensity that made my chest tight — the kind of looking that bypasses your social defenses and goes straight to the thing you're trying to hide. His eyes were dark brown, almost black in the monsoon light, and they held a steadiness that reminded me of something I couldn't place. A deep-water anchor. The kind that holds even when the surface is chaos.

"Ojju. Is everything okay here?"

I opened my mouth to say yes. To perform the fine-I'm-fine routine I'd perfected since childhood — since the first time a teacher asked why I had a bruise and I said I fell, since the first time a landlord asked if I could afford the rent and I said of course, since every time anyone asked anything the answer was always fine, fine, I'm fine because showing weakness in Mumbai is like bleeding in shark water.

Instead I said: "How soon can you get me off this island?"

His expression shifted. The grin — the easy, confident, I-crossed-a-monsoon-sea-for-modak grin — vanished. In its place was something focused. Alert. The face of a man who navigates storms for a living and has just spotted one forming.

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened. I just—" I gripped the windowsill. The wood was damp under my fingers, swollen with moisture. "The host. Deven. I know him. From before. He's—"

"He's what?"

I couldn't say it. Couldn't say he's my ex who dated me under a fake name and lied about everything and now I'm trapped cooking his birthday dinner on a private island while his wife has no idea I exist and last night someone stood outside my door breathing and this morning someone was in my kitchen and I'm scared, Sameer, I'm scared in a way I haven't been scared since I was fifteen and my father came home drunk and I hid in the kitchen cabinet because the kitchen was always the safest place.

"It's complicated," I said.

"Okay." Sameer leaned against the window frame. Rain dripped from the overhang onto his shoulder but he didn't seem to notice. "Here's what's not complicated. The sea is too rough for a crossing right now. Wind's at 70 kmph and climbing. I checked the IMD forecast on the way over — there's a secondary depression forming off the Goa coast. I can't safely make the run until the wind drops below 40. Best case that's tomorrow morning, 5 or 6 AM. Worst case, Monday."

"Monday."

"If the wind holds."

My throat closed. Monday was thirty-six hours away. Thirty-six hours on this island with Deven and his dead eyes and his whispered Hello, Ojaswini and the wet footprints and the perfume in my kitchen and the feeling — growing stronger by the hour, settling into my bones like monsoon damp — that something terrible was building.

"But." He put his hand on the windowsill. His pinky touched mine. The contact was electric — not a metaphor, actual electricity, the static charge of two bodies in humid air connecting. "If you need me. If anything happens. There's a VHF radio in the boathouse — the small building at the dock, the one with the blue corrugated roof. Channel 16. The maritime distress frequency. I monitor it 24/7 from the marina. You press the talk button and speak. Doesn't matter the time. Doesn't matter the weather. I'll hear you."

"VHF radio."

"It's how fishermen talk. How the Koli community has communicated on this coast for decades. Doesn't need cell signal. Doesn't need internet. Doesn't need satellites or towers or Jio recharge. Just radio waves. Electromagnetic radiation traveling at the speed of light across the water."

I looked at his hand. The calluses on his palm — thick ridges of skin along the base of each finger, the kind that only comes from years of rope and wood and salt water. A thin white scar across his knuckles, healed clean, the kind of scar that comes from a fist hitting something it shouldn't.

"Sameer."

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

He smiled. Not the cocky grin from the dock yesterday — the one that said I know I'm charming and I know you know it. Something quieter. Something private. The smile of a man who means what he says and doesn't need you to believe him because the truth doesn't require your faith.

"I'll be here at first light tomorrow. Sea or no sea." He pulled his hand back. The absence of his warmth was immediate. "The modak are best warm. If the microwave works, thirty seconds. If the power's still dodgy, wrap them in a banana leaf and hold them over the stove flame for a minute. My mother says the banana leaf is actually better — gives them a smokiness."

Then he turned and jogged back down the stone path toward the dock. His footsteps splashed in the puddles. His shirt clung to the muscles of his back. He didn't look over his shoulder. He just went — steady, confident, a man returning to the sea because the sea was where he belonged.

I stood at the window, holding the bag of his mother's modak, the paper damp and warm against my palms. Inside, I could feel the round shapes — six of them, each one pressed by hand, the coconut-jaggery filling fragrant even through the wet paper.

I opened the bag. The smell hit me like a memory I didn't know I had — warm jaggery, fresh coconut, cardamom, the faintest trace of ghee. My grandmother used to make modak on Ganesh Chaturthi. She'd sit on the kitchen floor, cross-legged, the dough in a brass paraat, her fingers working the rice flour into perfect cone-shaped shells. She'd hum while she worked. Always the same song. A Marathi abhanga about Vitthal — Vitthala, Vitthala, Vitthala re — and the kitchen would smell exactly like this bag.

I ate one modak standing at the window. The outer shell was soft and slightly chewy — steamed rice flour, the kind that dissolves on your tongue. The filling was perfect: fresh coconut shredded fine, cooked in jaggery until the sugar melted into the coconut and turned it dark gold, spiked with cardamom and a tiny crunch of poppy seeds. It was sweet without being cloying. It was comfort in a shape you could hold.

I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time.

Safe.

Which, on this island, was the most dangerous feeling of all.

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