Chapter 4: Anushka / Fontainhas

# Chapter 4: Anushka / Fontainhas

The room above Sulochana's Kitchen was small and white-walled and smelled of old wood and fresh linen.

A single bed with a cotton mattress. A ceiling fan that wobbled on its axis but moved air. A window with green wooden shutters that opened onto the street below. The same narrow lane Anushka had walked up an hour ago, now filling with mid-morning foot traffic. A nightstand with a glass of water already placed on it, as if Sulochana had known someone would need this room today, or as if the room was always kept ready. For whom, Anushka didn't ask. Her fingers tightened around the edge of the chair.

She set her backpack on the floor, kicked off her kolhapuri chappals, and lay down on the bed fully clothed. The sheets were cotton. Rough, sun-dried cotton, not the softener-treated kind you got in Mumbai shops. They carried a faint smell of reetha soap and sunlight, and when Anushka pressed her face into the pillow, the texture against her cheek was like fine sandpaper, gritty and clean.

She thought she wouldn't sleep.

She was wrong.

She slept for four hours straight, dreamlessly, the kind of sleep that happens when the body takes over from the mind and says: Enough. We're shutting down. Come back later. When she woke, the room was hot — the fan had stopped because the power had cut, and the sounds from the street below had changed. More voices now. The clink of cutlery. The smell of cooking — garlic and coconut and something pungent that might have been vinegar or kokum.

Sulochana's Kitchen was open.

---

Anushka washed her face in the small bathroom at the end of the upstairs hallway — a bathroom with blue-and-white Portuguese tiles on the floor and a brass tap that required three full rotations before water emerged, lukewarm and tasting of pipes. She changed into a fresh kurta, the dark blue one with the mirror-work border that Tara had bought her last Diwali — and went downstairs.

Restaurant was transformed. The kitchen she'd entered through the back door that morning was now a controlled riot of activity. Sulochana stood at the massive gas burner, stirring something in a pot large enough to bathe a child in. Beside her, a young man, maybe twenty, with a wisp of a moustache and a bandana covering his hair, was chopping coconut with a speed that suggested either extreme competence or extreme recklessness. A woman Anushka's age was carrying plates through a swinging door to the dining room beyond.

"Ah, you're up." Sulochana didn't look away from her pot. "Sit in the dining room. Rhea will bring you food."

Anushka pushed through the swinging door and found herself in a room that was everything the kitchen was not: calm, beautiful, intentional. Eight tables, each covered with a white cloth. The walls were painted a warm terracotta, hung with framed black-and-white photographs of old Goa — fishing boats, church facades, women in traditional kunbi sarees carrying baskets on their heads. Ceiling fans turned slowly. The light came through tall windows with lace curtains that softened the afternoon sun into something golden and forgiving.

Half the tables were occupied. An older couple, European, judging by the sunburns and the guidebook on the table, shared a plate of what looked like xacuti. A group of four young women in matching T-shirts (a bachelorette party, Anushka guessed, from the word "BRIDE" in glitter across one of the shirts) were taking photos of their drinks. A man in his sixties sat alone by the window, eating rice and fish curry with his fingers, methodically, the way you eat when food is fuel rather than performance.

The woman from the kitchen — Rhea, presumably, appeared at Anushka's table. She was striking. Short curly hair, freckles across the bridge of her nose, brown eyes that held a quality Anushka could only describe as alert — the eyes of someone who noticed things, catalogued them, filed them away for later use. She wore a cotton dress with an apron over it, and her feet were bare on the restaurant's stone floor.

"You're the one from Mumbai," Rhea said. It wasn't a question.

"News travels fast."

"In Fontainhas, everything travels fast. Sound, gossip, the smell of vindaloo." She smiled. A quick, asymmetric thing, more smirk than smile. "I'm Rhea. Sulochana mavshi said to feed you. What do you eat?" The fabric of the cushion was rough against her forearm.

"Anything."

"Wrong answer. This is Goa. Be specific or I'll bring you everything on the menu and you'll be here till Tuesday." She pulled a notepad from her apron, pen poised, then laughed and stuffed it back. "I'm kidding. I already know what you're getting. Mavshi made her special prawn balchão today and she only does that when she's trying to impress someone. You, apparently, are the someone."

Rhea vanished into the kitchen and returned three minutes later with a tray that held more food than Anushka could eat in a day. A steel thali with rice, prawn balchão (red and furious-looking, the kind of dish that dared you to eat it), dalitoy (a thin Goan lentil preparation), kismur (dried shrimp with coconut), a stack of pão bread, and a small bowl of solkadhi — the pink coconut-milk drink that Anushka had heard of but never tried.

"Eat with your hands," Rhea instructed, setting the tray down. "The balchão is better that way. Something about the heat of the spice meeting the heat of your fingers. Mavshi's theory, not mine."

Anushka ate.

The balchão hit her tongue and the world narrowed to the single point of contact between chilli and taste bud. It was ferocious — not just hot but layered, with garlic and vinegar and a smoky sweetness underneath the burn that made her eyes water and her scalp prickle. She tore a piece of pão and used it to scoop rice and curry together, and the bread's slight sweetness balanced the spice in a way that felt almost medicinal. The solkadhi was cool and creamy and tasted of kokum — sour, bright, like drinking a sunset.

She ate until the thali was clean. Actually clean. The kind of clean where you've used the last piece of bread to wipe the steel surface until it reflects the ceiling fan.

Rhea appeared to collect the tray and raised an eyebrow at the spotless thali. "Either you were starving or the food is that good."

"Both."

Rhea sat down across from Anushka without being invited — a casual presumption that would have felt rude from someone else but from Rhea felt natural, as if she assumed companionship unless told otherwise. "So. You're mavshi's — what? Relative? You look like her."

"I'm her sister's daughter."

"Shalini maushi?" Rhea's eyebrows went up. "I didn't know Shalini maushi had a daughter."

"Neither did I, until recently."

Rhea studied her with those cataloguing eyes. Anushka could almost see the information being processed, sorted, filed. "You're the DNA match. The one from the app."

"Sulochana told you?"

"She didn't have to. She's been checking her phone every five minutes for weeks. Mavshi doesn't do phones. She barely knows how to open WhatsApp. When she suddenly starts squinting at a screen like it holds the answer to something, you notice." Rhea leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. "How much has she told you?"

"About my mother. About Deepak — my father. About why she — why I was given up."

Rhea nodded slowly. "And you're going to Benaulim tomorrow."

"That's the plan."

Something flickered across Rhea's face, concern, maybe, or caution, or the specific expression of someone who knows something they're debating whether to share. She uncrossed her arms and leaned forward, dropping her voice even though the nearest occupied table was three metres away. Sweat gathered at the base of her neck.

"Shalini maushi is — she's complicated. She's not unfriendly. She's just, " Rhea searched for the word, her gaze drifting to the window where the afternoon light was turning amber. "She's built walls. Good walls. Thick walls. The kind you build when the alternative is falling apart. When you meet her, don't expect — "

"Don't expect her to be happy to see me."

"Don't expect her to show it if she is."

---

Anushka spent the afternoon walking Fontainhas.

She walked because she couldn't sit still, because the food had given her body energy and the conversation had given her mind too much to process, and the only way to balance the two was to move. She walked the narrow streets and looked at the painted houses and tried to imagine Shalini walking these same lanes at eighteen, before Bombay, before Deepak, before any of it.

The old quarter was small enough to cover on foot in an hour, but Anushka kept circling, kept finding new details. A bakery that sold bebinca — the traditional Goan layered cake, displayed in a glass case like jewellery. A bookshop the size of a closet, run by an old man in a guayabera shirt who was reading Saramago in Portuguese. A chapel with its doors open, the interior cool and dim, rows of empty wooden pews and a smell of old incense and candle wax that reminded Anushka of the Mahalaxmi Temple near her Dadar flat — different gods, same devotion.

She texted Tara:

Met Sulochana. She's real. She's my maasi. My birth mother is alive. Her name is Shalini. She's in Benaulim. I'm meeting her tomorrow.

Tara's reply came in seven seconds:

OH MY GOD. Are you okay?? Call me right now.

Anushka didn't call. She typed:

I'm okay. Really. I just need to walk. I'll call tonight. I promise.

You better. I'm dying here. Literally dying. Metaphorically. But also literally.

You're not dying literally.

My heart rate is 110. I checked on my watch. That's basically dying.

Drink water and stop being dramatic.

I LEARNED DRAMATIC FROM YOU.

Anushka smiled. She put her phone in her pocket and kept walking.

---

She found the beach at sunset.

It wasn't a proper beach — not the wide, tourist-packed strips of Calangute or Baga that she'd seen in Instagram reels. This was Miramar, a curve of sand at the point where the Mandovi River met the Arabian Sea, the water brown and green and shimmering in the dying light. A few families were scattered across the sand, children running at the waves and shrieking when the waves ran back, parents watching from towels and plastic chairs. A vendor sold bhel puri from a cart parked on the promenade. The air smelled of salt and frying puri and that specific green smell of the river — algae and mud and growing things.

Anushka took off her chappals and walked to the water's edge. The sand was still warm from the day, and when the first wave reached her feet — ankle-deep, surprisingly cold — she gasped. The cold travelled up her legs and settled in her knees, a sharp, clarifying sensation that cut through the fog of the day's emotions like a blade through paper.

She stood there. The water came and went, came and went, each wave washing sand from under her heels and between her toes, making her sink millimetre by millimetre into the beach. She thought about Shalini walking to a shishu gruha in Girgaon with a three-week-old baby. She thought about Deepak Mhatre dying in a taxi on the Western Express Highway. She thought about Mandakini saying "you grew in our hearts" over ice cream from Naturals, and Baba's belly laugh, and the harmonium gathering dust on the almirah.

She thought about the word mother and how it could mean so many different things to the same person.

The sun went down. The sky turned from gold to pink to violet to the deep blue-black of a Goan evening, and the first stars appeared over the Arabian Sea, faint against the light pollution from the city but there. Definitely there, if you looked hard enough.

Anushka dried her feet on the hem of her kurta, slipped her chappals back on, and walked back to Fontainhas in the dark.

---

That night, she called Tara.

She sat on the bed in the upstairs room with the green shutters open to the street, the sounds of Fontainhas at night drifting in. Distant music from a bar somewhere, the scooter-buzz of someone heading home late, a dog barking without conviction. The fan was working again; the power had returned. The warmth of the chai cup seeped through her palms.

Tara answered on the first ring. "Tell me everything."

Anushka told her everything. It took forty-five minutes. She started with the closed restaurant and the alley and the sound of the knife, and she ended with the beach and the cold water and the sinking sand. She didn't edit. She didn't censor. She gave Tara the whole thing, raw and unprocessed, because Tara was the only person in the world who could receive it without flinching.

When she finished, Tara was quiet for a long time. Anushka could hear her breathing. Slightly congested, because Tara always got slightly congested when she was emotional, as if her sinuses and her feelings shared a circuit. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger.

"Anu."

"Yeah."

"You're going to be fine."

"How do you know?"

"Because you're the bravest person I know. You took a DNA test because you couldn't not know. You got on a bus to Goa because you couldn't not go. And tomorrow you're going to meet the woman who gave birth to you because you can't not meet her. That's not recklessness. That's courage."

"It feels like recklessness."

"Courage always does. That's how you know it's real."

They were quiet for a moment. Through the phone, Anushka could hear the Mumbai sounds of Tara's flat — the TV in the neighbour's room, the distant rumble of a local train. Home sounds. The sounds she'd grown up with, the sounds that meant safety. The humidity sat on her skin like a damp cloth.

"I miss you," Anushka said.

"I miss you too. Now go to sleep. You've got a mother to meet tomorrow and you need to look alive."

"Good night, Tara."

"Good night, Anu. And Anu?"

"Yeah?"

"She's going to love you. Anyone who doesn't love you is broken. That's just science."

Anushka hung up. She lay in the dark, listening to the fan and the distant music and her own heartbeat, and she waited for sleep to come. His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel.

It took a long time. But eventually, it came.