Chapter 11: Tanvi

Diwali was two weeks away, and Kasauli was transforming.

The transformation was: annual, predictable, and still — every year — beautiful. The shopkeepers on Mall Road strung marigold garlands between the lamp posts, the orange and gold flowers catching the October sun and making the road look like it was: celebrating. The sweet shops — Gupta Sweets, Sharma Mithai, the new place near the church that called itself "Artisan Confections" and that everyone called "the expensive one" — had their Diwali displays in the windows: kaju katli in silver foil, besan ladoo stacked in pyramids, the specific abundance of Indian festivity that said: we have survived another year, and we are: grateful.

I could eat: none of it.

This was the annual Diwali cruelty. The festival of lights, the festival of family, the festival of food — and the food was: wheat, dairy, ghee, maida, sugar in combinations that my body treated as: chemical warfare. Every year, Maa tried. She made GF besan ladoo with jaggery instead of sugar. She made coconut barfi with dairy-free condensed milk. She tried, and the results were: edible, sometimes good, but never: the same. Never the kaju katli that melted on the tongue like: silver clouds. Never the gulab jamun that Priti and I had eaten as children, sitting on the floor of our Ambala house, our fingers sticky, our faces: happy with the specific happiness of children who did not know that their bodies could: betray them.

I was fifteen when the first Diwali after diagnosis arrived. I had stood at the kitchen counter watching Maa make gulab jamun — the dough, the frying, the sugar syrup — and had: cried. Not loudly. Quietly. The crying of a teenager who had lost something she couldn't: name, because the loss wasn't dramatic, wasn't visible, wasn't the kind of loss that people gathered around and mourned. It was the loss of: normal. The loss of eating without: thinking. The loss of festivals without: calculations.

Maa had found me. Had held me. Had said: "Beta, we will make our own sweets. Different sweets. Better sweets." And had spent the next ten years proving it — a collection of recipes, adapted and invented, the Tanvi-safe Diwali menu that grew every year and that was, by now, a: tradition.

But traditions required: Maa. And Maa was in Ambala — had moved back after Papa's retirement from the army, back to the city where she'd grown up, the city that was three hours from Kasauli by bus and that might as well have been: three continents during Diwali, because Diwali was when the buses were: full, the trains were: full, the Chandigarh-Kasauli road was a parade of cars carrying families home, and getting a seat on any vehicle was: a military operation.

"Come home," Maa said on the phone. "For Diwali. Priti is coming. Karan is coming. Papa will make his terrible jokes. We'll do puja. We'll make the ladoo."

"I'll try, Maa."

"Don't try. Come."

"The café is busy. Diwali week is our biggest week. Kavita Aunty needs—"

"Kavita Aunty has survived fifty Diwalis without you. She'll survive this one."

The truth was: I wanted to go. I wanted to be in Ambala, in the house that smelled like incense and Maa's cooking and the specific warmth of a family gathered for: the thing that mattered. But the other truth — the truth I couldn't tell Maa, the truth I could barely: admit — was that leaving Kasauli meant leaving the flat, and leaving the flat meant leaving: Mohit. And leaving Mohit for five days felt like: removing a wall from a building. The building might stand. Or it might: notice.

When had Mohit become: a wall? When had his presence in the flat shifted from intrusion to: architecture? From the duffel bag on the café floor to the bathroom schedule to the ORS at 3 AM to the idlis from Maa's recipe — somewhere in the: sequence, he had stopped being a guest and started being: structural.

This was: a problem.

*

Mohit was in the kitchen when I got home from the shift. He was: baking. The kitchen smelled like almond flour and vanilla — the specific combination that meant he was attempting something from the: recipe book. The recipe book being: a spiral-bound notebook that I had started in 2018, filled with every GF-DF recipe I'd found or created, the notebook that lived on the kitchen shelf next to the spice rack and that I had: not given him permission to use.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making Diwali sweets."

"You're — you're making Diwali sweets. From my: recipe book."

"I called your mum again."

"You called my mother: again?"

"She said the almond flour barfi is your favourite. Page seventeen. She also said the coconut ladoo is: tricky, and that the jaggery needs to be melted slowly or it: burns. I'm on: page seventeen."

I looked at the counter. He had: assembled. The almond flour, the jaggery, the coconut milk, the cardamom pods that he'd crushed with the back of a spoon because we didn't have a mortar and pestle, the pistachios for garnish — the shelled, unsalted kind from the dry fruit shop in Solan, the specific pistachios that Maa used because "the salted ones ruin the: sweetness, and the shelled ones mean you don't have to: work."

He had driven to Solan. Again. For: pistachios.

"Mohit."

"Don't tell me to stop. I'm already: committed. The jaggery is melting. You can't: un-melt jaggery."

"Why are you doing this?"

He stopped stirring. The spatula — my spatula, the silicone one, the safe one — paused in the pot. He looked at me. Not the grin. Not the mascot. Not the prankster. The: person. The person I had been sharing a bathroom schedule with for two weeks, the person who had sat on my bathroom floor and mixed my ORS and left his door: open.

"Because Diya loved Diwali," he said.

The name. In the kitchen. Between the almond flour and the melting jaggery, the name of the girl who had died at nine, the girl whose photograph was on Mohit's desk, the girl who had called me "the coolest didi in Kasauli" and who had: not survived long enough to eat Diwali sweets as a: teenager.

"She loved the lights," he said. "The diyas. She'd line them up on Nani's verandah — twenty, thirty, forty diyas, because she said the more light there was, the less: dark there was. Seven-year-old logic. But she was: right. And after she — after, Diwali became the: hardest day. Because the lights kept: coming. Every year. And she: didn't."

"Mohit."

"So I make sweets. Every Diwali. Nani and I make sweets and put them on the verandah and light the diyas and — it's not: enough. It's never enough. But it's: something. And this year, I thought — your mum's recipes. Your safe recipes. I thought I could make them for: you. Because you can't eat the regular ones. And Diya would have: hated that. She would have hated that you couldn't eat the Diwali sweets. She would have made you: safe ones. She was: nine, and she would have figured it: out."

I was: crying. Not the quiet crying of the fifteen-year-old at the kitchen counter. The crying of a twenty-six-year-old woman who was standing in a kitchen that smelled like cardamom and almond flour and: grief, watching a man make sweets for a dead sister and a living: friend, watching a man who carried his loss the way she carried her: disease — invisibly, constantly, with a: smile that covered: everything.

"The jaggery is burning," I said.

"What?"

"The: jaggery. It's burning. You need to stir."

He stirred. I cried. The kitchen was: small and full of steam and the specific alchemy of grief and sugar and the feeling that — for the first time in eleven Diwalis — the sweets might taste like: enough.