“But he’s old enough to know how to put some earplugs in his ears.” Ashna shook the hand Omar held out.
“Want to go for a swim later, beta?” Omar said to Ashna. They had spent last evening jumping the waves and he had explained the backwards process with which Bollywood lyrics were written to retrofit already composed music. The man seemed to approach life with a sardonic yet empathetic eye, and a calm passion that was the yin to her mother’s fiery yang.
“Of course.” The Sripore ocean was Ashna’s favorite place to swim, and she had forgotten quite how much she loved it.
The four of them sat there sipping Ashna’s newest blend. She called it Family Ties. Tomorrow Rico and she would go back to their lives in California—Rico to his new job as Yash’s campaign strategist; Ashna to the renovations they were doing on Curried Dreams. Her mother had paid off the mortgage and freed Ashna up to gather more debt in rebuilding it to be a chai and pastries place.
Ashna hated the idea of leaving Mom, but distance no longer felt like separation. They already had Shobi and Omar’s next trip scheduled for Curried Dreams’ grand relaunch in three months.
It had been Aji’s idea to totally gut the place and “bring it into this new era.”
“If I changed Curried Dreams, would that be horrible?” Ashna had asked her grandmother the day after the show ended, when she took Mom’s ring back to return to her. It was a memory of her son, after all, and a family heirloom.
“Nobody in their right mind would say you haven’t done everything possible to save your father’s restaurant,” Aji had said with her limitless kindness. “Sometimes, no matter what you do things can’t be saved. Or even people. I should have said this to you years ago. But I never wanted to admit it. For a mother to see a child self-destruct is the worst kind of pain. I do believe I tried everything with Bram. I tried saam, daam, dand, bhed—the traditional four steps to fixing any problem: logic, bribery, punishment, and separation. I tried affection, tough love, everything, but he was who he was. Every time life presented him with two choices he chose the easier one, the selfish one, and it destroyed him. What I didn’t realize until it was too late was that you paid the highest price for it.”
“I had you, Aji,” Ashna had told her grandmother. “You made everything softer.”
Rico leaned his head back on her knee, and Ashna ran a hand through his newly cut-short hair, her heart bursting with gratefulness.
“You know,” Mom said, looking at Ashna in a way Ashna still wasn’t used to, and might never be. Then again, maybe her mother had always looked at her that way, she’d just never been able to see it. “The night you were born, I remember having a vision, a vision like this, of us with this feeling in our hearts. Like anything was possible because we were loved and free. That vision filled me with so much hope, I scratched out your name on the birth certificate and put down the only word that could describe how I felt. Ashna.”