“The poli is burning, Ma,” he said quietly. “And Kavya, you’re rolling it too thick. Here. Like this.”
He stood in the kitchen doorway, his starched shirt clinging to him from the heat. He saw his daughter, flour on her nose, hands sticky with dough, and his mother, calmly flipping a golden-brown poli on a cast-iron tawa. For a long second, no one spoke.
Aaji shrugged, a smile playing on her lips. “She asked. A daughter who asks is a daughter who stays.”
“I see,” he said, his voice low. “So this is the Sunday project.”
But Suresh didn’t lecture. He walked to the old steel dabba sitting on the counter—the same one Kavya had guarded on the train. He opened it. Inside, neatly layered between banana leaves, were her previous experiments: slightly burnt shankarpali , a lopsided thepla , and a jar of achaar that had fermented a little too aggressively.
Kavya braced herself. The lecture. You have an MBA. You manage a team of twelve. Why are you playing in the kitchen?