Page 56 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Chapter Forty-Eight

The Parsi café was on a quiet street. It crouched on the block like an old man, shirt pressed but thin. The signs were bright and clean, but the walls were grimy with the density of time and city dirt.

Veronica felt a little thrill as they walked through the doors, seeing the roots of the places they’d visited in London and Paris, the original checkerboard tablecloths, the chalkboard with specials for the day. The windows were covered with grillwork, and a mezzanine looked over the dining room.

It was busy. Students and businessmen, tourists with backpacks in one corner, a mother and father and child in another. “Good morning!” said the host, a tidy man in his late sixties. “Three of you?”

“Yes,” Henry said.

Veronica drifted behind them, devouring details—the peeling paint on the walls, the exposed wires, the kitchen with cooks visible behind a pass-through window.

The specials of the day were prawns berry pulao , and mutton biryani.

Mutton, she thought. She’d eaten lots of lamb but couldn’t remember if she’d ever tried mutton.

But probably not today, either. It was early, and she wanted the classic breakfast, the bun maska and chai, as she’d read about. As she sat, still gathering details, she said, “This is great. I feel like I’m seeing through Rachel’s eyes for real.”

Mariah looked a bit sour at that, and Veronica tried to tamp down her effusiveness. But this was the real thing, the cafés they’d been tracking, and she hoped she could tap into whatever it was that Rachel had been meaning to express.

She could see that the other cafés had been much too shiny, but of course you couldn’t import this level of time. Taking out her phone, she started tapping in her notes, and noticed a sign that had the rules of the place, including at the bottom, “No Photography.”

“No photography,” she said aloud.

“We probably have to pay a licensing fee,” Henry said. “I’ll find out once we order.”

“What do you think you’re going to get?” Veronica asked Mariah. “What’s the game plan?”

“I don’t know. You can decide today. I’m going to find the toilet.”

She flung her menu on the table and strode to the host, who pointed her to the back. Veronica stared after her. “She is not doing well.”

“Agreed.”

“I don’t know how to proceed,” she confessed. “I’m not her mother, but if I were, I’d want to get her back home ASAP and get some help.”

“We can just try to wrap it up as fast as we can. Maybe skip Delhi.”

“I think that’s where the sisters are, though. They’re the ones who can tell us what happened.”

“Is there still a mystery, though?” Henry asked.

“I think there is. I mean, why did the sisters leave Bombay? Why open the restaurants in London and Paris?” Veronica covered her heart with both hands. “Not solve the mystery! How can you just walk away?”

He smiled, slow and easy, and she loved that he looked completely at home even here, a place he’d never been. “I see you do not agree.”

The server came to their table, a friendly man in his fifties. “Americans?” he guessed.

“Yes. Have you worked here a long time?” Veronica asked. “It’s wonderful.”

“I started here as a dishwasher when I was fourteen,” he said, straightening his tie. “In those days, there were many more cafés of this kind, but they’re all closing now. This one and a few others are the only ones left.”

On impulse, Veronica asked, “Did you ever know a place called Café Guli?”

“Sure! Not too far away.” He pointed with his pencil, over his shoulder. “Farroukh Irani; my father knew him. It closed long ago, twenty, thirty years.”

“We have visited some cafés his daughters created in London and Paris,” she said. “Did you know them, too?”

“I did,” he cooled ever so slightly as Mariah returned. “I didn’t know they’d gone to Europe. We all thought it was America.”

“Did you know their brother, too?”

His expression closed. “It was a long time ago.” He readied his pencil. “What would you like to order?”

Interesting. Veronica took the hint, and ordered a simple breakfast. Mariah also ordered a bun and egg and chai. Only Henry, a big man with a big appetite, ordered a full meal. “And bring three fresh lime sodas, please,” he added.

“Oh, yes,” Veronica said. “I forgot. Thank you.”

Mariah looked as if she’d washed her face with cold water. The edge of her hairline was wet, her skin faintly pink. “In other news, you might be happy to know that I’ve been texting with Jill about a contract for the book, and she thinks the best answer is to pitch to my mom’s publisher.”

“Really.”

“It won’t be as much as they paid my mom, obviously, but she thinks they’ll be really happy to publish this ‘posthumously.’”

Veronica glanced at Henry, slightly alarmed. It was one thing to make a deal with Mariah, quite another to make one with a publisher. “What would they need in order to go ahead?”

“I’m not sure. I think she said—” She pulled her phone out and punched up the message string. “Yeah. You’ll need to send a sample chapter and an outline of what you think the book will be like.”

In the kitchen, a dark man made a joke to another man in a language Veronica couldn’t understand. A server swung by with a tray full of drinks and placed three tall glasses of a pale-green liquid on their table.

A publishing deal! Her heart skittered. What did that even entail? What did she know about any of this?

Except, maybe she did know. She’d been intimately involved in Spence’s pop philosophy book. She’d helped with the structure, the outline, and read every single chapter before he turned it in. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll see what I can pull together.”

“You’re welcome,” Mariah said, and drank from her glass of soda. “Oh, man! That’s really good. Maybe I’m dehydrated.” She reached for the glass of water, and Henry halted her.

“I’ll get bottled.”

“Yeah. I keep forgetting.” She shook her head. “It just seems weird that everyone who lives here can drink the water, but we can’t.”

“I know what you mean,” Veronica said. “I knew a professor who never drank anything but bottled water wherever she went, even the next state over, because she said the gut gets mixed up when it gets different bugs in the water.”

She nodded. “So do you know how you’ll set up the book?”

Veronica pursed her lips. “Maybe. I think your mom was enchanted with the original Parsi cafés, so we can start there. How much of your mom’s story do you want in there?”

“I don’t know,” Mariah said. “I guess I haven’t thought about that. Maybe we need to get to the end of the story before I decide. And I’ll read the letters. Thanks for forwarding them.”

“Sure. Whatever you decide is fine. If we don’t include her story of coming to India, I’ll focus more on café culture through history, and connect to each of the places we’ve explored.”

“That sounds good,” Henry said. “I can send you a sampling of photos, too. Maybe they’ll inspire you.”

“Good.” A wild sense of possibility buoyed her. What if she could pull this off? What if?

After they ate, Veronica wanted to find where Café Guli had been, and see if they could find anyone in the neighborhood who’d known the Irani family.

As the server had suggested, it turned out to be within walking distance.

It gave them a chance to see the area, too: dogs cheerfully running the streets, cats on motorcycle seats, trees offering shade. And, all at once—

“A monkey!” Mariah cried, pointing. “Three of them!”

The trio sat along a high roofline, and the small brown creatures looked at them curiously. One munched something from his palm, his tail running down the side of the building. Veronica chortled. “How amazing!”

“Don’t ever feed them,” Henry warned. “They’re like seagulls.”

“I don’t really know about seagulls,” Mariah said. “Why are they like them?”

“Opportunistic. They won’t leave you alone once you feed them.”

“Have you been around them a lot?” Veronica asked.

“Here and there.” He laughed, and pointed as another one who popped over the edge of the roof grabbed something from the one who’d been eating and ran away. The first monkey squealed and gave chase. “Exhibit A.”

“It’s still amazing that they’re just ... out here.”

“It is,” Henry agreed. He flung an arm around Mariah’s shoulders. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes. I think maybe I was hungry. That food poisoning was awful.”

“Good.”

“Ooh, look!” Mariah said and pointed at a fabric store. A dazzling variety of fabrics hung in the window, vivid reds and saturated blues, cotton prints Veronica vaguely remembered were called chintz.

Mariah pointed to a fern-green chintz printed with white branches. “You’d look awesome in that green.”

“Thanks. It’s really pretty.” Aware that she’d been marching toward her goal like a dog on a scent, she paused to give Mariah some focus. Maybe that was the main thing she needed, attention. “Which one would you choose for yourself?”

“Mmm. I think I look great in red,” she said without smugness. “But that blue and gold is killer.”

“You would look amazing,” Veronica said. And she wondered if maybe Rachel had shopped on this street, if the café had been along here. She kept the thought to herself, afraid to upset the equilibrium Mariah seemed to have found.

She also suddenly wondered whether Elsie had been on this street at some point, more than a century before.

She’d been born in Mumbai, then called Bombay, and spent her formative years here, but Veronica had no idea where.

She probably didn’t have time to track it down, but it suddenly seemed sad that she wouldn’t have a chance. When would she ever be back?

But maybe she was no longer the woman whose life she wanted to document. Maybe that was an idea left over from another time in her life.

Hmm. How did she feel about that? She nudged the spot where Elsie had lived for so long, and there wasn’t much left there. Elsie had fled to some other writer or scholar’s brain.