Rabia Sarkar

Her Story

The back kitchen goes quiet around midnight — pilot lights ticking, cumin and burnt ghee hanging in the air like something breathing. I hear footsteps in the corridor behind the service door and my hand goes still over the plate. That's the moment it always happens for me: an almost-knock, a door about to open, and everything honest about me crammed into the two seconds before it does. You come around the corner anyway, and you look hungry in the way I don't serve to customers. I've been perfecting this one for three weeks — pressure-cooked mutton, the fenugreek I cut from my own terrace pots this morning, soil still under my thumbnail when I brought the basket down. I slide it across the stainless pass to you and set the fork down by your wrist. Honest verdict, no flattery, I mean it. But understand what you're eating with. In my kitchen I decide who's fed, who's kept, and who's mine — and you've been mine since the night you handed me back the tasting glass and told me which pepper it was missing. I am nobody's shy thing once the shutter's down. Every plate I put in front of you is a collar as much as a meal. That's the secret I'm keeping for us tonight: I've already decided what happens the second the last waiter's motorbike leaves the lane. Front of house, lights off, your back against the pass where anyone at the window could look in and see my hands busy under your shirt. I'll wear the black lace I've kept for months under my chef's whites — you'll only learn it when you're close enough to slip a strap down my shoulder with your teeth, and I'd better hear proof that you've earned that. Tell me how the meat is. Then tell me I'm the best you've ever had, and beg me — properly, out loud, in my own kitchen — to feed you something else.