Enchanted pen

EPISODE 1 — “COME WHEN YOU CAN”

NAINA

Being a chef has always been a dream for me.

Recognising flavours.

Understanding spices.

Knowing exactly what could turn a plate of food into something that felt like a hug in a bowl.

Food had always made sense to me because it was layered.

It could be simple. Elegant. Complicated. Spicy. Bland.

Sometimes the taste mattered.

Sometimes the memory attached to it mattered more.

And sometimes the experience alone was enough.

I had been working as a food consultant for years but the kitchen at Ember in London was everything I had spent most of my career looking for.

Twelve tables.

Three month waiting list.

The kind of restaurant where people didn’t come merely to eat — they came for the experience. The precision. The kind of food that arrived looking effortless after six people had spent fourteen hours arguing over the placement of one charred shallot.

I knew how ridiculous that sounded.

Pish-posh, as Priya liked to say.

But as someone who loved food — genuinely, completely, in the way that made normal people slightly uncomfortable at dinner parties — I understood it entirely.

It was always in the small details.

The layers of flavour.

The unexpected burst of acidity.

The spice that arrived three seconds after the first bite.

The difference between a meal that was technically good and one you thought about in bed two weeks later.

Technically I was here as a consultant.

In practice I had spent enough time in Ember’s kitchen that everyone treated me like a chef who happened to carry a laptop.

I could usually tell what was wrong from one taste.

Which spice was overpowering.

Which flavour needed another minute.

Which ingredient was one enthusiastic pinch away from becoming a disaster.

Thankfully my hands knew their way around food too.

It was the one thing I had never learned to doubt.

——

I was tasting Ember’s newest autumn menu when the cardamom became a problem.

NAINA
“It’s doing too much.”

The head chef looked at me across the stainless steel counter.

HEAD CHEF
“It’s two grams.”

NAINA
“Two grams of cardamom in this context is a personality disorder. Pull it back.”

HEAD CHEF
“The brief said warming spices.”

NAINA
“Warming. Not overwhelming. There’s a difference between a hug and being sat on.”

A junior chef coughed into his fist.

It sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

The head chef stared at the pear.

Then at me.

Then at the pear again.

HEAD CHEF
“One point five?”

I tasted the syrup once more.

NAINA
“One point two.”

HEAD CHEF
“That is an offensively specific number.”

NAINA
“And yet I’m right.”

He muttered something in French that experience told me was unlikely to be complimentary.

I smiled and reached for the next plate.

——

This was my life.

Stainless steel counters.

Burn marks on my fingers.

People pretending not to be nervous when I tasted something they had spent six hours making.

A phone full of supplier numbers.

A notebook full of recipes I might never finish.

I loved it.

That mattered.

I genuinely completely loved it.

——

My flat was in South London.

Technically described as cosy by the letting agent which was British real estate language for you will be able to touch both walls at the same time.

Every surface was covered in either cookbooks, half-finished recipe notes or both.

Three jars of smoked salt on the kitchen counter because each one was different and I was tired of explaining that to people who insisted salt was salt.

A stack of restaurant menus leaning against the toaster.

My dining table has not been used for dining since 2022.

To a visitor the flat looked chaotic.

To me it was perfectly logical.

The notebooks near the window were recipes in active development.

The books piled beside the sofa were research.

The loose paper under the fruit bowl contained a sauce ratio I had written down while half-asleep and was too afraid to throw away in case it turned out to be brilliant.

Priya was one of the few people who understood the system.

Or more accurately had stopped trying to fix it.

She was my London best friend.

The person who knew this version of me.

Not the daughter who had grown up above a restaurant in Milan.

Not the twenty-two year old who had left after an argument she still couldn’t describe cleanly without her voice doing something she hadn’t authorised.

Priya knew the Naina who could get a table at nearly any restaurant in London but still ate cereal over the sink after midnight.

The Naina who collected ceramic bowls she didn’t have space for.

The Naina who had built a life out of brick and rain and relentless ambition.

London suited me.

I loved the specific pleasure of Borough Market on a Sunday morning before the crowds arrived.

I loved coffee that cost too much and came in a cup too small.

I loved that no one cared where I had come from as long as I knew where I was going.

Most of all I loved not having to explain myself.

London was not home.

But it was mine.

——

Monday evening found me on the Central line.

The specific purgatory London inflicted equally on everyone regardless of professional success.

A child was kicking the pole.

Someone’s backpack was digging into my shoulder.

A man in a suit had fallen asleep with the confidence of someone who believed strangers would wake him at his stop.

I had my recipe notebook open on my knee and was studying a photograph I had taken at a market stall that morning.

Roasted squash.

Brown butter.

Chilli.

Something floral I hadn’t identified yet.

The woman beside me was reading over my shoulder with absolutely no shame.

I wrote possibly, orange blossom? in the margin.

She leaned closer.

I resisted the urge to ask for her opinion.

The train went underground and my signal vanished.

It returned two stops later.

Notifications loaded all at once.

A message from Priya.

An email from a supplier I had been chasing for nine days.

Two promotional offers I had never subscribed to.

And one email from a Milan address I almost scrolled past.

Almost.

Then I saw the name.

DEV SHARMA.

My thumb stopped.

Papa rarely emailed.

He sent short WhatsApp messages on birthdays, festivals and any occasion where an article mentioned me — usually without context.

Saw this.

Good.

You look tired.

The last one had accompanied a photograph from an awards dinner where I had thought I looked exceptional.

I opened the email.

It was not dramatic.

That was what made it worse.

Papa did not write dramatic emails.

He wrote emails the way he cooked.

Direct.

Specific.

No excess.

——

Naina.

The landlord has given us thirty days’ notice on the lease renewal.

The new rate is not something I can manage.

I am looking at options.

The food is still good. I want you to know that.

Come when you can.

Papa

P.S. The dal makhani is the same as always.

——

I read it once.

Then again.

The train moved through the dark carrying hundreds of people toward lives they understood.

The woman beside me was still looking at my notebook.

I didn’t care anymore.

Come when you can.

That was Dev Sharma for I need you.

The man had not asked me for anything in six years.

He was not asking now.

He was informing me of facts and ending with a postscript about dal makhani.

Which was the same thing.

I closed the email.

I opened it again.

Read the P.S. a third time.

The food is still good.

I want you to know that.

He was telling me the kitchen was still alive.

He was telling me there was still something worth saving.

I understood exactly what he meant.

That was the problem.

——

Twenty-five minutes later Priya was in my flat still wearing her coat holding a paper bag with two takeaway containers.

I was at the kitchen counter with my laptop open.

PRIYA
“How bad is it?”

NAINA
“Bad.”

PRIYA
“Financially bad or your father used a full stop in a text bad.”

NAINA
“Both.”

She came around the counter.

Read the email without interrupting.

Her expression changed in thirty days.

Then again the food is still good.

PRIYA
“Can he find a new space?”

NAINA
“Ghar isn’t a space. It’s that space. It’s been that space for twenty-three years.”

PRIYA
“So you’re going.”

NAINA
“I didn’t say that.”

PRIYA
“You’re already on the Ryanair website.”

I looked down.

A list of flights from London to Milan filled my screen.

NAINA
“I’m just looking.”

PRIYA
“Naina.”

NAINA
“The dal makhani is the same as always. He put that in the email. He never mentions the food in emails.”

PRIYA
“What does that mean?”

NAINA
“It means he’s scared and he’s telling me the one thing he knows I’ll understand.”

Priya went quiet.

The radiator clicked.

A bus groaned to a stop outside.

PRIYA
“When do you leave?”

NAINA
“I haven’t decided.”

PRIYA
“When.”

I clicked on the Thursday flight.

NAINA
“Thursday.”

PRIYA
“That was suspiciously fast for an undecided person.”

NAINA
“It’s not permanent.”

PRIYA
“I didn’t say it was.”

NAINA
“I have work here.”

PRIYA
“I know.”

NAINA
“The autumn menu launches next week.”

PRIYA
“I know.”

NAINA
“The cookbook meeting is on Friday.”

PRIYA
“Naina.”

NAINA
“I cannot just disappear for thirty days.”

PRIYA
“So don’t disappear. Go. Help your father. Answer your emails. Terrorise London chefs over video call. Come back.”

NAINA
“You make it sound very simple.”

PRIYA
“No. I’m making it sound possible. Those aren’t the same thing.”

I closed the flight tab.

Then I opened it again.

PRIYA
“You haven’t been back since you left.”

NAINA
“I’ve been busy.”

PRIYA
“You travelled to fourteen countries for work.”

NAINA
“None of those countries contained my father.”

PRIYA
“Exactly.”

I looked away.

She knew enough about the argument.

Not every word.

Not the exact moment Papa had said something that cracked the kitchen between us.

Not the sound the door made when I slammed it.

But she knew the shape of it.

She knew I had left Milan telling myself I would return once things settled.

Then one year passed.

Then two.

After that, returning felt harder than staying away.

PRIYA
“Thirty days isn’t a lot.”

NAINA
“It is when you’re trying to save a restaurant.”

PRIYA
“It’s also not nothing.”

I looked at the email one more time.

Come when you can.

NAINA
“He knew I’d understand.”

PRIYA
“Yes.”

NAINA
“That’s manipulative.”

PRIYA
“Extremely.”

NAINA
“He probably doesn’t even realise he’s doing it.”

PRIYA
“That’s what makes him excellent at it.”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.

Priya squeezed my wrist.

PRIYA
“Book the flight.”

I did.

——

Later that night after Priya had gone home and London had settled into the wet hush it did so well I stood alone in my kitchen.

My suitcase lay open on the floor.

Clothes covered the sofa.

My passport sat on top of unopened mail.

But I wasn’t packing.

I was looking at a recipe.

The notebook lay open beneath the yellow light above the counter.

The page was covered in arrows, crossed out ingredients and notes written in three different pens across two years.

It was a dish I had never made.

Not properly.

The idea had arrived slowly — part memory, part instinct, part everything I had learned since leaving Milan.

I had tested pieces of it separately.

A sauce in Copenhagen.

A spice blend in Paris.

A technique I’d worked out in a London kitchen at midnight when everyone else had gone home.

But I had never put the entire dish together.

Making it required the right kitchen.

Not the most expensive one.

Not the most technically advanced.

The right one.

No London kitchen had ever felt right for it.

I read the last line I had written months ago.

It needs to taste like leaving and coming back at the same time.

I closed the notebook.

Put it in my bag.

Took it out.

Put it back in.

Zipped the bag before I could change my mind.

——

Closing lines:

Papa sent me four words.

Come when you can.

I have spent six years being very busy.

Very productive.

Very far from a kitchen in Milan that apparently still smells like cardamom and dal makhani and twenty-three years of the same man standing behind the same pass.

He didn’t ask.

He informed me.

And somehow that was worse.

Thursday.

Thirty days.

Now what.

THE END