Silk Saris and Sweet Sorrel: A Year's End Queer Romance
In Part Two of Three, patient Alafair bides her time, but can't quite restrain her heart
Dear readers, welcome to Part Two of Silk Saris & Sweet Sorrel! In case you missed Part One, which introduced you to Priya, you can read it here before diving into Alafair’s chapter.
Part Three will be with you sooner than you think! Til then, live and love each other wildly; drink all the sweetness the lingering hours of this year have to offer.
🌺 It needed patience, above all things.
Sure, Alafair thought, decanting a stream of ruby-red liquid into the cut crystal pitcher, you could buy sorrel pre-cleaned, ready to boil. You could even get the helpful roadside sellers to bag out the right amount of cloves and ginger, a one-stop shop for all your brewing needs. She stood back from the table, smoothed the linen cloth down a final time, and surveyed the terrain. She touched her damp fingertips to her hair again, checking that none of the mismatched pins had slipped out during her preparations. All good.
Alafair prided herself on not being a purist. Times changed, both in the food and beverage world and outside of it, and she was damned glad to move with those tides. Things that her cache of barista and mixologist buddies balked at, she not only accepted, but flung herself headlong towards, measuring cups and industrial-grade blenders at the ready. Vegan ponche a creme? Chadon beni mojitos? Bayleaf and soursop infused homemade rum? Sign her up. She paused, looked back at the drinks station where the sorrel brewed from her great-granny’s recipe perched in pride of place.
Some things, though. Some recipes were meant to stay the same. Not many, no. But when Ermentrude Ramchand, God bless and keep her memory, wrote out the procedure for sorrel brewing from fresh buds to claret liquid, in that elegant spidery handwriting, she had known what she was doing. It felt like tempting the wrong kind of fate to mess with that now.
God alone knew Alafair didn’t need any more run-ins with the backhand side of destiny.
Her phone buzzed at her hip. Alafair fished it out of her pocket, flicked the screen open to a perfunctory text that told her everything she needed to know about tonight.
she coming. I think. I call she just now dey and she eh say anything but she had that tone. you sure you know wha you doing, Fairy?
Alafair squinted at Dev’s pet name but resisted the urge to roll her eyes, her nose scrunching as she tapped out a swift reply.
Thanks, Dev. For delivering the invy. For checking up. Stop calling me Fairy, that wasn’t cute ten years ago and it’s aging badly, man. And. Thank you, again.
She sighed as she shoved the phone down the back pocket of her jeans, registering the hour as she scanned the empty white tents, their peaked domes intersecting like the pointy spires of a temporary castle. She should get out of her prep clothes, slip into the new dress that looked like midnight and cost almost as much as buying a small sliver of the sky. But she didn’t care. She didn’t care. Not if it meant Priya’s gaze would fall on her bare shoulders, her bare back.
Not if it helped Priya see her, standing there, sorrel-red still staining her fingers, after three goddamn years.
Patience, Alafair chided herself, heading inside through the back entrance, smiling as Mummy lifted her silver head from the last of the forest green cloth napkins. The kitchen smelled of ginger and masala, cardamom and the faintest traces of caramelized sugar. The cooking was long over, but the aromas of everything they’d made still lingered. Few kitchens had ever smelled as good to Alafair as the one she’d grown up in, right here in the heart of San Fernando. Very few people could make magic with their food: make it mean something more than calories and protein and complex carbs. Her mother, Lelah, had always had that gift. When Lelah first took a bite of the lopsided cake Priya had made them for the first day of vacation after Common Entrance exams, her deep brown eyes widening, she had looked like she tasted a little magic herself.
If it takes one to know one, Alafair thought, watching her mother’s gold bangles glint as she folded the final napkin into a festive swan, then Lelah had known about Priya’s gifts from the beginning, and done everything to support them. Long before Lelah or Auntie Neera knew what was between their daughters. Before the gossip mill started churning out rumours thick as pure ghee. Before family members started taking sides, and despite the odds, a love story had bloomed brighter than Divali in Felicity, only to gutter out like so many deyas caught in the pouring rain.
Before any of that, Alafair remembered as she stood in front of her mother’s full-length mirror, running her palms down the front of the sequinned dress, there had just been them. Two girls in pigtails with red ribbons, one of them with grazed knees, the other with butterfly-shaped Band-Aids to press onto the hurt. One of them holding up a ripe mango for the other to tear into, giggling as juice ran down her chin and smeared her cheeks. One of them always, always, by the other’s side. They hadn’t needed to kiss to know each other would taste like home… but oh, when those kisses had finally come.
How perfectly sweet they had been.
Alafair winced like the memory might be able to actually hurt her physically, touching her nail tips to her lower lip in a swift reactive tic.
“Patience,” she said, aloud this time, inhaling, sliding each pin from her messy bun, running a final comb through her loose hair, willing it to stay tame and not curl in a thousand different directions. You needed patience for almost every fine thing, in the kitchen and outside of it: cleaning sorrel, for one. Courting a long lost love, for another. Not that she was doing that. Not, Alafair admitted to herself as she stepped outside to wait under the faery light archway of her Christmas Eve party, that she wasn’t.
She knew she shouldn’t hope for anything. It had been three years, and most of the months inside them had only offered cold comfort. She lifted her gaze to the headlights of the dented Jeep making its way up the Ramchands’ gravel driveway. She did the opposite of hold her breath as the car door clicked open, as that warm, velvety alto greeted her mother and father, bangles clacking in happy familiarity as tight-tight hugs were traded and friendly conversation struck. Alafair had never been one for histrionics. She didn’t believe in holding a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, or whatever the hell happened in the romantic dramedies she binge-watched when she couldn’t sleep and everything, everything in her kitchen made her want to brew something good for her ex-woman. No. Alafair Fairy Ramchand believed in taking her breaths deep, her drinks strong, and by God, she believed in acting patiently. You couldn’t make good sorrel in a frenzied rush. You couldn’t speed through inventing recipes in the early morning, leaning half-naked against the kitchen island and scooping fresh fruit into wooden bowls to puree, all the while wishing you were tasting peppermint-passionfruit schnapps from her mouth.
All you could do sometimes, she thought as Priya stepped into the light towards her, glimmering in a silk sari the colour of the sea during a storm in Maracas Bay, was wait. 🌺
Gosh Shivanee.... that was breathcatching... I missed Part 1. Begging for the link....please?
An enthralling part 2. Eagerly awaiting part 3. Maybe a 4 too?