Read Online Mirror in the Sky by Aditi Khorana - Free Book Online Page A

of black slacksand a black button-down shirt. His hair was rumpled, and he was holding hands with a tall brunette with an obnoxious laugh. We made eye contact for a brief second, but I ducked into a pet store, hiding behind a wall of aquariums to avoid an awkward interaction, and by the time I emerged, he was gone. Neither of us brought it up afterward.
    â€œYou should go say hi to him.”
    â€œHow come it’s so busy today?”
    Amit shrugged. “Maybe the last book club selection was
Orientalism
.” I took this as a cue to find my father, threading my way through the narrow corridor past the restrooms and the kitchen.
    Occasionally I helped out at the restaurant. I liked the organized chaos of the place. Tickets coming in, mounds of ginger, onion, garlic, and tomatoes waiting to be thrown into sizzling pans, rolls of dough tossed into the tandoor transforming into chewy rounds of naan, blackened and crispy at the edges. It was this metamorphosis that delighted me—there was something satisfying about it, starting with something and ending with something else entirely.
    Sometimes, on early summer mornings, I would watch my father steep tamarind with jaggery, chili, and ginger to make chutney, observing it bubble and thicken on the stove. Or I would inspect the glass jars of pickles that lined the windowsill of the kitchen—orbs of preserved lemon suspended in sugar syrup, slivers of raw mango salted and blended with mustard and cumin seeds.
    My father had made those pickles. He loved the precisionof cooking, believed in “correct” measurements and cleaning up workstations as you go. These things seemed to bring him a sense of satisfaction.
    â€œDad?” I called out as I entered the storage room. “How come you’re in here?”
    He had his back to me and was stacking large industrial-sized cans of whole tomatoes.
    â€œIt’s gotten so disorganized,” he said, frustration in his voice. “Everything’s a big mess! I keep telling Amit that we need a system, a process. You can’t just dump things everywhere. Everything has a place, and if you don’t put things in their proper place when they come in . . . this is where you end up.” He gestured to the large burlap sacks of multicolored lentils around him, to the bulging nets filled with red onions and ginger and ghostly white garlic. The pantry didn’t look any more or less disorderly than usual to me. For a moment, I thought he was referring to the restaurant itself—how he had ended up within it.
    He turned to me then, his voice softer now. “Shouldn’t you be at home doing your homework?”
    â€œI just felt like . . . I don’t know, visiting you.” It was true. I thought about telling him about Mario, but I still wasn’t ready to talk about it.
    â€œCan you tell me about Schrödinger’s cat?” I asked him.
    He paused for a minute, a large plastic container of turmeric suspended in his hand.
    â€œWhat made you bring that up?”
    â€œI don’t know. Mom said I should ask you about it.”
    My father turned to face me, placing the container on the floor. He sat down on top of a sealed sack of basmati rice. His eyes were distant. “I haven’t thought about Schrödinger’s cat in years. I told your mother about it on our first date. It’s . . . a thought experiment . . . the idea that two contradictory possibilities can exist simultaneously.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWell, think about a cat. Let’s say you take this cat and you put it in a box with unstable poisonous gas in it. The gas has a fifty percent chance of poisoning the cat and killing it, and a fifty percent chance of doing nothing. It’s a closed box, sealed. So we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive until we actually open the box and look at it. But the thing is, if you do the experiment enough