The first time Ravi tasted someone else's despair, he was collecting empty containers from the seventeenth floor of a glass tower in Bandra, and the flavor hit him like a fist of copper and ash, so sudden and violent that he dropped the plastic bag and watched it scatter across the marble hallway. The containers rolled away like escaping prisoners, each one singing with the metallic tang of a soul corroding from the inside out.
Mr. Arjun Singh, software architect, regular customer, Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, always the same order: two portions of butter chicken, extra mild, one garlic naan, no onions. The man stood in his doorway now, designer stubble catching the harsh corridor light, eyes hollow as abandoned wells.
"Sorry, sir," Ravi mumbled, scrambling to collect the containers. "Slipped from my hands."
But his tongue still burned with the taste of the man's anguish, like he'd been sucking on old coins soaked in kerosene. Three months since his mother had died, three months of delivering food through Mumbai's arteries, and suddenly the city had cracked open its chest to show him its hidden flavors.
The monsoon was coming. You could feel it in the air, thick as ghee, pressing down on the city like a lid on a pressure cooker. Ravi rode his motorcycle through the humid nights, containers stacked in the insulated box behind him, and began to map the emotional geography of Mumbai through taste.
Mrs. Kamala Desai in Colaba, seventh floor, sea-facing flat that hadn't seen a fresh coat of paint since her husband died two years ago. Every evening, same order: two thalis, one vegetarian, one non-vegetarian. She always set both plates on her dining table, always returned both containers licked clean, and they tasted of burnt sugar and jasmine, loneliness crystallized into something almost sweet. When Ravi collected them, the flavor would coat his mouth for hours afterward, making everything else taste like memory.
He started keeping a notebook, hidden under his motorcycle seat. Green pen for joy (rare, tasted like fresh cardamom and rain). Blue for sadness (common, variations from salty tears to old newspaper). Red for anger (chili and iron). Black for the ones that worried him, the ones that tasted like endings.
The app on his phone buzzed constantly. Order picked up. Order delivered. Rate your experience. Five stars meant nothing when you could taste the truth. The algorithm didn't care that the couple in Dadar, Priya and Dev, young professionals with matching laptops and dying love, left containers that reeked of curdled milk and bitter almonds. It didn't track how their orders had shifted from one large pizza shared to two separate meals, eaten in different rooms.
"You're late," Priya said on a Thursday evening, her voice sharp as glass. Behind her, Ravi could see Dev on the balcony, smoking and staring at his phone.
"Traffic, madam. Sorry."
She thrust the containers at him, and the taste exploded across his palate: heartbreak fermenting into rage, love gone sour as spoiled yogurt. He wanted to tell her that he'd tasted this before, in other apartments, other lives. That it would pass or it wouldn't, but either way, the earth would keep spinning and the orders would keep coming.
Instead, he said, "Thank you, madam," and left.
The monsoon broke on a Tuesday, earlier than expected, catching the city with its pants down. Streets became rivers within minutes. Ravi took shelter under a flyover with a dozen other delivery drivers, all of them checking their phones, watching orders pile up while the rain hammered down like bullets.
"Crazy to go out in this," said Prakash, who worked for a different app, same game. "Let the rich wait for their dinner."
But Ravi's phone showed an order from Mr. Singh, and something in his gut twisted. The last three deliveries, the taste had grown stronger, darker. Not just copper now but earth and formaldehyde, the flavor of someone making final preparations.
He rode through the rain, water streaming off his helmet, containers protected in their insulated cocoon. The city blurred past, neon bleeding in the water, everything flowing toward the sea. By the time he reached the tower, he was soaked through, leaving puddles in the marble lobby.
The security guard knew him, waved him through. Elevator to seventeen. The hallway stretched ahead, each door a portal to someone's private universe of joy or sorrow. Mr. Singh's door was ajar.
"Sir? Delivery!"
No answer. Ravi pushed the door open, found the apartment dark except for the glow of a laptop screen. Mr. Singh sat at his dining table, an empty pill bottle beside him, fingers still on the keyboard.
"Sir!"
The man looked up slowly, pupils dilated, movements syrupy. "Oh. You came in the rain."
"Sir, what did you take? Sir, we need to—"
"It's fine. Everything's... coded. Automated. Emails will send after... Clean. Efficient."
Ravi was already calling the emergency number, phone wedged between ear and shoulder while he tried to keep Mr. Singh upright. The taste in the room was overwhelming, death creeping in at the edges like mold, but underneath it, something else. Relief? Peace? The flavor of someone who'd made a decision and found comfort in it.
The paramedics arrived in twelve minutes, pumped his stomach in the living room while rain lashed against the windows. Mr. Singh would live, they said. This time. They'd seen him before.
"You saved him," the paramedic told Ravi. "Good thing you came when you did."
But Ravi wasn't sure he'd saved anyone. He'd just postponed something, kicked the can down the road. The containers in his bag were getting cold, other customers waiting, the algorithm calculating delays and penalties.
He left the tower and rode to Mrs. Desai's flat, arriving ninety minutes late, soaked and shaking.
"Beta, what happened to you?" She pulled him inside, maternal instinct overriding protocol. "You're freezing."
Her apartment smelled of incense and old photographs. The dining table was set for two, as always. Her husband smiled from a dozen frames on the walls, frozen in sepia-toned joy.
"I'm sorry I'm late, auntie. The rain, and there was an emergency—"
"Sit. Sit." She pushed him into a chair, disappeared into the kitchen. Returned with hot tea and a towel. "The food can wait. You look like you've seen a ghost."
"A customer was... unwell. I had to call an ambulance."
She studied his face, this woman who'd been ordering dinner for a dead man for two years. "You're a good boy. Your mother would be proud."
The words hit him unexpectedly, and suddenly he was crying, really crying, for the first time since the funeral. Mrs. Desai didn't say anything, just sat beside him while the rain hammered down and the tea grew cold.
"She used to cook," Ravi heard himself saying. "Every day, no matter how tired. Said that feeding people was like feeding their souls. I thought it was just something mothers say, you know? But now..."
"Now you understand."
He looked at her, this lonely woman with her empty containers that tasted of burnt sugar and jasmine. "I can taste it. The emotions. In the containers. I know how that sounds, but—"
"In my village," Mrs. Desai said quietly, "there was a woman who could smell sickness. She'd walk past someone and know if cancer was growing inside them, know if their heart was failing. It drove her mad, eventually. Too much truth for one person to carry."
"What happened to her?"
"She learned to make perfume. Beautiful scents to balance out the ugly ones. Found a way to live with her gift."
They sat in comfortable silence while the storm raged outside. Finally, Ravi stood to leave, but Mrs. Desai pressed a container into his hands.
"Kheer," she said. "I made too much."
He took it home, to his single room in Dharavi where the rain drummed on the tin roof like an endless tabla solo. The sweet dish tasted of cardamom and comfort, but underneath, he could taste Mrs. Desai's essence: loneliness, yes, but also strength, acceptance, a sweetness that had nothing to do with sugar.
The next morning brought news through the delivery app's chat group. A blackout had hit half the city during the night. The couple in Dadar, Priya and Dev, had been trapped in their apartment elevator for six hours. Someone had seen them afterward, walking out together, holding hands.
Ravi thought about the algorithm that governed his days, the routes optimized for efficiency, the ratings and reviews that reduced human interaction to stars and comments. But underneath it all, in the spaces between pickup and delivery, in the taste of empty containers and the weight of untold stories, there was something else. Something unquantifiable and necessary.
He started small. A note tucked into Mrs. Desai's order: "The kheer was perfect. My mother would have loved your recipe." A message to the app's support team about Mr. Singh, suggesting they flag accounts with concerning patterns. An extra container of rice left at Priya and Dev's door with a simple card: "Sometimes storms bring people together."
The monsoon continued for weeks, turning Mumbai into an archipelago of islands connected by determination and necessity. Ravi rode through it all, containers secure in his insulated box, mapping the city's emotional weather with each delivery.
Mr. Singh started ordering salads, tiny portions that tasted of effort and therapy and slow reconstruction. The flavor wasn't pleasant—medicine never is—but it no longer tasted like endings.
Mrs. Desai began ordering single portions. The burnt sugar flavor remained, but fainter now, mixed with something new. One evening, Ravi arrived to find another man there, a neighbor from two floors down, sharing her single portion while they watched the rain.
"Don't need the containers back today," she said, winking. "Come tomorrow."
Priya and Dev moved to a smaller apartment, closer to work. Their last order from the old place tasted of compromise and cautious hope, like green shoots after a forest fire. They tipped extra, left a five-star review that said simply: "Thank you for everything."
The notebook under Ravi's motorcycle seat grew thick with observations. He began to see patterns, rhythms in the city's emotional hunger. Loneliness spiked on Sunday evenings. Joy clustered around paydays and festivals. Despair had its own geography, pooling in certain buildings, certain floors, like water finding the lowest ground.
He thought about his mother's words, about feeding souls. She'd never know about his strange gift, would never understand how her son had become a curator of the city's hidden flavors. But maybe she didn't need to. Maybe it was enough that he understood now, that he could taste the difference between loneliness and solitude, between endings and beginnings.
Three months after the monsoon ended, Ravi got a message through the app. Mr. Singh, requesting delivery, but with a note: "Please come up. Want to thank you properly."
The apartment looked different. Brighter. Plants on the balcony, windows open to let in air that didn't taste of finality. Mr. Singh had gained weight, lost the hollow look around his eyes.
"I wanted to thank you," he said, pressing an envelope into Ravi's hands. "Not just for that night. For... I don't know. Being there. Being human in all this." He gestured vaguely at the city beyond his windows, the great machine of Mumbai churning through another day.
"Just doing my job, sir."
"No." Mr. Singh shook his head. "That's the thing. You weren't."
The envelope contained enough money to buy a new motorcycle, maybe even start his own food business. But Ravi kept delivering, kept tasting the city's secrets in empty containers. He learned to live with the gift, as Mrs. Desai's village woman had learned to make perfume. Some days the flavors overwhelmed him, sent him home with his mouth full of other people's grief. Other days he tasted joy so pure it made him weep.
The app updated its interface, added new features, optimized routes even further. But the containers remained the same, plastic vessels carrying more than food, holding the residue of human experience in their microscopic scratches and stains. Ravi collected them all, these modern offerings, these prayers addressed to no one and everyone.
Mumbai sprawled on, ten million souls eating and yearning and surviving, and Ravi rode through it all, a courier of more than cuisine, tasting the city's heart one empty container at a time. The monsoon would come again, would always come again, but until then there were orders to deliver, stories to taste, connections to make in the narrow spaces between algorithm and appetite.
In his notebook, he wrote: "Today Mrs. Desai's containers tasted of butterscotch and laughter. She's learning to cook for one, and somehow, it's becoming enough."
The city hummed its electric mantra around him, and Ravi rode on, carrying food to the hungry, carrying more than food, carrying the possibility that someone, somewhere, was paying attention to the flavors they left behind.