The first time Rajesh tasted someone else's grief, he was holding a paper bag containing butter chicken and naan, standing in the fluorescent glare of a hospital corridor at 11:47 PM. The grief hit him like a mouthful of ash and iron, so sudden and overwhelming that he nearly dropped the order. Through the small window in the door, he could see a family huddled around a bed, their faces carved hollow by waiting.
He left the food with the nurse and stumbled out into the Mumbai night, where the air hung thick with exhaust and the promise of monsoon. His mouth still held that terrible taste - not of the food, but of something else entirely, something that shouldn't have been possible to taste at all.
By morning, he'd convinced himself it was exhaustion. Four hundred and seventeen deliveries that month alone, his mother's voice reminded him over breakfast, each number a small disappointment that her philosophy-graduate son had become nothing more than a courier for other people's dinners. But when he picked up his first order of the day - a birthday cake for a seven-year-old in Bandra - the taste came again: fizzy and golden, like champagne mixed with sunlight, though he'd never tasted either.
The city became a map of flavors after that. Each plastic bag, each cardboard box, each carefully stapled receipt became a window into the secret emotional life of Mumbai's twenty million souls. The investment banker in his glass tower, ordering sushi at 2 AM, tasted of copper pennies and burnt rubber - anxiety so thick Rajesh could feel it coating his teeth. The call center workers sharing biryani tasted of camaraderie and exhaustion, sweet and salty like tears mixed with laughter. New love tasted of cardamom and rose, fresh mint and honey. Breakups were vinegar and spoiled milk.
"You're losing weight," Amit observed three weeks later, as they waited for their orders at the restaurant hub. The place hummed with the organized chaos of Mumbai's food delivery ecosystem - dozens of drivers checking phones, grabbing bags, racing against algorithmic deadlines. "And you keep making that face."
"What face?"
"Like you're tasting something bad. Or good. I can't tell anymore." Amit pulled out a cigarette, offered one to Rajesh who declined. "My cousin knew a guy who went crazy doing this job. Started thinking the GPS was talking to him personally."
Rajesh wanted to explain but couldn't find the words. How could he tell Amit that he'd become an involuntary sommelier of human emotion? That he'd started taking longer routes just to delay the moment when he'd have to taste another person's loneliness? That he'd begun to categorize the flavors in a notebook - forty-seven distinct varieties of sadness alone, ranging from the metallic tang of fresh grief to the moldy sweetness of old regrets?
The app pinged. Order ready. Address in Versova, the old part where the fishing boats still pulled in at dawn and the buildings hadn't yet been replaced by towers. Rajesh grabbed the bag - Thai food, still hot - and headed for his bike.
The taste hit him in the stairwell of the building, so unusual he had to stop and lean against the wall. It was... nothing. Not bland, not neutral, but a complete absence, like tasting the concept of vacuum. His tongue searched for something, anything, but found only void.
Apartment 4B. Mrs. P. Sharma. The name had become familiar over the past weeks - always the same order from the same Thai restaurant, always at the same time, 9:30 PM. He knocked.
The woman who answered was perhaps fifty, wearing a simple cotton sari, her hair pulled back in a bun that had probably looked the same for decades. Her face was neither sad nor happy, neither old nor young. It simply was.
"Thank you," she said, taking the bag. Her voice carried the same quality as the taste - present but somehow absent.
"Every night," Rajesh heard himself say. "You order the same thing every night."
She looked at him then, really looked, and for a moment something flickered behind her eyes. "Yes."
"Why?"
In the old days, before the apps and algorithms, before the city became a machine for processing human needs into profit margins, such a question might have led to conversation. Now it was an intrusion, a violation of the contract between customer and service provider. But she didn't close the door.
"Habit," she said. "Routine is... useful."
The void taste intensified. Rajesh's tongue felt numb, as if he'd been to the dentist. "Are you okay?"
"I am exactly as I choose to be." She began to close the door, then paused. "You're different from the usual drivers."
"I taste things," he said, the words tumbling out. "I mean, I sense... I know how people feel through their food. It started three weeks ago. And you - you're the only one who tastes like nothing."
She studied him for a long moment. "Come back tomorrow. After your delivery. If you really want to know."
The next twenty-four hours stretched like taffy. Rajesh delivered joy (birthday parties), sorrow (late-night comfort food), lust (oysters and champagne to hotels), and everything in between. But his mind kept returning to Apartment 4B, to the woman who tasted like absence.
When he knocked the following night, she was waiting. The apartment beyond was sparse but clean, with the kind of deliberate emptiness that suggested choice rather than poverty. Books lined one wall - neuroscience texts, philosophy, poetry. A single photograph faced the wall.
"Tea?" she offered, and he accepted, though he could taste nothing from the cup she handed him.
"My name is Priya," she said, settling into a chair that had molded to her shape over countless evenings. "Dr. Priya Sharma, though I haven't practiced in three years. I was a neuroscientist specializing in emotional regulation and memory."
The story came out in measured doses, like medicine. A daughter, Kavya, brilliant and troubled. The kind of depression that didn't respond to medication or therapy or love. The morning Priya found her, twenty-three years old and finally at peace in the worst possible way. The months after, when every emotion felt like betrayal - how dare she laugh when Kavya couldn't? How dare she find joy in a sunset, peace in a piece of music?
"So I fixed it," Priya said simply. "I knew enough about the brain, about the chemical cascades that create emotion. It took months of meditation, specific dietary restrictions, careful pharmaceutical interventions. I turned myself into what you taste - nothing. No joy, but also no pain. No love, but also no loss."
"That's not living," Rajesh said.
"No," she agreed. "But it's not dying either. It's... sustainable."
They sat in silence. Outside, Mumbai roared its nightly symphony - horns and music and ten million conversations happening at once. Inside, the apartment felt like a bubble outside of time.
"What does grief taste like?" Priya asked suddenly. "Real grief, not mine."
Rajesh thought of the hospital corridor, that first taste that had started everything. "Like ash and iron. Like swallowing the keys to a locked door. Like..." he paused, searching for words. "Like love with nowhere to go."
Something shifted in her face. Not quite emotion, but the shadow of its possibility.
"I order the same meal," she said, "because Kavya loved Thai food. Pad Thai, specifically, extra spicy, no peanuts. She was allergic. I order it every night and throw it away. It's the only ritual I kept."
"You could taste it," Rajesh said. "The food. I could... I could tell you what it tastes like. Not the flavors, but the feeling of it. The memory."
"Memories have tastes?"
"Everything does. The city is full of them. Nostalgia tastes like burnt sugar. Hope tastes like rain on concrete. Love tastes different for everyone - sometimes chocolate, sometimes chili, sometimes both at once."
Priya stood and walked to the kitchen, returning with the untouched takeout container. She opened it, and the smell of lemongrass and chili filled the room. For the first time since he'd met her, Rajesh tasted something from her - not quite emotion, but the possibility of it, like the first green shoot pushing through concrete.
"Tell me," she said.
So he did. He told her about the birthday cake that tasted like pure joy, about the old couple who ordered tea and samosas every Sunday and tasted like sixty years of companionship. He told her about the coding students pulling all-nighters, their pizza tasting of ambition and fear in equal measure. He told her about the city's hidden emotional life, revealed one delivery at a time.
Somewhere in the telling, she began to cry - not with grief, but with the simple release of someone remembering how to feel. The tears tasted like rain after drought, like windows opening in a closed room.
"I can't go back," she said. "To feeling everything. It would kill me."
"Then don't," Rajesh said. "Feel one thing. One small thing at a time. Like tasting a new dish - you don't eat the whole menu at once."
She picked up a fork, twirled a small amount of pad Thai, and raised it to her mouth. Rajesh watched her chew slowly, thoughtfully.
"What do you taste?" he asked.
"Lemongrass," she said. "Chili. Tamarind." A pause. "And something else. Something like... like a door opening. Just a crack. Just enough to let a little light in."
They became an unlikely pair after that. Every few nights, after his delivery, Rajesh would stop by Apartment 4B. They would share a meal - always something different now - and he would tell her what emotions he'd tasted that day. Slowly, carefully, she began to taste them too. Not the full force of feeling, but small sips. Homeopathic doses of human experience.
"You're teaching her to feel again," Amit said one night, after Rajesh had explained everything. They were sitting on Marine Drive, watching the Queen's Necklace of lights curve around the bay. "But what about you? What are you getting out of it?"
Rajesh thought about it. Since meeting Priya, the overwhelming flavors of the city had become more manageable. Perhaps because he had someone to share them with, or perhaps because helping her had given his strange gift purpose. He still tasted emotions with every delivery, but now they felt less like an invasion and more like a conversation.
"A friend," he said finally. "I'm getting a friend."
The monsoon came early that year, turning Mumbai into a water city, all silver curtains of rain and flooded streets. Rajesh navigated his bike through the chaos, deliveries wrapped in extra plastic, the taste of the city's emotions intensified by the weather - frustration, wonder, that particular Mumbai mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration that came with the rains.
He was making a delivery in Juhu when his phone rang. Priya's name on the screen was unusual - she never called.
"Can you come?" Her voice was different. Not flat, not empty, but full of something unidentifiable.
He made his excuses to the app, took the penalty for abandoning his shift, and rode through the rain to Versova. She was waiting at the door, holding a photograph - the one that had faced the wall. A young woman, laughing, caught mid-gesture as she pushed hair from her face.
"It's Kavya's birthday," Priya said. "Would have been. She would have been twenty-seven today."
The apartment smelled of cooking - real cooking, not takeout. She'd made biryani, the kitchen counter covered with evidence of effort: whole spices, saffron soaking in milk, a cookbook propped open with a coffee mug.
"She loved biryani," Priya said. "I haven't cooked since..."
They ate in silence at first, but it wasn't empty. Rajesh could taste it - not grief exactly, but grief transformed. Like composted earth, dark and rich, ready for new growth. Priya ate slowly, each bite a small act of courage.
"What do you taste?" she asked.
"Memory," he said. "But not the kind that hurts. The kind that honors."
She nodded, and for the first time since he'd met her, she smiled. Not a full smile, but the beginning of one. "I want to tell you about her. About who she was, not just how she left. Would you listen?"
So she talked, and Rajesh listened, and the rain hammered against the windows like the city itself was bearing witness. She talked about Kavya the child who saved injured pigeons, Kavya the teenager who wrote terrible poetry, Kavya the young woman who wanted to change the world but couldn't figure out how to change herself. With each story, the void taste that had defined Priya began to fill - not with the absence of emotion, but with its careful, deliberate presence.
"I'm scared," she admitted as the night grew late. "What if I start feeling everything again? What if it's too much?"
"Then you'll order Thai food," Rajesh said. "And I'll deliver it. And we'll remember that feelings, even the hardest ones, are just tastes. They come, they go, they change. Nothing is permanent, not even emptiness."
The rain had stopped by the time he left. The city smelled clean and new, that particular Mumbai smell of wet earth and possibility. As he walked to his bike, his phone buzzed with notifications - missed deliveries, penalties, his rating dropping. But for once, he didn't care about the algorithms and their demands.
He had one more delivery to make that night. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out a small container he'd brought with him. Gulab jamun from the place near his mother's house, the one that made them fresh, soaked in rose syrup and cardamom.
He knocked on Priya's door again. "Dessert," he said when she answered. "For the birthday."
She took the container, opened it, and the smell of roses filled the hallway. "What will it taste like?" she asked.
"Only one way to find out."
She took a bite, closed her eyes, and for a moment her face was transformed - not by emptiness or by pain, but by the simple sweetness of being alive, of being human, of being capable of both sorrow and joy, often at the same time.
"It tastes," she said, "like beginning again."
The next months passed in a blur of deliveries and conversations. Priya began leaving her apartment, first for necessities, then for small pleasures - a walk by the sea, a visit to a bookstore, eventually even a movie (though she left halfway through, overwhelmed by the crowd's collective emotions that Rajesh could taste even from outside). She returned to reading, not neuroscience now but poetry, philosophy, the kinds of books that asked questions rather than providing answers.
Rajesh's gift evolved too. The tastes became more nuanced, more complex. He could distinguish between types of happiness - the sharp citrus of achievement, the warm bread of contentment, the sparkling wine of new love. He started a blog, anonymously, called "The Emotional Cookbook of Mumbai," where he catalogued the city's feelings in culinary terms. It gained a small but devoted following of people who recognized their own experiences in his descriptions.
His mother noticed the change. "You seem happier," she said one morning, making rotis with the practiced efficiency of decades. "More settled. Is there a girl?"
"No, Ma. Just a friend."
"This friend you visit in Versova? The one you bring food to?"
"She's teaching me something," Rajesh said, which was true enough.
"And what are you teaching her?"
"How to be hungry again."
His mother looked at him strangely but said nothing more.
The anniversary came with the next monsoon. One year since Kavya's death, four months since Rajesh had first tasted the void in Priya's Thai food. She called him early that morning.
"I want to go somewhere," she said. "Will you come?"
They met at Juhu Beach as the sun was setting, the sky painted in shades of orange and pink that Rajesh could taste as nostalgia and hope mixed together. The beach was crowded with families, couples, children playing cricket with makeshift wickets. The bhel puri vendors called out their wares, the smell of tamarind and chili in the air.
"She loved this beach," Priya said. "We'd come here when she was little, before..." She trailed off, watching the waves. "I haven't been back since."
They walked along the water's edge, their feet sinking into the wet sand. Rajesh could taste the emotions of the crowd around them - joy, frustration, love, boredom, the whole spectrum of human feeling. But from Priya, he tasted something new: not emptiness, not grief, but a kind of acceptance. Like the taste of ocean air, salt and possibility.
"I want to try something," she said, stopping suddenly. From her bag, she pulled out a small container of ashes. Not all of them - most had been scattered months ago by relatives while Priya watched from her emotional distance. But she'd kept these, unable to let go completely.
"I wasn't ready before," she said. "I couldn't feel it. But now..."
She opened the container and walked to the water's edge. The waves lapped at her feet, and she stood there for a long moment, the ashes in her hands. Then, with a movement like releasing a bird, she let them go. The wind caught them, dispersed them, made them part of the sea and sky.
Rajesh tasted it then - not grief, not relief, but something in between. Like the taste of a sunset, beautiful and fleeting, impossible to hold.
"Thank you," Priya said, turning to him. "For teaching me that feeling nothing is not the same as healing."
"You taught me something too," Rajesh replied. "That feeling everything doesn't mean understanding anything. Sometimes you need someone else to help you make sense of the tastes."
They stood there as darkness fell and the beach slowly emptied. The food stalls began closing up, the lights of the city coming on like stars. Mumbai continued its endless hunger, its constant consumption and creation of emotion.
"I'm thinking of going back to work," Priya said. "Not neuroscience. Something else. Teaching, maybe. Or counseling. Something where feeling is an asset, not a liability."
"And the Thai food?"
"I think I'll try cooking it myself. It won't taste the same, but maybe that's okay. Maybe it should taste different now."
As they walked back toward the road, Rajesh's phone began pinging with delivery requests. The night shift was beginning, the city's appetite awakening. He looked at the screen, then at Priya.
"Go," she said. "The city's hungry."
"Will you be okay?"
"I'm learning to be. One taste at a time."
He got on his bike, the orders stacking up in his app. As he drove away, he could taste the emotion trailing from her like perfume - not happiness exactly, not sadness either, but something more complex. The taste of a life being lived, with all its flavors, bitter and sweet combined.
The city swallowed him up, its ten million hungers waiting to be fed. He picked up his first order of the night - pizza for a call center, the taste of shared exhaustion already seeping through the box. But now it didn't overwhelm him. He'd learned, through Priya, that emotions were meant to be tasted, not swallowed whole. That the ability to feel, even to feel too much, was its own kind of gift.
His phone rang. A text from Priya: "Next week, same time? I'll cook."
He smiled and texted back a yes, then drove on into the Mumbai night, carrying other people's dinners and feelings, a strange prophet of the city's hidden emotional life. The streetlights blurred past like shooting stars, and somewhere in the distance, the ocean continued its ancient conversation with the shore, tasting of salt and time and the possibility of change.
The rain started again as he made his last delivery of the night, a gentle drizzle that would build to a downpour by morning. The customer was a young couple, newly married by the taste of it - all champagne bubbles and nervous laughter. They thanked him profusely, apologizing for making him come out in the weather.
"It's okay," Rajesh said, meaning it. "Someone once told me that rain makes everything taste stronger."
As he rode home, he thought about Priya, probably reading in her apartment, learning to feel again one page at a time. He thought about his mother, waiting up with dinner despite his protests. He thought about Amit, who'd started asking him to taste his deliveries, curious about what emotions might be hiding in his orders. He thought about the blog followers who wrote to say his descriptions had helped them understand their own feelings better.
The city tasted different now than it had that first night in the hospital corridor. Not less intense, but more nuanced. He could taste the individual notes in the symphony of emotion - the high loneliness of the office towers, the warm community of the chawls, the desperate hope of the railway stations, the quiet contentment of the old Parsi cafes. Each delivery was a story, each taste a glimpse into someone's inner world.
His gift hadn't gone away. If anything, it had grown stronger. But he'd learned, through Priya's journey back to feeling, that the point wasn't to be overwhelmed or to shut down. It was to taste thoughtfully, to savor even the difficult flavors, to understand that emotion - like food - was meant to nourish, not to consume.
The rain grew heavier as he parked his bike, and he ran the last few meters to his building. His mother had left the light on and dinner waiting - simple dal and rice, the taste of home. As he ate, he thought about writing his next blog post. Maybe about the woman who'd learned to stop feeling and then learned to start again. Maybe about the delivery driver who'd become Mumbai's unofficial emotional sommelier. Or maybe just about the taste of rain on a hot night, and how it made everything - joy, sorrow, hope, fear - more vivid, more real, more absolutely and essentially human.
Tomorrow he would wake up and do it all again - deliver food, taste feelings, navigate the endless hunger of the city. But tonight, in his mother's kitchen, with the rain drumming on the windows and the simple taste of dal on his tongue, he felt something he hadn't tasted in himself for a long time: contentment. Not the absence of want, but the presence of enough.
And in Versova, in Apartment 4B, Priya stood at her window watching the rain, holding a cup of tea that tasted faintly of cardamom and possibility, learning that emptiness was not the only alternative to pain. That there was a third option, harder but infinitely more rewarding: the choice to feel it all and survive it, one small taste at a time.
The city hummed its midnight song around them both - auto-rickshaws and late-night trains, street dogs and insomniacs, ten million dreams and disappointments happening simultaneously. And through it all, the endless circulation of food and feeling, delivered by an army of drivers who connected the city's hunger to its satisfaction, one order at a time.
Rajesh finished his dinner, wrote a quick blog post about the taste of homecoming (like butter on warm bread, like finding your keys after searching everywhere, like your mother's voice calling you in from the rain), and went to bed. Tomorrow there would be more deliveries, more tastes, more stories. But he was ready for them now, armed with the knowledge that every emotion, no matter how overwhelming, was temporary. That feelings, like meals, were meant to be experienced and then digested, becoming part of you without consuming you.
The rain continued through the night, washing the city clean for another day of hunger and satisfaction, sorrow and joy, emptiness and fullness, all of it tasted and delivered by those who'd learned to navigate the complex flavors of being alive in a world that never stopped eating, never stopped feeling, never stopped hoping for something better with the next order, the next meal, the next taste of possibility.