The butter chicken tasted of heartbreak.
Not the curry itself—that was sublime, all cream and tomato and garam masala singing together like old lovers—but something else, something that hit Samir's tongue like a memory of tears. He pulled his motorcycle to the side of Mohammad Ali Road, the Tuesday afternoon traffic howling past him like mechanical djinns, and stared at the plastic container in his delivery bag.
Thirty-seven minutes to deliver. The app would start screaming at him soon, that digital banshee that ruled his days. But Samir couldn't move, couldn't understand why his mouth was flooding with the taste of someone else's sorrow, salt-bitter and aching, layered beneath the food like a frequency only he could detect.
Two years he'd been racing through Mumbai's veins, ferrying meals from kitchen to door, becoming invisible, becoming nothing but movement and speed. Two years since Meera's funeral, since he'd stopped feeling anything at all. And now this—this impossible taste that wasn't taste, this emotion that wasn't his.
"Ey, Spider," he called to Arjun, who was pulling up beside him, his own delivery bag fat with orders. "Taste this."
Arjun, all nineteen years and optimistic bones, laughed. "Samir bhai, you know we're not supposed to—"
"Just taste it."
The boy shrugged, dipped a piece of naan into the container. Chewed. Smiled. "Good stuff. Sharma's Kitchen, right? They make the best—"
"You don't taste anything else?"
"Like what? Cardamom?"
Samir waved him off, kick-started his bike. But as he wove through the afternoon maze of cars and buses and bodies, the taste lingered, transformed. By the time he reached the customer's flat in Bandra, it had shifted to something else entirely—anticipation, nervous and electric, tasting of green chilies and mint.
The door opened before he could knock. A young man, maybe twenty-five, hair still wet from the shower, cologne trying too hard.
"First date," the man said, grinning sheepishly, taking the bag. "Been three years since my last relationship. Stupid to be nervous about dinner in my own flat, right?"
Samir stared. The taste in his mouth matched exactly the feeling radiating from the man's face. "The food will bring luck," he heard himself say, the words appearing from nowhere, from the same place as this impossible knowledge.
The pattern revealed itself over the following days, Mumbai's emotional map spreading across his tongue in flavors both strange and familiar. From the sandwich stall near Victoria Terminus: exhaustion that tasted of burnt coffee and iron filings, the morning cook working her third straight shift. From the Chinese restaurant in Colaba: joy like lychees bursting with honey, the chef having just learned of his daughter's pregnancy. From the dhaba near the airport: rage, pure and petroleum-dark, after the owner's son had gambled away the week's earnings.
Samir began to categorize them in his mind, creating a taxonomy of taste and feeling. Anxiety was always almonds, bitter and sharp. New love carried cardamom and rose water. Grief—grief was ash and rain.
He tried to explain it to Spider during their evening chai break, the two of them parked under the flyover near Mahim, watching the Arabian Sea swallow the sun.
"You're saying you can taste what people feel when they cook?"
"Not taste. Not exactly. It's like—" Samir struggled, watching the light die on the water. "You know how sometimes a song makes you remember something that didn't happen to you? Like that, but with flavor."
"Bhai, you're working too much. When's the last time you took a day off?"
Never, Samir wanted to say. Because days off meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering Meera's laugh, the way she used to steal his phone to change his ringtone to ridiculous Bollywood songs, the way the cancer took her voice first, then everything else.
Instead, he said, "There's this one restaurant. Sharma's Kitchen. Every time I pick up from there, I taste the same thing."
"What?"
"Like someone's drowning. Like they're already underwater, looking up at the last of the light."
It was Thursday when the taste from Sharma's Kitchen changed, became urgent. Not just sorrow now but decision, resolution bitter as cyanide. Samir delivered the order—palak paneer and rotis to an office building—but couldn't shake the feeling that he was carrying someone's last meal, though not for the customer.
He went back. Parked across from the small restaurant, watching through the window. Mr. and Mrs. Sharma, moving through their dinner service like dancers who'd forgotten the music. She was thin, thinner than last month when he'd glimpsed her. He was gray at the temples, gray in his movements.
The story came in pieces. From other drivers, from the chaiwallah on the corner, from the woman who ran the pharmacy next door. The Sharmas had sold everything to open this place after Mrs. Sharma was laid off from HDFC Bank. The pandemic had nearly killed them. Now the landlord wanted triple rent, and their son's medical bills from a motorcycle accident had eaten their savings.
"They're good people," the pharmacy woman said. "But pride, you know? They won't take help."
That night, Samir dreamed of Meera. She was cooking in their mother's kitchen in Kerala, humming that old Mohammad Rafi song she loved. "You can taste it, can't you?" she said, not turning around. "All that sadness. But Samir, brother mine, what about your own?"
He woke with his mouth full of ash and rain.
Friday. Saturday. The taste from Sharma's Kitchen grew more intense, more final. Samir found himself taking every order from there, even the ones that barely covered petrol. Each meal was a message, a goodbye letter written in spices and ghee.
On Sunday afternoon, the app sent him there again. Mrs. Sharma herself handed him the bag, and their eyes met. Hers were dry, decided. The food in the bag tasted of endings.
"Auntie," he said, the word appearing unbidden. "The butter chicken from Tuesday. The customer said it was the best they'd ever had."
She blinked. "Tuesday?"
"The one with extra cream. He said it reminded him of his mother's cooking. Said it made him want to call her, tell her he loved her."
This was a lie, but not exactly. The customer hadn't said anything, but Samir had felt it in the flavors, the homesickness that had infused that particular order.
"He did?"
"Every meal from here carries something special, Auntie. Something that changes people."
She laughed, but it was broken glass. "Changes people. If only it could change situations."
"It does," Samir said, surprising himself with his vehemence. "I deliver your food all over the city. I see their faces when they open it. It's not just food."
"Beta, you're kind, but—"
"Let me help."
The words hung between them like a bridge across dark water.
"I know someone," Samir continued, though he didn't, not yet. "Someone who invests in restaurants. He's been looking for authentic places, family operations. The real Mumbai taste."
Mrs. Sharma's pride flickered, warred with desperation. "We don't need charity."
"Not charity. Business. Your food is worth investing in."
That night, Samir did something he hadn't done in two years. He called his mother in Kerala, then his uncle who worked in hospitality, then three cousins in Mumbai who had connections to restaurant investors. He created a story, a narrative of a delivery driver who'd discovered the city's best-kept secret. By midnight, he had two potential investors willing to try the food.
But more than that, as he made these calls, as he reached across the gulf of his own isolation, he tasted something new in his own mouth. Not ash, not rain, but something green and growing. Hope, maybe. Or just the first flavor of healing.
Monday came with news. One of the investors, moved by the authenticity of the food and the story of the bank manager turned chef, offered not just investment but partnership. The Sharmas could keep their kitchen, their recipes, their dignity.
Samir was there when Mrs. Sharma received the call. The taste that flooded his mouth was indescribable—sunrise and sugar, temple bells and first rain. She looked at him, understanding somehow that he was behind this reversal.
"Why?" she asked.
He thought of Meera, of all the meals she'd never cook, all the flavors she'd never taste. "Because your food carries feelings. And feelings need to be delivered."
That evening, Spider found him at their usual spot under the flyover.
"You look different, bhai."
"Different how?"
"Like you're actually here. Not just your body, but you."
Samir considered this, watching the sea. "I can taste my own feelings now."
"What do they taste like?"
"Complicated," Samir said. "Bitter and sweet. Like dark chocolate with sea salt. Like coffee after crying. Like life, I suppose."
They sat in comfortable silence, two delivery drivers in a city of twenty million, carrying more than just food through the streets. Samir's phone buzzed with new orders, the app summoning him back to work. But for a moment, he didn't move, just sat there tasting the evening air, the complexity of being alive, the flavor of a Tuesday afternoon that had changed everything.
The city called to him through the phone's insistence, all those kitchens and hearts and stories waiting to be delivered. He climbed back on his bike, adjusted his helmet, felt the familiar weight of the empty delivery bag on his shoulders. But now he knew what he was really carrying through Mumbai's endless streets—not just food but feelings, not just meals but messages, not just flavors but the full, strange, impossible taste of human connection.
As he merged into traffic, Spider keeping pace beside him, Samir thought he could taste the entire city on his tongue. Twenty million flavors, twenty million stories, all of them mixing in the evening air like the world's most complex curry. And somewhere in that vast recipe, his own story was finally beginning to cook again, seasoned with grief and hope in equal measure, served hot and fresh and ready to be shared.
The butter chicken on Tuesday had tasted of heartbreak. But heartbreak, Samir now understood, was just another flavor in the feast of being alive. And he was finally, after two years of fasting from feeling, ready to eat again.