Love that stays

The baking workshop

Fun-fact: I thought of this story after watching Project Hail Mary. Not anyway related to the movie but I fell love in with the space 🔭🛰️

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The workshop was held in a sunlit studio tucked between a bookshop and a florist on a quiet Sunday street, the kind of place that smelled like vanilla and warm wood before you even opened the door. Ahana stood outside it for approximately forty-five seconds, having a small, private argument with herself about whether to go in.

She went in.

The space was cheerful in a deliberate way pastel aprons hung by the entrance, worktables were dusted with flour and little hand-written recipe cards were propped up at each station like tiny flags. Ahana looked around and registered, slowly, that she was perhaps the youngest person in the room by a margin of at least twenty-five years.

She stood in the doorway with that information for a moment.

Every other participant appeared to be somewhere between forty and sixty-five, chatting comfortably with each other in the way people do when they've been retired long enough to have hobbies on Sunday mornings. Two aunties were already comparing notes on their grandchildren. A man in a very serious apron was asking the instructor about diabetes. Someone's hearing aid was making a faint whistling sound.

Seri, Ahana thought, with great feeling. I will never forgive you for leaving me with these oldies here.

"You look like you're calculating your exit route already."

Ahana turned.

The woman beside her was somewhere around fifty, with silver threading generously through her dark open hair and a face that was somehow both sharp and warm at the same time, the kind of face that had clearly laughed a great deal and argued even more. She was wearing a bright yellow kurta, had reading glasses perched on top of her head, and was looking at Ahana with an expression of open, unhurried amusement. She looked cool and energetic.

"I'm Mythili," she said, extending her hand. "And before you say anything, yes, you are the youngest person here, and yes, it's going to be fine, because I am going to stay with you and we will be the most cool team around here."

Ahana shook her hand. "I am Ahana. Sure aunty no problem."

Mythili smiled. "Come. They're pairing people up and I need a partner who is smart. The last time I baked with my husband, he added salt instead of sugar and confidently told me it was a 'flavour experiment.'"

Ahana laughed before she could help it. "Okay. Yes. Let's be partners."

They were assigned to the same station, a long wooden table near the window, sunlight falling across the marble surface in warm strips. The task for the first round was a classic: a layered vanilla sponge with buttercream and a fruit compote. Simple enough that beginners could manage it. Complex enough that it required actual attention.

Ahana was a precise person by nature. She measured everything twice. She read the recipe card fully before touching a single ingredient. She organized the station left to right in order of use , eggs, flour, butter, sugar, vanilla.

Mythili watched this with one eyebrow raised.

"Do you have OCD?" she asked. It wasn't really a question.

"No aunty, why?"

"You just sorted your ingredients by sequence of use." Mythili picked up the vanilla extract and placed it back where Ahana had moved it from, just to see what would happen.

Ahana immediately moved it back.

Mythili grinned. "See that proves."

"No aunty, it's just simple organisation satisfaction and I am definitely not diagnosed with OCD," Ahana admitted a bit awkwardly.

Mythili giggled "I am just pulling your leg, Ahana. By the way, what do you do for living?"

"I am a space scientist aunty, I work with satellite systems."

Mythili looked genuinely delighted. "My God. You build satellites and you're here learning to make sponge cake on a Sunday?"

"The satellite had a bad week," Ahana said, before she could think better of it. "I needed something that would go right."

Something in Mythili's expression shifted. Understanding, maybe. The kind that doesn't need the full story to be real.

"Well then," Mythili said, cracking the first egg cleanly against the bowl, "let's make sure it does."

They fell into a rhythm that had no business being as natural as it was.

Mythili was intuitive in the kitchen in the way that only people with decades of experience are she knew when the butter was ready by the smell before the color, she folded batter with the practiced ease of muscle memory, and she had strong, fully committed opinions about everything.

"More vanilla."

"The recipe says one teaspoon," Ahana said.

"The recipe is being dumb. More vanilla."

"Aunty.."

"Ahana. Trust me or don't, but we are not making a tasteless cake."

Ahana looked at her. Looked at the vanilla. Added more vanilla.

"Good girl," Mythili said serenely.

In return, Ahana was meticulous about the things Mythili was impatient with, she timed the oven precisely, she measured the layers of buttercream with embarrassing accuracy, she caught two small errors in their compote before they became larger ones.

"You would have over-baked it," Ahana said, pulling Mythili's hand gently away from the stove.

"I would have noticed."

"In about four minutes you would have had burnt cake loaf."

Mythili looked at the pot. Looked at Ahana. "...I would have still noticed."

But she stepped back, respecting Ahana's opinions.

Between rounds, they talked. Not in the careful, surface way of two strangers being polite, in the easy, rambling way of people who had somehow already decided they liked each other and were now just filling in the details.

Mythili spoke about her home in Chennai, her husband who meant well but was a disaster in any room containing food preparation, her

twin children who only knew to eat and irritate her. How their elder brother spoils them rotten. She spoke the way people do when they're genuinely comfortable digressing, circling back, laughing at herself, taking up space without apology.

Ahana found herself listening in a way she rarely did. Not waiting for her turn to speak, just listening. Watching. Noticing the way Mythili gestured when she was making a point she found particularly important, the way she'd pause mid-sentence to taste something, the way she said no no no listen when Ahana tried to interrupt a story at the wrong moment.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Ahana started talking too. Really talking.

About Astra-M1 and the eight months that had gone into it. About the press conference and standing in front of cameras and not being allowed to cry until she got home. About how much she loved her work even when, especially when it was hard. About Mayank and Seri and how they'd bullied her into coming here today and she was going to have to call them and admit, grudgingly, that they'd been right.

Mythili listened with the same quality of attention she gave everything, full, unhurried, without interrupting.

"You're remarkable," she said simply, when Ahana finished.

Ahana blinked. "I'm really not, I am very emotional and I almost cried instead of being practical."

"You stood in front of a press conference hours after losing eight months of your work," Mythili said, "explained a technical failure clearly and without falling apart, and then came to a baking workshop the next morning because you still wanted to learn something new." She tilted her head. "That's not nothing, Ahana."

"And being emotional is not bad."

Ahana didn't know what to say to that because maybe she was dying for that kind of validation. So she looked down at the cake and said, "We should probably start the compote for the second round."

Mythili smiled and let her change the subject. That, too, was a kind of grace.

They made the frosting in Ahana's favourite shade of green, because thoughtful Mythili made it happen that way. It looked like an offering to the forest fairy. Very cute.

They won second place.

The announcement came with a small ribbon, a modest round of applause from the other participants, and a basket of ingredients that Mythili immediately began cataloguing with great interest. First place had gone to two retired schoolteachers who had, in Ahana's professional assessment, cheated by clearly having done this before and simply pretending otherwise.

"We were robbed," Ahana said.

"We were absolutely robbed," Mythili agreed serenely, tucking the ribbon into her bag.

They were still laughing about it when the workshop wound down and people began gathering their things. Ahana folded her apron neatly, retied her ribbon around the handle of the basket, and was just beginning to think about the drive home when Mythili turned to her with a particular expression.

Ahana had not seen that expression before. And it is alarming.

"Ahana," Mythili said, "I want to ask you something. And I want you to hear it fully before you respond because I am not asking you this out of impulse."

Ahana went still. "...Okay."

Mythili was quiet for a moment, in the way of someone choosing their words with genuine care.

"I have a son," she said. "He is thirty-two years old. He is composed in a way that sometimes worries me, careful in a way that occasionally frustrates me, and good, genuinely, deeply good in a way that makes me prouder than I know how to say." A pause. "He is also very much alone. Not unhappily, he would tell you. But I am his mother, so I notice the difference between contentment and loneliness, even when he doesn't."

Ahana went very still. Unease creeped into her stomach.

"I've spent a long time thinking about who might be right for him," Mythili continued, her voice quiet but certain. "Not just compatible on paper. Actually right. Someone with warmth and spine in equal measure. Someone who feels things deeply and doesn't apologize for it. Someone who can be serious when it matters and completely ridiculous when it doesn't." She looked at Ahana steadily. "I wasn't expecting to find that person at a baking workshop. But here you are."

The room had emptied almost entirely. Afternoon light lay in long, golden panels across the flour-dusted worktables.

Ahana started. Stopped. "You're asking me if I'd consider.."

"Meeting him, yes. Nothing more than that. Just meeting. I am definitely not forcing you but I would be very happy if you give it a try."

Ahana opened her mouth. Closed it. Several things moved across her face in quick succession, surprise,something almost like longing, hope and then the familiar, reflexive retreat.

She looked down at her hands.

"Aunty..," she said, carefully. "I need to tell you something."

"Tell me beta."

Ahana looked up. Something in her expression had settled into a kind of honesty that cost her, she could feel the cost of it even as she spoke.

Her eyes are turning glassy but are too transparent to notice.

"I'm an orphan," she said bluntly. "I grew up in a children's home. I don't have a family. No parents, no relatives who stayed, no history that anyone would point to and feel good about." She paused. "I'm not... I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me. I've made peace with most of it. But I know what this means when it comes to marriage. I know what mothers look for, what families expect, what the conversation sounds like when they decide someone isn't suitable. I would have been homeless if not for my education. I don't know under what circumstances I was given birth to that they have to abandon me like this."

Her voice was steady, but only just. "I wouldn't want you to be embarrassed when introduce me to people. And I wouldn't want to walk into something where I've already been decided against before I've opened my mouth."

She stopped. The silence was the quiet kind, not the empty kind.

Mythili was watching her with an expression Ahana couldn't immediately read. Then, slowly, she set down her bag. Because this is too sensitive and she needs to deal it carefully. Lovingly.

"Are you finished?" she asked.

Ahana blinked. "I ..yes."

"Good." Mythili folded her hands. "Now I'll speak."

She didn't raise her voice. She didn't perform gentleness, the way some people do when they're trying to seem kind. She was simply direct, in the way of someone who had lived long enough to find softening things around the edges more exhausting than it was worth.

"I am not embarrassed by you," she said.

"I am not going to be embarrassed by you. You are a satellite systems scientist who helped build something extraordinary, who stood in front of the national press and spoke with more composure than most people twice your age, who added the correct amount of vanilla today despite my being pushy about it and who spent this entire morning making me laugh more than I have in recent memory." A pause.

"Your parents not being present in your life is a fact about your history. It is not a fact about your worth. I will not allow you to make it one, and I will not allow my son's home to be a place where you are made to feel that way either."

Ahana's throat tightened.

She hadn't expected that. She'd prepared for patience, maybe. For polite insistence. She had not prepared for someone to simply refuse. Firmly and warmly and without any drama whatsoever, just refuse to see her the way she half-expected to be seen.

"You don't even know me," Ahana said, and her voice was smaller than she meant it to be.

"I've spent 7 hours with you," Mythili said simply. "I know enough to know I'd like to know more. And I think," she added, softer now, "that you know that too."

Ahana looked away. Out the window. The street outside was ordinary and Sunday-quiet, a couple walking a dog, a child on a bicycle, a city going about its afternoon.

"Just meet him," Mythili said. "That's all I'm asking. One conversation. If you don't like him, you walk away. I won't hold it against you and neither will he. I've raised him better than that."

Ahana was quiet for a moment.

Then: "What does he do?"

Mythili's expression shifted, a small, almost imperceptible pause. The kind that meant she'd known this question was coming and had been deciding how to handle it.

"He's an IAS officer," she said.

Ahana stared at her.

"An IAS?" She stopped. Started again. "Aunty. An IAS officer?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand what that means? That's a different world entirely. That's expectations and position and a kind of family and social standing that I..." She shook her head. "I don't belong there. I wouldn't know how to. People like that don't marry people like me, and the ones who try spend years regretting it because the gap doesn't close will be me, it just I will become the furniture, always there, and never belongs.."

"Ahana." Mythili's voice was quiet but it stopped her.

She looked up.

Mythili was looking at her with something that was not pity and not frustration and not impatience. It was something steadier than all of those things.

"I am going to say something to you," she said, "and I want you to actually hear it."

Ahana nodded, barely.

"If, after meeting my son, you find that his character is lacking, that he is unkind, or careless, or the kind of man who makes people feel small then I will walk you to the door myself and not say another word about it."

Her voice was even, certain. "But if you walk away before you've even met him, if you decide, right now, in this room, that you are not worthy of a conversation and then you are not rejecting him." She held Ahana's gaze. "You are rejecting yourself. And I don't think you've come this far in life to do that."

The room was very quiet.

Ahana felt something in her chest not breaking, exactly. More like something that had been held very tightly for a very long time, slowly, reluctantly, beginning to loosen.

She thought about younger Ahana. The one who had learned early and thoroughly that she would have to earn every room she entered, every kindness she received, every belonging she was ever allowed to feel. Who had built herself carefully and competently from the ground up and was proud of what she'd built but who still, in the quieter hours, stood slightly outside things. Watching from just behind the glass.

She thought about the nightmare. The sea. Everyone drifting away.

She thought about Mythili's hand passing the vanilla extract back to her and the easy, certain way she'd said trust me.

"I'm not agreeing to marry anyone," Ahana said finally. Her voice had steadied.

"I'm not asking you to," Mythili said.

"I'm agreeing to a conversation. One. With no expectations and no pressure. "

"Ahana."

"What?"

"Yes or no."

A pause.

"...Yes," Ahana said.

Mythili's face did something then, warm and relieved and just slightly triumphant in a way she didn't entirely bother to hide.

"Good," she said. She picked up her bag, tucked her reading glasses more firmly onto her head and headed toward the door.

Then she paused and looked back.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I think you're going to like him."

"I think," Ahana said, "that I already like his mother."

Mythili laughed, full and real and unbothered and walked out into the Sunday afternoon.

Ahana stood for a moment in the empty workshop, surrounded by the smell of vanilla and the afternoon quiet, holding her small second-place ribbon and the strange, warm, terrifying feeling of something beginning.

She wasn't agreeing to marriage.

She wasn't agreeing to anything, really.

She was agreeing to meet a stranger because his mother had stood in front of her and simply refused to see her as less and that act, so quiet and so complete, had undone something in her that she hadn't known was still tied.

She had not come to this workshop looking for a family.

But somewhere between the vanilla and the second place ribbon and reject him on his character if you want to, not on mine.

She thought she might have found the beginning of one.

——

My Ahana is going to get her very own family soon.

Bye bye.