“Tastes Like Home” - #Manvik story -9th updated

Hey all ,

An attempt on these characters and the cooking background the show started with initially.Posted it on another platform and thought of posting it here .

Chapter 1 - A Hire no one asked for

Vikrant Saluja built Sarson on one rule, and he didn’t bend it for anybody: nobody touches his menu who hasn’t actually bled for Punjabi food. Not read about it. Not done a semester abroad and called it research. He meant people who’d stood over his nani’s chulha at three in the morning during wedding season, who’d gone dhaba to dhaba between Ludhiana and Patiala begging cooks to hand over things they’d never even tell their own sons.

So when the board — his investors, the ones who’d funded the outlet and now apparently thought that bought them a say in everything — told him they were bringing in a new Head Chef without even running it by him first, he was angry before he’d heard a single name.

Then he heard it.

“Mannat Khanna.”

He didn’t know her, not really. Just her reputation, which somehow made it worse. Le Cordon Bleu. A couple years in some Michelin place in London where she must have deconstructed butter chicken served in a martini glass with one sad coriander leaf balanced on top like it was about to perform surgery. He’d seen her name once in a food magazine, under a headline calling her “the chef reinventing Punjab for the global palate,” and he’d genuinely wanted to throw the magazine across the room.

Punjab didn’t need reinventing, he believed

“She’s not a fit,” he told the board flatly, in the meeting they’d technically called to “inform” him, not to ask his opinion. “She’ll bring all that nonsense in here and call it elevation. I built this place on my dadi’s recipes. I’m not just handing it over to someone who thinks sarson da saag needs a quenelle.”

Rajeev Malhotra — loudest guy on the board, also happened to write the biggest checks — just smiled the smile of a man whose mind was already made up. “Vikrant. Her numbers in London were extraordinary. She’s moving back to India, family reasons, we didn’t ask, and she wants Chandigarh specifically. We are not turning away a chef like that because you’ve decided, sight unseen, that she’s going to insult your dadi’s saag.”

“I’ve seen enough, Rajeev .

“You’ve seen a magazine spread.”

He didn’t have an answer for that, which somehow made him angrier.

“She starts Monday,” Rajeev said. “Co-head chef, equal say in the kitchen. That’s the deal, and honestly it’s a good one — for you and for Sarson. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

He made it harder for about four days anyway. Argued, sulked, even called his mother to complain — which backfired completely, who wanted to meet the Punjabi kudi.

By Friday he’d lost. Board had voted. Mannat Khanna was Sarson’s new co-head chef starting Monday, and there was nothing left to do but show up and decide how badly he wanted to behave about it.

What he didn’t know — what nobody bothered telling him, was that Mannat already knew exactly how this was going to go.

Yikes and done

Chapter 2 :” We’ll see “

Mannat Khanna heard about it. Heard it straight from Rajeev, actually, over a phone call she’d taken standing in her empty London flat, packing boxes stacked around her feet . He hadn’t meant he’d let it slip. One board member had pushed back. Hard.

“Let me guess,” she’d said, already smiling into the phone. “The chef.”

“Vikrant’s protective of the place. It’s not personal.”

It was extremely personal. She knew that before she’d even hung up, but she looked him up anyway,Found his profile - three years of interviews where he used the word authentic like it was a knife he kept sharpening on every journalist who came near him. Authentic Punjabi food doesn’t need a passport stamp to prove itself. I didn’t go to Paris to learn how to cook food my grandmother already perfected. There’d been a photo with that one too — him mid-rant, beard trimmed into a precise, deliberate shape. She’d looked at the photo longer than she needed to.

Somewhere over the Arabian Sea, on the flight home, she made a decision. She wasn’t going to bring any of it up. Not the call, not the vote, not his objection. She would just be good. Undeniably, repeatedly good.

Monday morning, Sarson’s kitchen smelled like cumin toasting and somebody’s barely-contained resentment, and honestly the second smell was easier to locate than the first.

Vikrant was at the tandoor when she walked in, and her first thought — gone almost before she’d finished having it — was that the photo had undersold him, infuriatingly. He had a pair of eyes that didn’t match the rest of him at all, wide and almost startled-looking, the kind of eyes you’d expect on a kid asking why the sky was blue ..

He’d been ready for her. He’d spent four days being ready for her, rehearsing some version of cold and brief that he could deploy and then go back to his coals and not think about again. He looked up once, fully prepared to deliver it.

And then, somehow, he forgot to.

He couldn’t have said exactly when the anger slipped out of his hands, only that it did, quietly, the way a held breath leaves you before you’ve decided to let it go. He told himself it was nothing — just surprise, just the gap between the magazine photo and the actual woman standing in his kitchen, glasses on, dupatta knotted.He almost let himself think she looked like home — caught it, corrected: no, she’d put butter chicken in a teacup like that was normal, like elegance and chaos could share a plate.

Then she set her knife roll down, unzipped it without ceremony, and started warming up at the board next to him — testing the give of the dough, checking the heat of his tandoor with the back of her hand like she’d done it a thousand times in a thousand other kitchens, picking up a blade and falling into a chop so fast and so clean it barely looked like effort. Low grip near the heel, knuckles loose, wrist doing all the real work while her fingers just guided — and he found himself watching the rhythm of it instead of finding fault with it, which had been the entire plan. There was no hesitation in her hands at all, no performance for an audience, just the unhurried certainty He recognized it the way you recognize your own handwriting in someone else’s notebook. That was the worst part — not that she was good, he could have managed her being merely good — but that she was good in the specific way that only comes from doing something until your hands stop asking your brain for permission. He knew that kind of good.

“Chef Saluja,” she said, not even looking up from the board, and there it was — his name in her mouth, flat and businesslike, exactly the right amount of nothing in it, and it landed on him like a hand on the shoulder of someone standing too close to a ledge.

He blinked. Came back into his own body like he’d been somewhere else entirely. “Ms. Mannat.” His voice came out perfectly level, perfectly cold, the line he’d rehearsed for four days finally arriving, four seconds too late to mean anything.

She felt something in her ease, just slightly, at that — not Chef Khanna, braced for a fight, but Ms. Mannat, softer without being smaller, and which happened to be exactly what she preferred, though she hadn’t told him that and couldn’t imagine he’d guessed it. She decided not to read too much into it.

“Staff meeting’s at eleven,” he went on, recovering his footing word by word. “Until then, the pass is yours to learn. We don’t do tweezer plating here. Hope that’s not a problem.”

“I’ve plated a lot of things with my hands, Chef. I’ll manage.”

She, for her part, had clocked the way he held his own knife at the board beside the tandoor — high on the handle, knuckles loose, an economy of motion no culinary school taught because it couldn’t be taught, only earned, hour after hour, the kind of grip that comes from cutting onions before you were old enough to be trusted near a stove. She filed that away too, the same way she’d filed his face, under things she would not be thinking about again, and then thought about it again anyway, briefly, before setting her jaw and getting to work.

“We’ll see,” he said, and turned back to his coals — too fast, the way you turn away from something you’ve been caught staring at.

We’ll see, she thought, tying her apron with more force than the knot strictly required. Yes. We will.

Please do continue...really eager for the next parts...

Another world of ManVik..

😊

@Mona_HappyLife- Here you go :)

Chapter 3: "Numbers Don't Lie, Chef"

For three weeks, they orbited each other and called it coexistence.

Mannat took the morning prep shift on the far end of the kitchen, near the walk-in, where the light was better, and nobody could read her face while she worked. Vikrant kept to his tandoor and his coals like a man guarding a border. They split the pass without ever discussing it — an unspoken treaty drawn in flour and turmeric —

She'd expected him to be exactly what the interviews promised: a purist with a chip on his shoulder. She'd built him in her head before she'd ever met him — over-confident, all instinct and no infrastructure, a man who could sear a fish four ways but couldn't tell you what Sarson's food cost margin looked like on a Tuesday in February.

So when the supplier invoices started landing on her desk pre-negotiated, she assumed it was the general manager. When the wastage numbers came in lower than any kitchen she'd ever audited, It took her four days of actually reading the paperwork — really reading it, not skimming it with the assumption already loaded — to realize the handwriting on the margin notes was his. Tight, fast, oddly elegant. The kind of handwriting that belonged to someone who'd done the math himself, at midnight, after service, because he didn't trust anyone else to.

She found him in the office on a Thursday, hunched over a laptop, and for once he wasn't wearing his chef's whites.

His office was nothing like the rest of the building.

Where the kitchen ran hot and loud and lived-in, this room was a held breath. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall let in flat, clean daylight with no curtain to soften it. The desk was a single slab of pale oak, bare except for the laptop,The walls were white, unbroken except for one black-and-white photograph in a thin steel frame — an older woman in a kitchen doorway, caught mid-laugh — and a single shelf holding maybe a dozen books, spines aligned, no two touching. A pale grey sofa sat against the far wall, untouched, present only because an office was supposed to have one.

It didn't look like a chef's office. It looked like the office of a man who had decided, early and on purpose, that no one walking in here would ever mistake him for someone who couldn't run a company.

Mannat took it in before she took him in, which was its own kind of tell.

He'd swapped his chef's whites for a fitted olive shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm, top button undone like he hadn't quite decided whether this was a meeting or a meal. No apron. No flour ghosted into the seams. Just him, leaning back slightly in the chair, one hand dragging through his hair like he'd been at it for hours, the line of his jaw doing something unfair under the flat daylight. He looked up when she came in, and there was a beat where she simply failed to say anything, because the eyes were the same — wide, startled, a little too honest for his own good — but everything else about him had quietly rearranged itself into someone she hadn't budgeted for.

"You have a meeting," she said. Not a question. A correction to her own assumptions, disguised as one.

"Investor call. London office wants quarterly numbers before they wire the next tranche." He didn't look up from the screen. "Why, did you think I just lit incense and vibed my way into this . Hmm?"

"I thought you had a manager for this."

"I am the manager for this, Ms Mannat." Now he looked up, and he tipped his head slightly, studying her the way he studied a plate before it left the pass. "I started Sarson with a personal loan and my dadi's bangle, Ms. Mannat. The tandoor came later."

She glanced around the office again — the squared invoices, the photograph in its thin steel frame, the absence of anything performative. "And the investors? London?"

Something shifted in his face, small and quick, there and gone. "They don't want a partner. They want a pipeline." He said it without heat, which somehow made it land harder. "A name they can put on a second location, a third, a menu they can shrink to fit a franchise model. They keep using the word scalable like it's a compliment." He closed the laptop halfway, just enough to look at her properly. "Sarson works because I don't let go of it. The day I do, it stops being Sarson and starts being a logo."

For the first time since she'd arrived, she understood — not the chef, not the brand, but the want underneath it. He wasn't protecting a recipe. He was protecting the only ground he'd ever owned outright,. And she was standing in the middle of that ground holding a clipboard from the very kind of corporation he'd spent years keeping at arm's length.

The bangle, the lease, the refused capital — none of it was stubbornness. It was a man standing in a doorway he'd built with his own hands, watching people try to walk through it without taking their shoes off.

It made her feel, suddenly and uncomfortably, like an outsider in a building she had every official right to be in. Unsafe, almost — the specific unsafety of being the wrong kind of person in the right room.

She sat down across from him without being asked, the way she did most things.

It was time to come clean.

Chef Saluja , I need to mention something—"

His phone buzzed against the desk, screen lighting up between them.

He glanced down at it, then back at her, something flickering across his face she couldn't quite name. "Hold that thought,Ms Mannat" he said, already reaching for it. "Sorry — I have to take this and step out "

Her own phone buzzed a second later. She pulled it out under the desk, glanced at the screen, and felt her stomach drop in a way that had nothing to do with Vikrant at all.

Chapter 4 : Confidently Incorrect

He'd been keeping his own ledger on her, too, the past three weeks — and getting it just as wrong.

He'd expected Mannat to be exactly what her profiles promised: a chef who'd traded her knife for a balance sheet, but in glasses. He'd built her in his head before he'd ever really watched her cook — composed, photogenic, allergic to mess, but in glasses and kurthis. He'd met a hundred chefs like that.

So when she started disappearing into the kitchen an hour before staff meal, he assumed. It took him four days of actually walking past that corner of the kitchen, really looking instead of assuming

He found her there on a Wednesday, elbow-deep in a pot of greens.

The corner she'd claimed wasn't dressed for an audience. Just a deggi, a battered wooden ghotni that had clearly outlived several kitchens, and a cutting board with mustard greens torn by hand instead of sliced — the kind of mess that never made it onto Sarson's Instagram, and he hoped never.

Vikrant took it in before he took her in.

She hadn't noticed him yet, or had noticed and decided it didn't change anything. Her sleeves were pushed up. Her hands moved without her watching them, the way his did at the tandoor when he stopped thinking and let twenty years take over. She reached for the bathua, paused, rubbed a leaf between two fingers like she was asking it a question, then added it a beat later than he expected, correcting herself by something other than a recipe.

"You're staring at my cooking “she said, without turning around.

“You are right “, Ms Mannat . Won’t you do the same if some one is elbow deep in greens while talking to the pot ?

She didn't look up from the pot. "Mustard first. Then spinach. Bathua lasts because it wilts fastest, and you don't want it going to mush before the rest of it catches up."

No spoon, Ms Mannat?

Spoon doesn't break the fiber right. You'd taste the difference. Most people wouldn't notice. You would, which is the only reason I'm telling you instead of letting you think I just like getting my hands dirty for the aesthetic and for a camera ."

He'd been so sure of the story he'd built about her — That story had been quietly dissolving for three weeks, watching her work maize flour into roti dough with the heel of her palm, unhurried, as she had nowhere else on earth to be, he understood he'd had the whole equation backward.

"Why not the machine?" he said. Not really a question. A man checking his own assumptions, disguised as one.

"Because this roti has to hold up against that saag, and a machine doesn't know what shape it's holding against. My hand knows. You feel when the dough stops fighting you." She glanced at him, the closest thing to eye contact she'd offered all night.

He was starting to understand he'd been asking the wrong question for three weeks — which of her was real, the magazine one or the kitchen floor, the negotiator or the cost sheet expert,the one with stars and foam

He didn't ask it outright. He didn't need to. It was sitting right there on his face.

She caught it anyway, and laughed — short, unguarded, nothing like the polished sound that made it into any profile of her he'd ever read. Her glasses had slipped down her nose somewhere between the bathua and the roti dough, and she pushed them back up with the back of her wrist, since both hands were dusted in flour, leaving the faintest white streak near her temple. Her chef's hat had tipped slightly to one side and she hadn't noticed, or didn't care.

"You're trying to figure out which one of me is the real one." She held up her hands, dusted with flour, like evidence. "Same two hands, Chef Saluja. I learned to use them one way in a hotel kitchen in Lyon, and another way, standing at my mother's stove before that. Doesn't make either one less mine. And it's not like one cancels the other out — it helps. Knowing what a cost sheet looks like makes me a better cook. Knowing what a kitchen actually needs makes me better at the company."

She covered the deggi, turned the heat down to almost nothing, content to let it finish the way it was always going to finish, whether he understood it yet or not. "Running a company took training. So did this. And the two of them talk to each other more than people think."

He understood - Two ledgers, kept in two different rooms of the same building, both quietly proving the same thing: nobody in that kitchen was just one version of themselves, no matter which version the other had been bracing.

“Yes, Chef Saluja —” She stood there, hands still dusted white, managing her hair again. She blew upward at it — a sharp little puff through pursed lips — and it hung in the air for half a second, then dropped right back into place, unimpressed by her efforts

Do not ‘ he told himself, with the firm internal tone of a man issuing a company-wide memo to an audience of exactly one. Do not fall for the woman with flour on her face blowing hair out of her eyes like it’s a tactical operation.

DO NOT.

~Lex..

Really nice. Please do continue and tag if possible 🙏

Been a while since someone wrote a fanfic on ManVik ♥️

The old ManVik days...

🤩

Chapter 6 : Hold That Thought

He took the call in the corridor outside his office, one hand braced against the wall like the wall owed him an answer.

“We need the franchise deck finalized by Friday,” the voice on the other end said — not Rajeev this time, but someone from London he’d spoken to exactly twice and disliked about model

“Sarson isn’t a model. It’s a kitchen.”

“It’s whatever you make it, Vikrant. Friday.” The line went dead before he could say anything.

He stood there a second longer and then went back into the office to finish whatever it was Ms. Mannat had been about to say.

She wasn’t there.

Her chair was empty, pushed back at an angle that suggested she hadn’t stood up so much as gotten up fast, and dashed.

He found her by the loading dock behind the kitchen.She had her back to him, phone pressed to her ear, one hand pressed flat against the brick wall like she needed it to hold her up.

“How bad,” she was saying. A pause. “Is he breathing alright? Mumma , Is he breathing alright.” Another pause, longer. “Don’t move him. I’m coming.”

She hung up and didn’t move for a second, just stood there with her hand still on the wall, like the loading dock had simply stopped including her in whatever else was happening in the building.

“Ms. Mannat.”

She turned, and for the first time since he’d met her, there was nothing composed about her face at all.

“My papa ,” she said, because apparently there wasn’t room left in her for anything but the truth, not right now. “His heart. It’s happened before. I have to go.”

She stopped, visibly doing the math on her own panic and not liking the answer. “I don’t actually know yet. I need to call ahead.”

“I’ll drive.”

“You have a franchise deck due Friday and an investor call you haven’t told me about yet, judging by your face just now in the corridor.”

“I have Friday. You have right now.” He was already walking toward the lot, not looking back to see if she was following, the same certainty in his stride. Get in the car, Ms. Mannat.”

She got in.

It was such a small thing, climbing into a passenger seat instead of driving herself, and it undid something in her that she hadn’t expected it to. She carried the weight and responsibilities of a lot of things and has always been in the driver seat for some time now.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said, somewhere past the second red light, watching the city go by too fast and not fast enough.

“I know.” He kept his eyes on the road.“Let’s see if it works anyway.”

She was quiet and it had started to drizzle a bit “There’s something I should have told you,” she said, eyes still on the window. “Weeks ago. Before any of this.”

“Now’s not the time, Ms. Mannat.”

“It’s exactly the time. I don’t know what’s waiting at that hospital and I don’t want this sitting between us if it turns out to be bad.” A breath. “I know you never wanted me here. I know you argued against my hire at the board meeting, before I’d so much as landed in Chandigarh. I wanted my work to be the answer to that — not a conversation, not an apology , just doing the job well enough that the objection stopped mattering. I wasn’t going to tell you I knew. I was going to let the food and the spreadsheets do it for me.”

He went very still in a way that had nothing to do with the wet road .

“How,” he said, and there was no dryness left in it

Rajeev has never once in his life kept a secret on purpose, and he let it slip on a call the week before I flew back — not maliciously- , he probably didn’t even register he was saying it. I looked you up after. Every interview, every piece anyone had written about Sarson. And then I decided the smartest thing I could do with that information was nothing at all.” She watched something move behind his face.

“I didn’t know you knew.” A short, low exhale. “I’d assumed, if anything, that you simply hadn’t found out yet. I was bracing for the day you did.” But , Why Sarson ?

It was never sarson ,but Chandigarh specifically, out of every posting I could have asked for.” She kept her eyes on the windscreen a moment longer before she let herself say it. “My father’s heart had already failed him once, eight months before this. I was in London when it happened, finding out over a phone call instead of standing in the room, and I promised myself I wasn’t doing that twice. So I asked head office for anything within reach of his house — not Sarson specifically, just close, four streets if I could manage it, so that whatever happened next, I could actually be there for it instead of reading about it from somewhere else. Sarson was simply the file that happened to say Chandigarh on it when I went looking. I came home for him, Vikrant. Long before I knew anything about you, or your dadi’s recipes, or any of this .

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just drove, the city sliding past the windows in that same too-fast, not-fast-enough rhythm.

“There’s more, and it isn’t about you, not directly, but it’s mine to give you while I’m giving you anything at all.” She kept her eyes forward, on the windscreen, “Rajeev doesn’t know this part. Nobody at Sarson does. Before I ever set foot in your kitchen to cook , my company offered me a clause to sign. If I came to Chandigarh and steered Sarson toward the franchise model — toward exactly the kind of three-location deck London is asking you for right now — there were perks attached. Real ones. Not a relocation package, not anywhere — that was never what I wanted, and they knew it by then. What they offered instead was security. A settlement large enough that I wouldn’t have to start over again, anywhere, ever — no more new cities, no more building a life from the ground up only to have it pulled out from under me the moment a company decided I’d served my purpose. A promotion track I’d been chasing for two years, locked in, permanent, the whole machinery of being rewarded for delivering the right answer instead of the true one. And underneath that clause, in case the franchise pitch needed a villain to make the hero story land, there was room to write Sarson up as something smaller and shakier than it actually is. Not fabricated outright. Just — shaded. Enough doubt in the right places to make the acquisition look like a rescue.”

“And you didn’t sign it.”

“I didn’t sign it. I came here and I looked at this place through Sarson’s eyes and yours, not London’s, and I wrote down the absolute truth instead — every number as it actually stood, every strength you’d actually earned, nothing shaded either direction. I sent it up through compliance directly, so it couldn’t be softened on the way to whoever needed it softened.” She exhaled, and some of the careful flatness in her voice finally gave way at the edges. “I lost it. The security, gone. The promotion, gone, or at least quietly shelved somewhere I’ll never get a straight answer about. I’m right back to where I’ve always been — building something new, from the beginning, with no guarantee any of it holds. I’m fairly sure I lost some goodwill too, the kind I won’t be able to measure until I need it and it isn’t there.”

He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice had a different weight to it .His eyes were as earnest as they could be, and he said, with the absolute truth in his voice, “I know you didn’t sign , a paper that would cost sarson — but not the details on what you lost, or what was asked of you.

“Not from you, and not from Rajeev — he genuinely doesn’t know, you’re right about that. I heard it from a supplier who wasn’t sure , but was sure that there is more to this. .

“You let me think I was confessing something you didn’t already know.”

For what it’s worth, Ms. Mannat — I’m sorry. But I owe you the honest version of why I objected, not just the polite one. I told myself it was about protecting the food — the recipes, the techniques, the actual taste of things my dadi spent forty years getting right by hand, no shortcuts, no substitutions. That part was true enough. But underneath it, if I’m being honest with both of us, I was scared in a way that had nothing to do with strategy at all. I’d seen what happens to a dish the moment somebody decides it needs reinventing for a wider audience — how fast the original disappears underneath the version that photographs better, sells better, travels better. I was terrified that the day someone fluent in fusion walked through my kitchen, until one day it wouldn’t taste like anything she’d ever made at all, I was fighting with the whole world , and I felt like they have added another person to it .I judged you before I’d met you because I was protecting something and that fear had nothing to do with who you actually turned out to be.”

“You were scared of losing your dadi’s food, so you decided I was the threat before I’d said a single word in that room.” She didn’t say it gently. There was an edge in it, sharper than anything she’d let herself show him before, three weeks of careful professionalism and control finally cracking open in a moving car on the way to a hospital. “Do you understand what that cost me, Vikrant? I walked into your kitchen already having to prove I wasn’t going to touch the one thing that had no intention of destroying at all on a daily basis .

“I am sor’

“You don’t get to just say I know and have that be the end of it.” Her voice wasn’t loud, but it had weight to it now, the kind that came from finally setting something down she’d been carrying silently. “I lost security and home over refusing to lie about a restaurant I’d never even cooked in. I wasn’t going to lie about this one either, and I needed you to actually hear that I fought for the right to be judged on the work, not on a fear about your dadi’s saag that had nothing to do with me at all.”

“I hear it.” He said it without flinching, without reaching for anything to soften it. “I’m not asking you to forgive the fear retroactively, or to pretend it didn’t cost you something real. I’m telling you I see it now, all the way through, and I’m not going to make you carry that weight alone again.”

He held her gaze a moment longer, the anger in her not gone but no longer alone in the room with everything else she was feeling. “I read you wrong once the actual person walked into my kitchen,” he went on quietly, “and I let it sit longer than I should have before admitting that to myself, let alone to you. I was never unsure of your integrity. And now I am just ashamed of making you feel the way you felt because of me and my fears .

He pulled up to the entrance and had her door open before she’d finished unbuckling, and for once she let him.

“Go,” he said. “I’ll park and find you.”

She went.

He found a spot, sat there a moment with both hands still on the wheel, and allowed himself, finally, the thing he’d been issuing internal memos against since a kitchen corner and a pot of greens three weeks ago. He was not going to be able to file this one away under things I will not be thinking about again. He was fairly certain that she will never carry such weight ever again as long as he is allowed to be around .

Friday’s deck could wait an hour. London could wait an hour. He got out of the car and went to go find her, because that, it turned out, was the only ledger he actually cared about getting right.

~Lex

Chapter 7: Margins of Trust

Nobody at Sarson ever saw the hours Mannat actually put into the franchise pitch, because she’d made sure of it.

The numbers London would actually respect didn’t live in any deck. They lived in Vikrant’s own ledgers — the real ones, handwritten in the margins half the time, years of actual cost and actual margin that no spreadsheet anywhere had ever been allowed to touch. He kept them in a drawer he didn’t lock because nobody had ever tried hard enough to need it locked; not Rajeev, not the accountant who came twice a year, not anyone who’d worked beside him for a decade. He had never once let another person sit with those books and ask questions of them.

He put them in front of Mannat without being asked.

She didn’t reach for them right away, and when she finally did, she looked up at him first, some unspoken question in her face about whether he understood what he was actually handing over. He did. He pulled out the chair across from her instead of answering, and sat, and watched her open the first ledger to a page he could have recited from memory, and said nothing at all.

He stayed quiet through all of it ,through her finding a costing error from two years back that he’d caught ,through her circling a margin on the saag that made no sense until she asked him about a supplier he’d since stopped using, through hours of her hands moving through pages that held every quiet failure and stubborn success of his entire working life. He didn’t explain himself to her, the way he might have once needed to explain himself to anyone who got this close to the actual machinery of Sarson. He simply let her see it.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t have built the deck’s numbers himself. He could have, eventually, the long way, the way he did everything — alone, slowly, trusting nothing he hadn’t checked three times. He stayed silent because he understood, with a clarity that surprised even him, exactly what it meant that he was letting someone else hold the books at all. It meant something had already shifted that he hadn’t said out loud yet. It meant he trusted her with the one thing he’d never trusted anyone with, not because he had no other choice, but because for the first time, he wanted to and wanted her to know it

She worked the deck after service, sitting at the same corner table Vikrant used for his own ledgers once the dining room had emptied out not because anyone had asked her but because she’d watched him fight for this kitchen and decided somewhere along the way that his winning mattered to her and Sarson . She built the numbers London would actually respect: real unit economics, real margin projections.She redid the financial model more times than she ever admitted to him, some nights past midnight.

He didn’t say anything about it directly — that wasn’t how either of them did the things - but he started leaving a plate of whatever the staff meal had been on her desk before he locked up, every single night, without comment, and she started eating it without comment too

Her father was discharged on a Tuesday, the doctor signing off with the particular brisk relief of someone who got to deliver good news for once. Vikrant drove to the hospital without being asked, and drove them both home after, and that was the first thing anyone in the house seemed to notice.

No one said a word .They didn’t have to.

~Lex

Thanks for the comments and likes

I been trying to wrap this story up for a while now, but it just refuses to end haha. So the next two updates will be the final two chapters. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve genuinely loved writing this one, and going back to read it has been just as much fun. Hope you guys enjoy the ending as much as I did writing .

Chapter 8 : Mine to Know

London said yes on a Thursday.The call ran 60 mins , most of it the kind of language Vikrant resented — except this time it arrived wrapped around an idea he recognized, because he and Mannat had built it themselves at the pass after hours. New locations would earn their place the way a cook earns a knife: through apprenticeship first, fusion only after. Sarson stayed his. Nobody was buying a logo. They were buying a method, and the method came with him standing at the center of it, not stepping aside from it.

When the partner from London finally said the word approved, Vikrant sat in his own office in a silence so complete he could hear the tandoor cooling two floors down.

“You did it,” Mannat said. She’d been in the room for all 60 mins , arms crossed, watching him fight for his own kitchen with the same certainty “You actually did it. On your terms.”

“We did it.” He said it simply, the way he said most true things, without performance and “You know that.”

“I know what I contributed. I’m asking what it felt like to get all of it.”

He thought about that longer than the question probably deserved. “Strange,” he admitted. “I spent so long bracing to lose something that I didn’t have a plan ready for keeping it. I’m still finding my feet.”

The partner came back on the line before Vikrant could sit any longer in that admission, all easy warmth now that the hard part was behind them, the way investors always turned generous the moment a thing had already proven itself without their help. There would be a package, he said. Not just confirmation of terms ;a recognition bonus, substantial, the kind of number that changed which floor a man could afford to live on. And alongside it, a choice: Vikrant could take a formal seat shaping the expansion’s terms going forward, a hand on every future contract before it reached a signature, or he could take the payout outright and let the lawyers handle the rest from a comfortable distance.

“Both have value,” the partner said, with the practiced patience of someone who already knew which one looked better on paper. “Take your time deciding.”

Mannat had already left the room by then, called away to sign for a delivery, gone before the conversation turned to anything that wasn’t strictly business. Vikrant didn’t ask her to stay. Some decisions, he’d learned, were only honest if nobody watched you make them.

He didn’t take very much time at all.

“I’ll take the seat,” he said. “But I want to restructure what comes with it before I sign anything.”

There was a pause on the line, the particular silence of someone recalculating a man they’d thought they already understood.

“Restructure how ?

“The personal payout. I want it redirected — not to me. There’s a property on the better end of Sector 26, the one that’s been sitting empty for months because nobody local could make the numbers work without backing. I want the settlement and the bonus both rolled into securing that lease, fully fitted, fully licensed — the lease and the license under her name from day one, so whoever runs it owes the bank and the landlord nothing. The property and the building itself, I’ll hold personally until they are in a position to take that on too.” He said it the way he said most decisions that had already been made somewhere private, long before anyone else heard about them. “And I want it opened under a name that isn’t mine.”

“Whose name, then?”

“Mine to know. Yours to draft the paperwork around, once I tell you.” He didn’t elaborate further, because the only person who needed to understand the reasoning wasn’t on the call. He already knew exactly how this would have to be offered, because he already knew exactly who he was offering it to. Mannat had refused a fortune once because taking it would have meant lying. She wasn’t going to accept a building she hadn’t earned just because it arrived wrapped in good intentions. If this was going to work at all, it couldn’t be a gift. It had to be something she could stand inside of and still call her own, on terms she chose, not terms handed to her.

“Send the paperwork,” Vikrant said. “We’ll finalize the redirection by end of week. I’ll handle how it’s presented on my end.”

He ended the call before anyone could ask him to explain further.

~ Lex

This is so good. Would like to read more. But I understand your situation