“Ray-man!” A skinny man rushed up to Ray, and the two men gave each other a complicated shoulder slap that turned into a half hug. They said something to each other in a language Bindu hadn’t heard before. It sounded so foreign that she wondered if they’d made it up. Then again, all languages sounded made up when they were foreign to you.
Ray introduced the man as the chef-owner of the restaurant.
“Beautiful,” the chef-owner said, taking Bindu’s hand and trying to bring it to his lips before Bindu realized what he was doing and tugged it away gently. They barely knew each other, and this wasn’t Regency England. Plus, the fear for Earth’s impending doom was still trembling in Bindu’s belly.
Ray’s friend—she’d missed his name in the kerfuffle over the Regency hand kiss—led them to a dark corner inside the restaurant, which was decorated to feel like a tunnel burrowed into the earth.
Not the most appetizing choice, but they had bigger things to worry about.
“I’m not sure I can eat after our conversation,” she said to Ray as his friend left with a promise to send out a meal that was going to change their lives.
Ray laughed with the kind of fondness she’d imagined on Rajendra’s face at Cullie’s birth. Only instead of being jointly responsible for the creation of a perfect grandchild, this was being jointly horrified at the future.
“You’re going to love this place.” With the tip of his finger, he touched her breastbone. “This pain you’re experiencing, this discomfort, that’s the love in your heart for humanity. In another half hour, you’re going to feel so much more at ease, trust me. This restaurant isn’t called Taking Earth Back for nothing.”
She hadn’t noticed the name of the restaurant. But she liked it. It made her think of vegetable patches in backyards and fish from nets dragged out of the sea mere feet from the markets where they were sold. How idyllic Goa had been, and all she’d wanted was to break free from it.
“It’s a nice name,” she said. “Is it seafood?” Even though a surprise cuisine had sounded exciting, she wasn’t comfortable with people ordering for her. It reminded her of her childhood, when her aie put the leftover fish and vegetables on her plate after feeding her father.
For all the things Rajendra had controlled in their marriage, he’d gladly and gratefully eaten everything Bindu put on the table. It had been a lot of great food Bindu worked hard at, but he’d acknowledged and appreciated that, and that was something.
“Eating seafood is desecrating the oceans.” Ray’s eyes flashed with an unholy rage that changed the air between them somewhat.
Before she could respond, a waiter brought out huge white plates and placed them on the table. Each plate had what looked like the tiniest gray dumpling at the center, drizzled with perfect lines of a very green sauce.
Ray popped it in his mouth, and his eyelids dropped with appreciation.
“What is it?” Bindu asked, bringing the dumpling to her mouth and trying to be discreet about smelling it.
“It’s a rice cake.”
She popped it into her mouth. Hmm. It tasted like . . . well, like chewing on a mushy earthen pot.
“What kind of rice?” These days they ground all sorts of things up—or “riced” them—and called it rice.
“Do you want to take a guess?”
Clay? she wanted to say, but she was too busy trying to swallow, which wasn’t quite as easy to do as it should have been.
Before he could answer, another big white plate showed up. This time the tiniest bowl sat at the center, filled with a bright-yellow soup dotted with what looked like sesame seeds.
Bindu’s cell phone vibrated, and she looked at it. Weaselly Leslie. Again. The man was relentless. What would it take for him to see that she had no interest in speaking to him?
Ray picked up the yellow soup and downed it in one gulp. It had been hours since Bindu had eaten, and that was a long walk. That rice cake wasn’t exactly making her want to take a chance on this soup. She picked it up and tried to sip it, but the consistency was gelatinous, and the entire cold glob slid into her mouth.
“Nobody poaches crickets quite as well as Amey,” Ray said.
The words registered in Bindu’s brain exactly as the soup passed down her throat. Her stomach somersaulted.
“Isn’t it amazing? If people knew that insects could taste like this, so much of the bias would be gone.”
The gloppy soup wobbled up her gullet.
“What’s wrong?” Ray reached out and took her hand.
Her phone rang just as bile rushed into her mouth, trying to bring the soup with it. Swallowing it down was the hardest thing she’d done. She yanked her hand away and pointed at the plate. “What did I just eat?”
“Wasn’t it great?” Ray said.
Actually, it had been awful. “What kind of restaurant is this?” She looked at the menu and realized belatedly that the letters were . . . oh dear Lord . . . worms.
“Amey is trying to reverse the stigma on eating insects. It’s the future of food. The only way to solve the—”
The phone rang again. Bindu answered it with a desperate jab at her screen.
“Hello,” she croaked. “Oh my God, where are you? No! This is the first time my phone rang. I swear I’m not ignoring you.”
“Okay,” Leslie’s confused voice said at the other end.
The waiter brought out another giant white plate, and Bindu pushed her chair back, the scrape of the legs loud against the slate floor.
“Oh, you’re here? Already? I didn’t think we were meeting until much later,” she said into the phone, voice on the verge of tears.
“Bindu?” Leslie said at the other end, sounding concerned. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Ray gave the plates the waiter put down on their table a loving look. It looked like paella, but instead of shrimp there were curly-tailed bugs and chunks of something brown.
The bile Bindu had swallowed made another resurgence in her mouth. “Fine. Fine. I’m sorry. I should have paid attention. I’ll meet you outside. Don’t be angry.”
“You can’t leave,” Ray said. “This is Amey’s pièce de résistance.”
“Just tell me where you are.” On the phone Leslie’s concern had turned to alarm. She heard him moving around. The need to throw up was so strong now, she grabbed her handbag. Moving helped.
Babbling on the phone helped. “Oh gosh, yes. I’m done here, don’t worry. Seriously. I didn’t realize I double-booked lunch. It’s on Marco Island beach. I’m not that far.”
Leslie was saying something, Ray was saying something. The chef had come out and was saying something, but all Bindu could think about was getting away from the room where she’d swallowed bugs and emptying her guts.
The next thing she knew she was crouched over the commode of the impossibly tiny restroom, bringing up her lunch. By the time she could stand again, there was nothing left inside her. If she let her brain think about it, insects crawled up her throat.
“You okay?” Ray was knocking on the restroom door.
When she went back out, he had the gall to look disapproving. She had the unholy urge to push past him and run. So she did. She made her way through the dark restaurant that now smelled like the moist dirt of worm hills. The thought made her stomach lurch again.