Akash Tripathi
1
The salty breeze of the Arabian Sea drifted through Girgaon Chowpatty, curling around sizzling pans and the spicy perfume of crushed coriander and garlic chutney. Tara Joshi stood behind her grandfather’s chaat stall, apron tied around her waist, expertly arranging plates of sev puri with the finesse only years of helping at the stall could teach. The sky had turned a buttery orange, and the usual crowd of couples, college kids, and beach walkers had begun to gather around the row of food carts. Dattatray Joshi—Dada to everyone—stood beside her, his wrinkled hands moving steadily, his voice warm and practiced. Tara had just returned from Pune after dropping out of culinary school—a decision she hadn’t yet shared with Dada. She thought of the unfinished emails, the stern messages from her professor, and pushed the guilt aside. Here, amid the clang of ladles and smell of spicy potatoes, she felt something close to peace.
Just as Tara handed a plate to a young boy licking his fingers in anticipation, a small hush fell over the crowd. A silver SUV pulled up by the promenade, and out stepped a man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, sunglasses perched on his nose even as dusk approached. Prakash Bendre—the legendary food critic known for both his brutal reviews and expensive taste. Murmurs rustled through the crowd like a gust of wind. What was he doing at a humble chaat stall like Joshi’s? Dada wiped his hands on his gamcha, confused but gracious, while Tara stiffened. Bendre strode forward with the confidence of someone used to being feared, his assistant trailing behind. “One plate of your best sev puri,” he said, voice rich with sarcasm. Tara bristled but said nothing, arranging the plate with extra care. Bendre took the first bite, chewed, and paused—not with disgust, but with curiosity. He raised a brow, took another bite, and said nothing. The crowd leaned in. Then, without warning, he staggered slightly, coughed, and clutched his throat. Plates clattered. A woman screamed. Within seconds, Prakash Bendre collapsed to the ground, lifeless.
The sirens wailed within minutes. Someone had already called the police, and the ambulance lights bathed the stall in flickering blue. Dada stood still, eyes wide with disbelief as Inspector Ameya Shelar stepped out of the police jeep, glancing between the body and the still-smoking chaat pan. “Who served him?” he asked. Tara stepped forward, her fingers shaking. “I… I did,” she whispered. The inspector’s expression didn’t change. “But who owns the stall?” “I do,” came Dada’s soft voice. They found traces of cyanide in the half-eaten sev puri. It was swift, clinical. Dada was arrested on the spot. The crowd began to whisper. Someone muttered about unhygienic food, someone else about the curse of success. Tara stood rooted, her grandfather’s gamcha clutched tightly in her hands. She wanted to scream that it was impossible—that Dada would never—but no one was listening.
That night, Tara sat alone in their cramped one-room kitchen flat above the laundry shop, the police’s words echoing in her mind. “We’ll investigate, but the motive is clear—competition, reputation, jealousy.” She wanted to believe the truth would emerge on its own, that the justice system would fix the mistake. But Mumbai was not built for quiet faith. It was built on noise, influence, and power. She stared at the photograph of her parents on the wall, then at the empty corner where Dada usually sat sipping tea. A paper bag with coriander lay on the counter, forgotten. Tara rose suddenly, fire swelling in her chest. If the system wouldn’t save her grandfather, she would. And she’d start right where it all began—with a plate of chaat and a critic who had too many enemies and one fatal snack.
2
The following morning, Girgaon Chowpatty felt like a crime scene out of a noir film. Yellow police tape fluttered around Dada’s shuttered stall, now stripped of its color and warmth. The familiar clang of spatulas and clink of steel plates had fallen silent. Tara stood at the edge of the cordon, arms folded, watching as officers moved around with grim efficiency, gathering leftover food samples and swabbing counter surfaces. It felt surreal—just last evening, they were laughing over cutting chai, teasing each other about her spice tolerance. Now her grandfather was in police custody, being treated like a criminal, and she was being quietly avoided by vendors who once shared pickle recipes with her. She turned away, her jaw tight, and began walking the beach, letting the wind slap some clarity into her thoughts. If she was going to prove Dada’s innocence, she’d have to peel layers no one wanted disturbed.
Her first stop was the food stall three thelas down—Pandeyji’s Pani Puri. The man was older, always wore aviators, and had been friendly with Dada for years. But today, when Tara approached him with a hesitant “Namaste,” his face turned wary. “Beta, maybe it’s best you lie low right now,” he muttered, eyes darting. “The police think your Dada had motive. Bendre’s reviews could kill a business. No one liked him much.” Tara asked if he’d seen anyone strange near their stall the evening before. Pandeyji shrugged. “Strange? Chowpatty is always full of strange people.” His lips pressed thin. “Look, don’t drag me into this. I have a license to protect.” Tara felt the sting of isolation—suddenly the camaraderie of food vendors meant little when scandal hovered overhead. She noted the hesitation in his voice though. It wasn’t fear of her—it was fear of something else. Someone else.
Back home, Tara called Niv, who burst in within an hour wearing jalebi-shaped earrings and wielding two steaming paper cups of coffee. “We’re not going to sit and mope,” she announced. “We’re going to find out who hated Bendre enough to kill him.” Tara recounted everything—Bendre’s surprise visit, the sudden collapse, Dada’s arrest. Niv tapped her foot. “You know what’s weird?” she said finally. “Bendre didn’t post anything about visiting your stall on social media. That man lived for drama. If he planned this review, where’s the teaser? The selfie? The Insta story?” That clicked something in Tara’s mind. She opened Bendre’s blog, Bombay Bites, and scrolled. His last post was about fusion dosa in Andheri—dated two days before his visit. Nothing about Chowpatty. Which meant he hadn’t planned to come. He was sent. Or lured. But by whom?
Later that day, Tara visited the police station with a lunchbox of Dada’s favorite upma, though she wasn’t sure they’d let her see him. To her relief, Inspector Shelar allowed a brief visit. Dada looked tired but smiled faintly when she entered. “Why are you wasting your time, Tara?” he said softly. “Truth has its own feet.” Tara sat beside him. “Truth may have feet, Dada, but someone’s tying its shoelaces.” He chuckled despite himself. When she asked about Bendre, Dada said he hadn’t seen him in years—since an old food festival where Bendre had praised his chutney, then turned cold overnight. “Maybe he was warned away,” Dada mused. “Big players don’t like small stalls being praised too loudly.” Tara’s heart thudded. Was it just a coincidence that Joshi Chaat Bhandar had begun trending again last month? That a blogger had recently declared it the “sleeper king of Chowpatty”? Tara left the station more certain than ever—this wasn’t about one plate of sev puri. It was about power, pride, and someone with a lot to lose.
3
The sun burned high over Chowpatty the next afternoon, but Tara barely noticed the heat as she weaved through the stalls, her eyes scanning faces, hands clutching her notebook like a detective in an old film. She had made a list the previous night—names of people who had reason to hate Bendre or fear his influence: rival vendors, bloggers, ex-stall owners. One name kept resurfacing in whispers and old blog comments—Aditya Thakkar. Years ago, his now-famous fast food chain Thakkar Tikkas had started as a modest food cart right next to Dada’s. Tara only vaguely remembered him—a sharply dressed man with flashy sunglasses and an over-polished smile. According to Asha Tai, who was now reluctantly warming up to her again, Thakkar and Dada had a falling-out long ago over something “business-related and bitter.” It was time to find out what.
Tara caught up with her old classmate, Sahil, who worked as a kitchen assistant at Thakkar’s central outlet near Charni Road. Under the pretense of a quick coffee, she questioned him about Bendre’s visit. Sahil looked around nervously and lowered his voice. “Don’t tell anyone I told you, but Bendre had a secret deal with Aditya bhai,” he whispered. “He was supposed to come for a tasting last week, but it got postponed.” Tara frowned. “Postponed?” Sahil nodded. “Word is, Bendre had some dirt on Thakkar’s preservatives. Said he might go public. Thakkar was furious. Shouted in the kitchen. Threw a plate.” Tara’s fingers tightened around her cup. She thanked him and left, her mind already sprinting ahead. If Bendre had been planning to expose something, and Thakkar wanted it buried, then maybe Chowpatty wasn’t just a backdrop—it was a perfect place to make a statement.
On a hunch, Tara returned to the beach and began asking vendors about the night of the murder. Most were guarded, but one—the young kulfi seller near the promenade—mentioned something odd. “There was a man near your stall just before the critic collapsed,” he said. “Wearing a brown kurta and a cap. Not someone I’ve seen before.” Tara scribbled this down. She remembered seeing someone similar briefly, blending into the background just as Bendre arrived. A customer? Or a plant? That evening, she reviewed her own phone gallery—she often took casual snaps of the stall for social media. In one blurred corner of a photo from that night, she spotted a brown blur that could be the man. Her pulse quickened. Was he the one who tampered with the chutney? But why?
She decided to visit Bendre’s office in Lower Parel, posing as a journalism intern. His assistant, a grumpy man named Dinesh, initially refused, but when she offered a food delivery and flashed a borrowed press badge Niv had printed as a prank, he relented. Inside the critic’s cluttered cubicle, she found scribbled notes, menus, and review drafts. One file caught her attention—it was labeled “Salt, Sugar, Poison?” and listed multiple street food businesses using harmful additives. Joshi Chaat wasn’t on it—but Thakkar Tikkas was. Beside it, in all caps: “More investigation needed. Confirm source.” Tara’s breath hitched. Bendre hadn’t come to Chowpatty to review Dada’s food. He came to meet someone—maybe confirm a leak, maybe warn someone, or maybe get silenced. And Dada’s stall, tragically, had been the perfect cover. The real poison, it seemed, was in the politics of food.
4
Tara spent the next morning flipping through every page of Bendre’s scribbled research notes she had secretly photographed. The paper was fragile, the handwriting chaotic—half-formed thoughts, underlined ingredients, names of suspicious vendors. But among the scrawls, three words stood out, written in the margin with an asterisk: “TT. Contract. Violation.” Tara knew exactly what “TT” stood for—Thakkar Tikkas. Something had gone wrong between Bendre and Aditya Thakkar, and the fallout had exploded across the beach in the form of a dead critic and a wrongly accused grandfather. She called Niv, who listened with a whistle. “So the chutney trail leads straight into a corporate kitchen?” she said. Tara nodded. “But I don’t know if Thakkar’s guilty, or if someone inside his empire is playing a dirtier game.” Niv replied dryly, “Well, only one way to find out—go undercover and stir the pot.”
That evening, Tara and Niv posed as food vloggers—complete with a ring light, a phone tripod, and loud praise for the ambiance—as they stepped into Thakkar Tikkas Live at Marine Drive, one of the fancier outlets. A hostess smiled and led them in, unaware of their real intent. While Niv distracted the staff by asking for vegan options that didn’t exist, Tara slipped toward the semi-open kitchen. She caught sight of a prep room marked “AUTHORIZED ONLY,” but before she could enter, a tall man with slicked-back hair emerged. Aditya Thakkar himself. He looked exactly as she remembered—flawless shirt, manicured beard, and the air of someone who’d turned ambition into art. He gave Tara a long, measured look, the kind that made her feel like a stale samosa under a spotlight. “Are you enjoying the food?” he asked with that PR smile. “Flavors are layered,” Tara said carefully. “Like the people who make them.” He raised an eyebrow, but before he could respond, a staff member called him away. She exhaled and slipped back to her table. She hadn’t gotten much, but something in Thakkar’s eyes told her—he recognized her.
Back home, Tara rummaged through a dusty metal trunk in the corner of their room. She pulled out a bundle of old ledgers and receipts from the early years of Joshi Chaat Bhandar. Dada, a meticulous man, had kept everything—paper bills from spice wholesalers, ration cards, even stall license renewals. In a folder dated 2005, she found something unexpected: a partnership document between Dattatray Joshi and Aditya Thakkar, when they had briefly tried to launch a joint food venture. The business had been dissolved within months. The reason? In bold red ink: “Use of unauthorized artificial flavoring—objected by Mr. Joshi.” Tara’s heart pounded. Dada had walked away from profit because of his principles. And Thakkar had built his empire on the compromise Dada had refused to make.
The next day, Tara confronted Inspector Shelar with everything she had: the scribbled notes, the broken contract, and the possible motive. He remained impassive, tapping his pen on his notepad. “It’s not enough,” he said. “Circumstantial. We need a witness, a camera, a confession—something solid.” Tara wanted to scream. “So you’ll just keep Dada in jail while the real killer strolls around building more restaurants?” Shelar looked at her for a long moment. Then, softer: “I don’t think your grandfather poisoned anyone. But the city doesn’t run on what I think. It runs on what I can prove.” As Tara left the police station, her frustration turned to clarity. She needed someone who saw everything, who never looked important but always knew too much. Someone who sold sharbat with gossip on the side. Asha Tai might hold the key to what really happened on the night Chowpatty’s most infamous chaat was served.
5
The breeze off the Arabian Sea was unusually cool that evening, but Tara’s palms were clammy with anticipation as she walked toward Asha Tai’s kokum sharbat stall. The old woman was pouring drinks into tall glasses, her signature green sari swaying as she moved. She didn’t look up until Tara said softly, “Tai, I need your eyes.” Asha Tai gave her a sideways glance, then sighed. “I knew this moment would come,” she muttered, wiping her hands on her pallu. “Sit. You’ll need something strong.” She handed Tara a glass of her extra-spicy kokum shot and gestured for her to sit on a plastic stool behind the stall. “I saw him. That night. The man in the brown kurta,” she said in a low voice. “He wasn’t from here. Didn’t eat, didn’t talk, just stood near your stall pretending to clean tables. But Joshi never hired anyone like that. After Bendre collapsed, he vanished like steam off hot pav.” Tara leaned forward, heart pounding. “Could you recognize him again?” Asha Tai nodded grimly. “I never forget a man who doesn’t tip.”
Armed with this new detail, Tara visited the local CCTV repair shop—Raj Electronics—where footage from surrounding stalls often ended up for backup. The owner, a spectacled man named Mukund, was reluctant until Tara mentioned Dada’s name. “I used to eat his sev puri every Sunday,” he said, pulling out a hard drive. They scanned the feed from the evening of the murder. Minutes before Bendre’s arrival, a figure in a brown kurta appeared on the edge of the screen, hovering around the stall with a rag in hand. He reached toward the spice rack, his back partially turned to the camera. It was just a few seconds—but enough to make Tara’s stomach twist. She froze the frame and snapped a photo. “That’s not our regular cleaner,” she said aloud. “That’s our poison delivery boy.” Mukund agreed to copy the clip. Tara left with the footage, her resolve hardened. She didn’t know who the man was—but she now had his face, and it was time to find out who he worked for.
Later that night, while Niv scoured social media groups for anyone who resembled the man in the footage, Tara returned home to find an envelope slipped under the door. No name, no logo—just a sheet of paper inside, typed in bold black font: “Drop it, girl. You’re chewing something bitter.” Her hands trembled as she read it again. Someone was watching her. Someone who didn’t want the truth to come out. She turned off the lights, locked the windows, and called Niv. “Things just got serious,” she whispered. “We need backup.” Niv replied, “We’re in a food fight with someone who doesn’t play by the recipe.” But even as fear crept in, a new idea sparked. “What if,” Tara said slowly, “the poison wasn’t even meant for Bendre? What if he just ate the wrong plate?”
The next day, Tara requested another meeting with Dada. Behind the bars, his eyes looked heavier, but his mind remained sharp. She told him everything—about the man in the brown kurta, the footage, the warning note. Dada frowned. “There’s an ingredient I’ve been hiding from you,” he said softly. “Not in the chutney. In the past.” He revealed that years ago, he’d caught someone tampering with his spice mix—an employee with links to synthetic flavor dealers. The man had been dismissed quietly, no police, no fuss. But Dada had always feared the grudge would return. “That man,” he said, “was the younger brother of one of Thakkar’s kitchen suppliers.” Tara stared at him. That connection, buried beneath years of silence, might just be the key. Because in Mumbai, enemies didn’t always come with knives. Sometimes, they came with folded hands, plastic gloves, and a recipe for revenge.
6
Mira leaned on the cracked wooden counter of her stall, eyes fixed on the grainy footage looping on her laptop screen. Thanks to an old college friend working part-time at a security firm, she had gained access to the CCTV footage from the food court at Girgaon Chowpatty the night of the murder. The camera didn’t capture sound but showed a clear enough view of her grandfather’s stall. She watched Mr. Deshmukh laughing with a customer, adjusting the spice levels in his signature sev puri. Moments later, the critic Dev Malvankar entered the frame, flanked by two unknown individuals—one of whom looked vaguely familiar. Mira’s brow furrowed as she paused the footage and zoomed in on the woman seated two tables away, glancing repeatedly at Deshmukh’s stall while fiddling with something under the table. It was subtle, but her body language betrayed a nervous urgency.
Mira took a screenshot and sent it to Imran, asking him to run a facial recognition search if possible. Meanwhile, she turned to her grandmother’s old recipe notebook for clues—trying to isolate any ingredient that might have been tampered with. Her eyes scanned over the chutney section, where a new recipe had been added only a month ago—written in her grandfather’s trembling handwriting. It was a green mango-coriander chutney, a summer special. But Mira distinctly remembered that Malvankar had asked for his chaat without chutney, claiming it masked the flavor of the base. That meant the poison, if added, had to be in either the sev or the potatoes. And both were prepared in advance, in bulk, stored in the blue plastic bin behind the stall. Her heartbeat quickened—anyone could have slipped something into those containers if they weren’t being watched.
She visited the neighbouring stall owners, posing as a curious granddaughter revisiting the market. Most were friendly—sympathetic even—but tight-lipped about Deshmukh’s arrest. Only one, a man named Ashok who ran a falooda stand, hinted at possible jealousy. “You know, your dada always had a fan following,” he murmured while swirling rose syrup. “Not everyone liked that. Especially not Bhaskar Kaka from the far end—lost most of his business to your stall last year.” Mira took mental notes. Bhaskar’s stall had been temporarily shut down a few months ago for hygiene violations, and rumor had it, he blamed Deshmukh for tipping off the municipal officers. Was this old rivalry enough to justify murder? She didn’t want to think so, but it was a trail worth following.
As night fell, Mira walked the length of the beach promenade, collecting discarded snack cups and wrappers from various stalls, her gloves smudged with grease and suspicion. At home, she set up a rudimentary lab on the dining table, comparing samples of sev and mashed potatoes from different stalls. She’d read enough about basic chemical reactions and toxicity signs in her culinary studies. If nothing else, she hoped to spot a deviation—perhaps a color difference, a smell, a clump where none should exist. Just as she was about to call it a night, her phone buzzed. Imran had replied with a partial ID of the woman in the CCTV footage—Maya Vernekar, an ex-employee of Mumbai Masala Magazine, where Dev Malvankar had once been the editor. Fired under mysterious circumstances. Now she had a name—and a motive.
7
The next morning, Meera returned to Girgaon Chowpatty before dawn, just as the first waves of golden light touched the oily surface of the Arabian Sea. The chaat stalls were yet to awaken, but the scent of salt and spice clung to the breeze. She made her way to the food vendor union office nearby, a place that had once been a cooperative but now ran like a boys’ club. Her contact, Prakash—an old worker who used to supply chutney masalas—was waiting, a thin man with silver streaks in his hair and turmeric-stained fingers. Over a shared cup of cutting chai, he opened up about the growing tensions between vendors. There had been complaints about extortion threats and subtle takeovers of prime locations, but everyone had kept silent—except one man: Ramdas. Meera’s heart skipped. “My grandfather?” she asked. Prakash nodded. “He had gone to the union with concerns. Said someone was sabotaging his ingredients. They laughed it off. A month later, this critic shows up and dies, and your Dada is in jail.” The pattern felt too clean to be coincidence.
Determined, Meera returned home and scoured her grandfather’s recipe notebook, which he always carried with him like a talisman. Tucked between two pages she hadn’t flipped before was a scrap of paper—half a page torn from a register, listing ingredients and three initials: “K.L., R.S., M.J.”. She remembered seeing those same initials spray-painted behind a stall near the back lane of Chowpatty, where the less popular vendors operated. They weren’t names, she realized—they were stall codes. Each stall at Chowpatty had one. Her Dada had been onto something. Armed with the clue, Meera spent the rest of the day discreetly visiting the stalls, pretending to be a food blogger while watching the staff prepare their chaat. At stall R.S., the tamarind chutney had a strange sharp smell. The cook noticed her lingering too long and barked at her to leave. That night, Meera couldn’t sleep—too many puzzle pieces, and the picture was still blurry.
Then came a break. At 2:13 a.m., she received a text from an unknown number: “I know what happened. Don’t trust R.S. Meet me behind the Shiv temple, 4 a.m.” Meera hesitated only a moment before deciding to go. She slipped into her hoodie, tucked a pepper spray into her pocket, and biked to the temple with the first flicker of dawn washing over the skyline. A figure emerged from the shadows—it was Anjum, a young tea-seller whose cart sat next to R.S. “I saw them that day,” he said nervously. “They switched the chutney. I thought it was a delivery error. But now I know—they did it on purpose. Ramdas chacha wasn’t even there when they prepped the stall. Someone else used his key.” Anjum hesitated before whispering, “And I think the person behind all this is tied to someone powerful. Police won’t touch them.” Meera recorded the confession, heart pounding. She finally had a witness.
Back home, Meera began drafting a timeline, connecting Anjum’s story, the stall initials, and her grandfather’s complaints. She circled the name “R.S.” in red and placed it in the center. Then she added a note: “Find out who owns R.S. stall.” Her investigation was dangerously close to blowing open something much bigger than a simple case of poisoning. She knew she couldn’t trust the police, not yet. So she called Raina, the food blogger with a following in the lakhs, and told her everything. Raina listened, stunned, then promised to run a feature: “The Curry Conspiracy at Chowpatty.” Meera’s war wasn’t just about justice now—it was about unmasking a culinary empire built on fear, lies, and the taste of cyanide masked by spice.
8
Mira stood at the edge of the promenade, the golden twilight casting a warm glow over the Arabian Sea, while the scent of roasted corn and frying vada pav wafted behind her. The past week had changed her life in ways she never imagined. She had uncovered a conspiracy that had festered under the glitzy crust of Mumbai’s food scene—where rivalries, greed, and grudges brewed like masala in a cauldron. But tonight, justice had found its way to Girgaon Chowpatty. The real culprit—celebrity chef Ketan Gokhale—had finally confessed under pressure, cornered by Mira’s evidence, her impromptu sting operation, and a discreet video recording that had captured his poisoning confession during a drunken rage in a private kitchen tasting. He had tried to frame her grandfather’s modest chaat stall to eliminate the only honest competition left—a beloved old man with generations of loyal customers.
As the police took Ketan away, Rajaram Sharma, Mira’s grandfather, was released from Arthur Road Jail. His sunken cheeks and glassy eyes lit up when he saw Mira outside the gate, holding a warm tiffin of his favorite khichdi and fried papad. Tears welled in both their eyes as he embraced her tightly, whispering, “You’ve done what even I couldn’t—you fought back.” Mira had always seen herself as an underdog in the chaotic culinary world, often second-guessed and brushed aside. But now, she had stood her ground, outwitted a food empire, and protected her roots. In doing so, she had discovered not just her strength, but her purpose. Her next dream was no longer just to become a chef—it was to build something honest and hers, on the same pavement where her family’s story began.
Two weeks later, a rebranding of the food stall was underway. The old blue-painted cart was refurbished into a retro-themed chaat kiosk called “Mira & Dada’s.” Newspapers picked up her story—a brave young woman who solved a murder, cleared her family’s name, and exposed the dark underbelly of celebrity cuisine. Food vloggers and TV channels queued for interviews. Mira, however, kept her focus rooted—using the publicity to talk about hygiene, transparency, and love in food. A quiet ceremony was held at Chowpatty to honor food critic Vinod Wagle, whose death had sparked it all. As Mira laid a white lily near the promenade bench where he had sat that fateful evening, she felt a strange peace—as if the city had whispered back in gratitude.
That evening, Mira stirred her signature tamarind chutney with jaggery, tasting it like she had seen her grandfather do a hundred times. The line outside “Mira & Dada’s” grew long, as curious customers waited to sample the now-legendary pani puri and aloo tikki chaat. Somewhere in the crowd, a new food critic scribbled notes in a leather-bound journal. Mira smiled, tied her apron, and stepped out to serve, not with the pride of a hero, but the calm of someone who had come full circle. Beneath the glowing fairy lights, with laughter echoing across the sea breeze, she realized the city had given her something rare—a second chance, a voice, and a story that began and ended with a spoonful of truth.
-End-
