Chef

by Jaspreet Singh

  BODY OF A SOLDIER FOUND AFTER 53 YEARS

  Trekkers on a remote stretch of Himalayan glacier have found the fully preserved body of a soldier 53 years after he died in a plane crash. They discovered the corpse, still in an overcoat uniform, with personal documents in the pockets. The discovery was reported yesterday at the base camp. The team also found aircraft parts close to the soldier, suggesting there could be other bodies buried in ice.

  It is believed the crash occurred in early 1934. The soldier may have been flying to or from Ladakh, the high altitude area in Kashmir.

  In 1934 India had yet to be partitioned by the British to become ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’. So it is not clear whether the body belongs to India or Pakistan. The two countries have fought four wars, three of them over Kashmir.

  Kashmir. It was my first time, and I found the place different from the way Delhi-wallahs describe it, as paradise, or shadow of paradise. I was a young man, but old enough to separate romance from reality. There was thick fog and it was very cold. I did not have a proper jacket. I had arrived with only one suitcase and the recruitment letter in my pocket. By the time I stood on the lawns of the General’s residence the sound of the train had simply disappeared from my mind. A uniformed man accompanied me from the gate-posts to Sahib’s residence, the Command House, located on a hill overlooking the golf course. I must have waited for half an hour on the lawns. I thought I was going to die of cold when a middle-aged man stepped out of the house. He was wearing an apron. The hair on his head was closely cropped. His face, clean-shaven with thin eyebrows, ears unusually long. The man’s body had a muscular appeal to it. A black dog trotted ahead of him. The dog came to sniff me. I touched its muzzle.

  ‘How old is he?’ I asked.

  ‘We are all growing old,’ the man said. ‘Fourteen, maybe, the dog is fourteen.’

  ‘How long do dogs live, sir?’

  He did not answer, but took off slowly in the wind towards a patch of vegetable garden, fencing around it. He opened a little wooden gate and shut it. The dog circumambulated the fence while on the other side the man stooped and plucked leaves of what to me looked like fenugreek or coriander. How the vegetables grew in the extreme cold was beyond my imagination.

  ‘Come.’ He asked me to follow him.

  I handed him the recruitment paper.

  ‘Not now,’ he said.

  On the way to the kitchen the man patted me on my back. He was an inch or two taller than me. Something about that pat made me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘The General’s ADC has told me about you. He has given me the instructions.’

  ‘What do I call you, sir?’

  ‘I am Chef.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Call me Chef Kishen.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Just call me Chef.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Follow me with your luggage,’ he said.

  We entered his room, which was between the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. The place reeked of shaving cream; cuttings from Hindi newspapers covered the walls: photos of Bombay actresses in revealing saris, including my favorite, Waheeda. On the side table a tape recorder was playing music unfamiliar to my ears. German music, he said. I wouldn’t have imagined, I said. Does this bother you? No sir. Top mewjik, he said. There were two beds side by side, and they formed a huge shadow on the floor. The square shadow on the wall came from the tape recorder. Chef pointed towards the smaller bed. Suddenly my body felt the exhaustion of a long journey. I dumped my suitcase and sat down on the bed.

  ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Keep following.’

  The kitchen. Scent of cumin, ajwain and cardamom. On the table, a little pile of nutmeg. Thick, oily vapor rose from the pot on the stove. The room was warm and spacious, the window high and wide. Tiny drops of condensation covered the top of the glass. Smoke soared towards the ceiling in shafts of light. I noticed many shiny pots and pans hanging on the whitewashed walls. And strings of lal mirchi, and idli makers, and thalis, and conical molds for kulfi. In the corner the tandoor was ready. Its orange glow stirred in the utensils on the walls. I walked to the oven and stooped over. A wave of heat hit my cheeks. It was then he put his arm around my shoulder and took me towards the dining room. He said, ‘Kitchen without a memsahib is a nice place to work in.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘See that woman looking down at us?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘She was the memsahib.’

  The painting was seven or eight feet tall, and so was the beautiful woman. Her eyes were big and wide open. Her brows, fearless. Skin, the color of cinnamon. She was wrapped in a graceful red sari.

  ‘Sahib used to love her as if she were a Mughal queen and she in turn loved him the way she loved her dog.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘She loved me too.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean yes, sir? She was a bitch. Memsahibs is people that controls the kitchen. She counted spoons. She counted to test the reliability of staff. That woman banned cooking without a shirt on, and I had to wear at least a banian in her presence. Aprons appeared suddenly. She cooked the dessert herself on Tuesdays and made me taste it and one wrong (but honest) word would make that woman swear in English. It was hard for me. The hardest thing to do is to hold my tongue, Kirpal.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘That woman refused to change recipes. To disturb a recipe is to disturb the soul of the dead, she would say.’

  Right then I heard loud voices coming towards the kitchen from other rooms. The bell rang for service. Chef replaced the server out on a cigarette break and dashed into Sahib’s room with the tray of tea and samosas. The samosas smelled of pork. Sahib is fond of pork, he said before leaving the kitchen. There was rhythm in his legs. In Sahib’s room I will also take ardor for dinner. He pronounced ‘order’ as ardor. It was one of the few English words in his vocabulary.

  I soon learned about him. Chef had joined the army as an ordinary soldier, and after an injury in the war he was sent to the Officers’ Mess. During a meeting of the middle brass of the regiment he had committed his first error. He had refused to serve tea to a Muslim officer.

  ‘I refused tea to that man,’ said Chef. ‘The problem with those people is that they smell. Badboo. That is why. The colonel showed me his teeth and reprimanded me severely. I was transferred to the kitchen as a dishwasher, but within a few months I bounced back. I made the kitchen my territory and impressed the officers with my above average culinary abilities. The brigadier of the regiment chose me for a four-month training course in international cuisine conducted by the foreign embassies in Delhi. German, French, Chinese, Italian, Szechuan noodles, linguine with clam sauce, lamb provençal, Pavlova – that kind of food. You see, if I had not refused to serve tea to the Muslim officer I would never have become a chef. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  4

  It is almost midnight. The train picked up speed close to Panipat Station. The light in the ceiling is flickering. A miniature fan swivels and hurls hot air. Not a single thought I have is peaceful. The screeching sound of metal against metal competes with passengers pushing and jostling even at this insane hour. A child lowers the window, raises it again. Her parents are stirring in their sleep, mouths half open. Their faces move left to right and right to left as if to a pendulum. Diagonally across from me a honeymooning couple is sitting underneath brightly colored bags. The wife is young and pretty. (A white jasmine tucked in her hair.) I like the nape of her neck, and henna on hands. Her husband, in brown corduroy, is glued to the World Cup cricket commentary. It must be day in Australia. He is holding the transistor radio close to his ear. Now and then he lifts his free hand and runs a finger through the brand-new wife’s hair. Such displays of emotion were not possible in public when I was a young man.

  She asks him to turn off the radio; he smiles and raises the volume. The peasants sitting next to him applaud: they t
oo would like to know the score. The child on my right yawns. She is no longer playing her window game. The cricket commentary is interrupted by commercials and the hourly news. The newscaster’s voice is convent-educated. Some would say sexy.

  She begins with late-night news about the American President.

  The President stunned our nation today by visiting the Gandhi Peace Memorial. Despite this gesture many of our countrymen are demonstrating in front of the American embassy in Delhi. The people have taken offence to dogs. This is what happened: yesterday just before the President’s visit the security-wallahs tested the site with sniffer dogs. The people feel that the dogs have desecrated the site. Some are also angry and shocked because the Prime Minister of our country was frisked by the American bodyguards (on Indian soil) before he was allowed to shake hands with the President, said the newscaster. Last night at the state banquet the President delivered a speech saying that America was definitely going to sign the nuclear deal with India, and his country was also going to allow the import of Indian mangoes. Now that is interesting, I say to myself.

  The man’s pretty wife is putting kohl around her eyes, surveying her face in a miniature mirror, the shape of a perfect oval.

  News is over. Back to cricket. The man, listening again. Please lower the volume, I request. He contorts his face. Please, I beg you, I say again. It is past midnight. He bows, apologizes, and to my surprise turns off the radio and begins reading the paper. As far as the dogs are concerned I don’t think we Indians should object at all. Gandhi loved animals. The dogs have done no harm to the father of the nation. If we are hell-bent on taking offence then we must take offence to the local thugs and criminals who deliver long speeches paying so-called homage at the Peace Memorial.

  On the front page of the paper there is a picture of the American President eating a mango. He is eating the reddish-yellow fruit with a knife and a fork. I see it in the flickering light. The picture is making me increasingly uncomfortable. This is not the proper way to eat a mango, I say to myself. They are supposed to be eaten the way Father used to.

  Father never used a knife to cut mangoes, he would suck them.

  He would eat several at a sitting, one by one, all varieties, sandhoori, dusshairi, langra, choussa, alphonso. He loved good food. Good chutney. He was right-handed but held a chapatti in his left; he scooped up the chutney with a torn bit of chapatti. If curried lamb was served, he liked gravy more than the pieces. He ate kebabs without a piyaz. Even now I can see him clearly. Father is home on a two-day leave from his regiment, he is eating dinner with another man in uniform, also a Sikh, I call him uncle, they are talking about colonels and generals, and war and enemy, us versus them. I can see this although I am hiding under the table. And I can hear them. Uncle’s foot taps my leg. I run to my room, from under the table. Father scolds me mildly for not doing my homework. From behind the curtain I watch Father sucking on the fruits one by one. Uncle has stopped eating, he is telling Partition stories, but Father continues. Even now I can see him squeezing the pulp upwards. To this day I remember his hands. His fingers were those of a musician.

  But.

  There are things he will never know. He has no idea about the anger I carry around to this day. Deep inside – so many unresolved emotions. Perhaps my cancer is the consequence of the shame and guilt and anger that never found a passage out of my body. The most important things in our lives can’t be squeezed out.

  I never wanted to join the army. In Delhi my desires were different. I had just had my eighteenth birthday. I woke up late that morning. Frying mustard oil and aloo parathas stung my eyes. Mother scolded me (from the kitchen) to hurry up. I rushed to the bathroom with soap and when I opened the door I saw my cousin was inside. I had opened the door thinking the bathroom was empty, but she was inside, washing herself. She was very beautiful, my cousin, a married woman, and later that day, at college, I could not forget her dark nipples. Drops of water moving, crawling on her cinnamon skin and wheat-colored breasts. I felt some strange forbidden joy. But at the same time I felt guilty, as if I had committed a crime. She was the first woman I had seen completely naked, and those two seconds kept coming back to me that day in the college, first during math class, and then during history. I saw her wet body everywhere in the classroom and I kept returning again and again to the moment she had buried her head in her hands (after a very brief eye contact) and I felt I could not live without touching her bare breasts. What was I doing in the classroom? The teacher was covering the subaltern history of Indians (especially Sikhs) who had died in Europe fighting the two World Wars. Outside it was very bright and hot. Through the window I noticed my mother rushing towards the college, accompanied by a man in a camouflaged uniform. I thought that my cousin had reported me, and I was to be punished.

  Mother stood by the door and had a fast talk with the teacher, and right away the teacher instructed me in a soft voice to pack my books. Her face froze as I marched my shadow to the door. There was pin-drop silence in our class. It was then I sensed something terribly wrong had happened. The man standing behind Mother looked very stiff; his face had no spark and his uniform was crisp and starched without a wrinkle. He was holding a black cap in his hand.

  They walked me close to the road beyond the spot where stray dogs were barking, a goods train passed by, parallel to the road, and the man asked if he could have a word with me.

  ‘Young man, the whole nation is very proud of Major Iqbal Singh.’

  There was a mist in Mother’s eyes. Unlike other women she rarely wept in public. She held my hand and slowly quickened her step. We walked in the same direction. Home. That was the last time we walked together. The dogs didn’t come after us.

  Now that I think about it she too was fighting battles. While my father was fighting a war in Kashmir with the Pakistanis, my mother was fighting battles with herself. She stopped in the middle of the road and hugged me, then let me go. She wanted to be alone.

  At home instead of Father and death, I kept thinking about my cousin’s cinnamon body. That evening my cousin and her husband came along with many others to our house. They drank imported Coke and spouted the standard things. When the mourning was over I took the empty bottles into the street and lined them up and kicked them one by one, the bottles rolling further and further away from me. A plane passed overhead, creating a white cloud. The windows of our house rattled.

  I knew then.

  When I woke up the next morning stray dogs kept barking in the street, and my whole body felt sick. I felt his presence in the room. I see myself running up the stairs to the room where he kept his black military trunk. In the trunk I found his pistol and from the roof terrace I started aiming, shooting at the dogs in the street until mother screamed at me from the other side of the clothesline. People flocked to our house. What is wrong with you? Poor thing, I heard one say. You are the son of a very brave man. Why are you muddying your father’s name? This boy has done nothing wrong, said Mother. She could speak no more. When the crowd left I heard the single bark of a dog on the pavement. It was the only one that did not flee like others towards the bazaar.

  ‘How many did you kill?’ asked Mother.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Dog killer.’

  ‘One is injured,’ I said.

  Mother begged me not to join the army.

  ‘You never wanted to.’

  ‘I’m going to join Father’s regiment.’

  She begged me not to move to Kashmir. That place is foreign to us, it is filled with turmoil, she said. She tried to persuade me to follow my original plan: study two more years, get a civilian job and then get married.

  ‘You’re my only child,’ she said.

  I clicked my heels and saluted her, the way Father used to.

  On the way to Kashmir the first time I took the train, I carried an old black and white photograph in my wallet. I recall saying to myself that the thing l
ooked different now, because the man in the photo was actually dead. The officer’s uniform, the medals on his chest, the epaulets, the turban with a red regimental ribbon, and the shining stars – everything looked different. Father is not alone in the photo, he is standing in the middle of the parade ground with three others. It is their graduation day. Father is the only one in a turban. With great amusement he is observing the caps of his fellow officers. The caps are floating in the air and are about to begin a sudden downward descent. (Cadets, the moment they become officers, follow an odd graduation ritual: they toss their caps up in the air to mark the turning point in their lives.) Father is unable to participate fully in the ritual. His turban is intact. He is one of them, but he is different. Like them he is young, filled with hope. Did he know then that soon he would become the yellow photograph in my hand? He could not have known then, and neither could I have known that soon his son would try to forget him, but the harder he would attempt, the more disastrously he would fail. On that train journey the photo terrified me. I remember opening the grimy window, tearing the thing into pieces, letting it go. There was thick fog outside, and the pieces went up and down in the wind and vanished in the fog. At the time a fellow passenger in the compartment was carrying a basket of unripe mangoes. Just like right now – this carriage has the same pungent odor.

  5

  When I think about my past, time begins flowing in a different way and my thoughts turn to the mountains of Kashmir, and to the river that begins at the toe of the glacier.

  The river begins in India, crosses the border and flows into the enemy territory. In Pakistan time is half an hour behind India, and the moment the river crosses the border it moves backwards in time. But three or four mountains away it re-enters our side, becomes Indian again, and by doing so moves forward in time. This crossing of borders keeps happening over and over again.