Chef

by Jaspreet Singh

  ‘Masturbation is bad,’ I said.

  ‘Major, what is wrong with making love to oneself? If one can cook for oneself, then one can also touch oneself.’

  ‘It is not real.’

  ‘Major, have you ever seen a naked girl before? Come. Here. Look. Nangi Ladki.’

  A helpless rage filled me. Anger began flowing inside me, and the tray shook as if the earth was shaking when I marched to Sahib’s room. I was wearing Sahib’s old clothes and shoes, which I had received on Diwali day, and I stood outside his room at twenty-one hundred hours, sharp.

  I froze in my position, waited outside longer than I should have. I could not believe what I heard. I think inside the room he was weeping. Sahib was listening to some soft ghazal music, the notes were extremely melancholic. But he was weeping as well. He was very attached to the dog and he was weeping. I stood outside for a long time with milk, coffee, sugar, cups, and silver spoons, and finally when my courage returned I tapped twice or thrice on the door. But the taps must have been very, very light, they must have felt like the passing breeze to the General inside that room. I tiptoed to the kitchen, transferred the coffee to a thermos, and left the tray outside the door by the mat. Then I returned to my room.

  My assistant was still up on his bed, on his elbows, looking at the glossy magazines. He reeked of rum. The room had the odor of sperm. There is no privacy in the army unless one is an officer. That was the first time I lost my patience. I yelled at him. Touching oneself is not real, I repeated. Shut the light and go to bed, I said. That night I listened to special music. Chef had given me a cassette of German music as a parting gift. The music went fast, then slow, fast, slow and fast again. Listening to those beautiful foreign sounds made me forget where I was and made me forget about masturbation.

  The dog never returned to its old self again. It had lost an eye, and the vision in the other eye already had grown very dim. So it would circle round and round. There was hardly any flesh left on its hind legs. Little Rubiya thought that the dog loved moving in spiraling circles and semicircles. She would count the circles like an expert mathematician. Zero. One. Two. Three.

  Kip-ing!

  Sometimes Rubiya, trying to catch butterflies, would drift towards my quarter, but the ayah would come after her. The girl hated school and would often try to run away. She flared her nostrils while telling me about another then another escape from school. The girl’s face resembled the dead woman in the painting, but her eyes were different, tiny, her legs thinner than lotus roots. Her cheeks were soft but dry, I knew this even without touching them.

  Rubiya and I, even then, despite her ayah, developed a special understanding, which goes beyond words. Sometimes when Sahib happened to be a little annoyed with my performance, Rubiya would wink or smile or give me a look which meant I understand, don’t worry, my father is a bit out of his mind. He is a bit fussy, that is all.

  How could I have predicted then that she was going to become someone big one day? How could I have seen the poet in Rubiya?

  Those days there was dust in my eyes, but let me say it again, those days were really the golden age in Kashmir.

  14

  The reason the enemy was able to cross the border and set up their camp on the glacier is because our Intelligence officers were sleeping, or playing golf, or building hotels and gyms and malls in Delhi, or they were drinking rum. And polishing their American accents. The enemy knew this and meanwhile entered the country and built bunkers high up on the mountains. Mules and helicopters had transferred rations to the bunkers, and our Intelligence officers kept sleeping. Our leaders kept posing for the Lahore–Delhi bus diplomacy photos, and no one knew that General Musharraf and members of his staff had crossed the Line of Control to visit the so-called freedom fighters, the soldiers of the Pakistani 5th Light Infantry, who had built concrete bunkers in our land. By the time the local villagers informed our army about the infiltrators it was too late. Thousands of enemy guns and men had crossed into our territory, and our men started dying like sheep and dogs.

  Early in June news reached us in the kitchen that the situation had shifted from bad to worse in the border areas of Kargil, eighteen thousand feet high. My assistant had to leave the kitchen on a convoy to the front, and he died in Tololing. Time flowed differently now for us in the kitchen – breakfast was served at night and lunch at five in the morning and dinner at noon. On certain days all we managed to whip up was raw and half cooked or yesterday’s leftovers and many a times Sahib ate with soldiers at the border posts. During war the difference between jawans and officers diminishes, Chef used to say. They eat from the same ration.

  I had lost all contact with Chef. Before the war, the radio operator Nair used to help me keep in touch with Kishen. But during the war he heard nothing from Siachen. News about him reached the kitchen only after the ceasefire, which took place sixty days later. The news was not good. He was alive. But during a two-day leave in Srinagar he had tried to kill himself.

  From the kitchen window I saw helicopters hovering over the hospital and the parade ground in the valley below. They shook the plane trees left and right. I cycled to the hospital. Men dead and near dead were being whisked into Emergency. I remember the shadows of the men who carried the stretchers. Voices of soldiers who wanted to delay their amputations, the surgery, because they were hungry. They had not eaten for days.

  Even the nurses and doctors looked sleep-starved and hungry. The wards were filled with dying men, and the corridors packed with badly wounded men or those with one arm or leg.

  Kishen’s bed was in a small room in that overflowing hospital. Normally it was a maternity room, but it had been opened up for this special ‘suicide’ case. The matter was under investigation. Two guards stood outside the room. Kishen, glacier-wallah, is in operating theatre, they told me. When will he return? We don’t know. We know nothing. No one knew what was going on in the hospital. There were many new nurses, and they all looked alike. I waited for a long time by the metal bed. The pillow on the bed had a hollow and I looked at the hollow and his name and rank and 23rd Battalion on a sheet glued on to the wall. His boots were under the bed. The stencil on his black trunk said: Brij Kishen, NCO, 23rd Battalion. They had moved all his things from the glacier to the ward. Lying on top of the trunk was his pen. I picked it up. I had seen him jotting in his journal with that pen many times in the kitchen.

  During the war we all did unnatural things and I was no exception. Rubiya, too, those days began doing unnatural things. School was canceled. General Sahib had postponed the Goan ayah’s annual leave – as a result the woman was always in a foul mood, not really taking care of the girl. Rubiya developed a fascination for observing fire. She would throw things she liked or disliked into the fireplace in the living room and watch them burn. Flames would consume the objects, soon they would crackle along the logs of pine and deodar in the fireplace, and it was possible to see the soot particles floating in the air. The girl made no distinction between what was useless and what was precious, she whimsically discarded her father’s things, even her dead mother’s clothes and ornaments and photos. She would sit next to the fireplace after the act and watch the roaring flames reduce the materials to ashes. She would feel the waves of heat hit her cheeks (I thought), then run away and hide for long hours somewhere in the big residence. Once or twice she was found hiding in my room, which was not even attached to the house. Several times Sahib scolded and even punished her but the war sent him away from the residence. I saw him briefly in the hospital the day I went down looking for Kishen. Back in the residence I was a bit stunned to encounter him again after such a short duration of time. Rubiya received a harsh scolding from her father during dinner. The girl refused to touch the food I had cooked and ran to her room. Sahib retired to his bedroom, he made no attempt to make up with the sobbing girl. Because of shortage of staff I doubled as the orderly and personally took the after-dinner tea to his room. He was pacing up and down in the room, which was
huge, but in extreme chaos, the bed unmade, the chairs and tables pointing in different directions. I left the tray on the center table. On the side of the table I noticed a pile of confidential files and not far from the files a red journal. On the spine Kishen’s Hindi signature was visible. What was it doing in Sahib’s bedroom? The Hindi was a bit faded, but it was still there. I felt like flipping through it, but restrained myself.

  ‘Kip, no need to stir sugar.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘You may leave.’

  ‘Goodnight, sir.’

  Back in the kitchen I tried to conjure up the course of events that must have happened. The CO of the regiment must have sifted through Kishen’s belongings after the suicide attempt, then handed the journal to the Intelligence Branch and the intelligence-wallahs dispatched it to Gen Sahib via a senior officer.

  Standing in Sahib’s room I kept hearing an echo of Chef Kishen’s voice. I had to do something. I was afraid, but I had to do something. ‘If you see this journal in the wrong place, destroy it, Kirpal.’

  This is the detail. Two days later the journal has still not left Sahib’s table. I enter Sahib’s room in the afternoon after his departure. I am about to pick up the thing when I hear voices. Ayah and Rubiya in the corridor. What if they discover me in the room? But. The voices recede. Soon ayah is in the bathroom, Rubiya starts playing barefoot in the garden with her dog. I am still in Gen Sahib’s bedroom, standing by the table. I pick up the confidential files and the journal, rush to the warm living room.

  That evening the General based on the report from ayah scolds and punishes Rubiya for having burned to ashes his important documents. That’s the limit, he says. You’ve burned my top-secret documents. She cries. She protests. But, Papa, she says, I didn’t do it. Papa doesn’t believe her. Ayah doesn’t believe her either. Sahib, here is the only half-burned page from those files, says the ayah. The page flew out of the fireplace, says the ayah. Papa, I didn’t do it. No, Papa. The girl is losing her faith in the world. I didn’t realize this thing then; now I know better.

  I have never been able to pardon myself for having given the girl so many tears, so much anguish. Ever since that moment I have felt a different person. Again and again I go back to that moment. I see myself rushing to the living room with the files and the journal in my hand. Through the window I make sure Rubiya is playing in the garden outside, her dog is panting, going round in circles. I make sure I hear the sound of water in the bathroom, a woman is taking her bath in there. I am in front of the fireplace. Waves of heat hit my face. I shake, I hesitate, I sense the presence of the dead woman in the painting, her ghostly gaze. I change my mind. But my mind is made up. I let the things in my hands go. Little tongues of fire start licking the pages. Then the crackle, the sparks, the roar.

  The only item I could not throw into the flames was the journal. Later in my room I opened the journal, not to judge anyone, but to simply find out why Kishen wanted to kill himself. What kind of information, scribbled inside the journal, was sensitive enough to cause its relocation to Sahib’s room?

  It is a little thing – seven inches by five inches – no more than two hundred pages. In Delhi, for a long time, I kept it under lock and key, but as I was setting out on this journey I picked it up and brought it with me. It is now with me on this train. The first time I tried to read it (in the General’s kitchen) was extremely difficult. Chef wrote the entries very tightly, in bad handwriting, and in two languages, Hindi and Punjabi.

  The first few pages are recipes of simple salads – somewhat exotic, but perfectly suitable for Indian taste buds:

  Tomato and Feta Cheese Salad

  900g tomatoes

  200g feta cheese

  120ml olive oil

  12 black olives

  freshly ground pepper

  Serves 4

  In bold letters he emphasizes: Black olives are a must, not green, not sun-dried black olives, but juicy black olives.

  The next few pages are filled with complaints about the absence of olives in Indian cooking. How hard it is to find this thing in Indian stores, and the troubles he had to go through to acquire olives. He ends a page with an invention of a new olive side dish, the olive raita. He ends the next page with another invention: mirchi (green cayenne pepper) chocolate fondue. Two pages later he comments on his fascination for cheese. He complains about the lack of good cheese in Indian cooking. Paneer is fine, but there are more than 462 types of cheeses, maybe more. He praises Brie and Roquefort in particular. Why do we borrow certain things from foreigners and not the rest? he writes. Why do we adapt to tomatoes and kidney beans and not cheese? Indian cooking seems impossible without tomatoes. But tomatoes moved to our country from Mexico. Only one hundred years ago we started using them in our food. Now it is commonplace.

  The French embassy-wallahs told me about a master chef, Batel or Patel his name was, and this man killed himself because he could not deliver the perfect meal. I bow before the master. I can never bring myself to do that.

  Right in the middle of the journal, he talks more about his apprenticeship at five-star hotels and foreign embassies in Delhi. Of all the embassies, he received his warmest welcome from the German embassy. He writes about Chef Muller. Chef Muller introduced him not only to German cuisine, but also to music. This music I listen to when I am alone, he writes. In the kitchen I hear this music when cooking. I cannot thank Chef Muller enough for gifting me two tapes of such fine music. But, how uninteresting German cuisine is! Even the curried sausage. It is hard to comprehend how such a culture managed to produce such incredible music!

  Chef’s life and work are fused together; it is difficult to separate them at least in the notebook. I had expected to see more sketches. But there are only three dirty pictures. A naked woman is shoving a Cadbury’s chocolate bar inside her sex. A man is balancing an orange on his erect lingam. His penis is coated with ‘kamasutra powder’ – the recipe is scribbled on the margin. Otherwise the pages look surprisingly clean. Only five or six have grease on them.

  Flipping through, it seems as if this is my journal. I have never kept a diary, but I might have written more or less the same words. I would have skipped the dirty sex parts, but I might have written about other things in a similar way. When I read these pages I sense a remarkable similarity in voice. He was my second self or perhaps I am what he was becoming. The greatest gift he gave me was not food. Not even the foreign cuisines.

  Chef gave me a tongue.

  The tone changes the moment he is transferred to the glacier. But again he is talking about his plans to install the first tandoor on Siachen. He plans to use mules as transport to take the component parts to the camp on the Icefields. He proposes a detailed method on how to reassemble the parts. He does not recommend parachuting the fully assembled clay oven down on the Icefields using a helicopter. (This method was used to transfer the Swedish guns.) He uses the words ‘glacier’ and ‘icefields’ interchangeably.

  In the beginning of June, he writes, with a heavy heart I quickly collected my things and left the base headquarters. We followed the long and dangerous road to Ladakh. Then a Cheetah helicopter flew us to the Icefields, a camp twenty thousand feet high. In the helicopter I was feeling dizzy. When I looked down I experienced vertigo. This was the first time I saw the Icefields from so close. They are like their name: huge white endless fields, where a hundred thousand people can play cricket and hockey for days on end. But the place is absolutely empty. Empty and desolate. Other than two little army camps there is nothing. Our camp is at a higher elevation than our enemy’s.

  Minus 58. God help us all.

  A soldier told me that this place is the second coldest on Earth, he writes. The glacier is eighty miles long. The name means ‘wild rose’. Wild roses grow at the base of this beast or organism or whatever it is. The Balti people live there, and in their language Siachen means wild rose.

  Not a single day goes by without firing by either side. We never attack on Frida
ys. A soldier told me that Fridays privilege the enemy because it is the day of their prayer. Saturdays are better. On Saturdays the peaks flash like the inside of a tandoor.

  Most of the mountain peaks here do not have names. So we give them names. Because we do not have much to do in the kitchen we find ways to amuse ourselves. Giving the peaks names kills time very well. Sometimes we give names which are abuses in our language: Ma-chod, bahen-chod, bhon-sadi-day. We call our enemies Pakis or sulahs. They call us Hindu cunts. Those ma-chods, behn-chods, bhon-sadi-days. Mother fuckers. Sister fuckers.

  Our homes are white arctic tents, each one with space for three sleeping bags. Evening, morning and afternoon I hear the same thing from the men: Arrange my transfer, or I am very unhappy here. Men become extremely religious here. The soldiers read Hanuman Chaleesa and Gita if they are Hindus and Japuji if they are Sikhs, and Koran if they are Muslims, but there are not many Muslims in the army.

  There are soldiers who look at photos of Bombay actresses like Shilpa Shetty (and vamps like Helen) for hours while others listen to songs on transistor radio. Some engage in thirty-second open-air pissing and spitting contests. Fluids freeze before hitting white ground. I have my Sony tape recorder here. Sometimes when I need to be alone I put on my parka and underpants under pure wool fatigues, and lace my Swiss snow boots and put on my gloves and baklava and black goggles and step out for a walk in loose, deep snow. I take my Sony along, and when I am far enough away from our camp I play Chef Muller’s German music. The music is foreign to my ears and perhaps that is why I like it more than our own.

  We wash once a month. We use kerosene oil to melt ice. Kerosene stoves run twenty-four hours in the tents. We have learned not to waste even a single drop of water . . . Kerosene blackens our faces, our fingers. We step out for the call of nature. We shit on the Icefields. The doctor has instructed us not to expose ourselves longer than thirty seconds. It is so cold on Siachen.