Chef

by Jaspreet Singh

  There is something wrong with the way we eat here. Precooked food. Canned curry and subzis. Canned rice. Chappati is a luxury. Unhealthy Maggie instant noodles. No Balti chicken. Mango frooti juice in tetrapacks. Salted Amul cheese. Butter. White bread. Cadbury chocolate bars are not for eating; we unwrap the bars and break them and dump them on the ice floor in our tents; chocolate makes ice less slippery, allowing us to walk without falling; we step on chocolate burfi, literally. I hate chocolate. Rum is free-flowing. Rum, too, allows us to walk. Sometimes jawans steal kebabs from the plates, which are sent to the officers’ tent. I approve of this wholeheartedly.

  Mustard oil is our savior. It doesn’t freeze.

  The Sikh soldiers experience more pain than the rest of us, he writes. Sharp crystals and icicles form in their beards. Long hair inside their turbans becomes matted automatically. They cry in pain trying to comb the hair. Halat khasta, they cry. Kip would have been dead by now.

  Don’t believe if someone tells you that men on the Icefields die like animals. No, they do not die like that. A mule when it slips into a crevasse cries out of agony for one full hour before slipping into deep silence. Men die either instantaneously, or take several days. On 4 March Naik Surendran died in his sleep due to HAPO. Two days later a second-lieutenant fell from a height of 14,000 feet. The rescue team failed to retrieve his body. They returned with a dead corporal, the soldier’s fingers stitched to his public hair.

  There are a few breaks in the entries after this point. Two or three pages later he starts repeating himself. As if he is stuck inside a cold white vortex. Armies are supposed to be mobile tigers and foxes, he writes. But we have become ice.

  Everything is white here, even time has turned white. These are my white hours. This Icefield is not for the weak-hearted. We are being killed not only by the Pakistanis but also by bitter cold. It is so cold here it eats one’s brain and belly and freezes the heart. Men use jerry cans of kerosene oil to thaw the Bofors guns. We are lucky we have the Swedish Bofors guns. They can lob the forty-kilo shells (which look like jackfruit) into the enemy positions thirty or forty miles away. The guns are helping us sheeshkebab the Pakis. But to use the guns one must stand out in the cold. Men complain about mountain sickness, this condition is called HACO – a human brain drowns in its own fluids, a human body turns blue, and HAPO – a lung fails due to lack of oxygen. Men can’t sleep. We hallucinate. Some hear the cries of djinns. Men become impotent. Yesterday a gunner while eating his meal broke down. He was telling us about his victories with women, and then suddenly he broke down and started weeping and said he can no longer get it up. It seems to me the reason he lost his manhood is because he stayed too long at this altitude. Six months without a break on Siachen. His officer could not find a replacement. I tried to console him, but he punched me in the mouth and said – what do you kitchen people know?

  I did not know how to respond to this man. He was not very young, in his late twenties perhaps. The moment he broke down all the laughter in the tent ceased, and people stopped eating, and we were no longer able to talk about the red-light district of Bombay: about Kamathipoora, where Pal and Thapa had picked up gonorrhea (at first they feared it was HIV), and where Inder had slept with the impotent ship captain’s pretty wife.

  Flipping through these pages, I say to myself on the window seat of this train, this does not seem like the journal of a man about to kill himself or about to make a serious attempt. In the journal he writes that he admires officers who simply look the other way when men do not follow their orders on the glacier. Siachen is a strange place, he concludes. Bonds between men grow strong here, and they grow very weak, and get blown away by cold winds. If I can admire or pretend to admire the beauty of this icy wasteland, and find poetry in the tents and igloos and seracs and pinnacles and icicles, and the black soot on the walls of the igloos because of kerosene oil bukharis and braziers, and parachutes dropping parts of Bofors guns, and canned food and sheep, if I can admire all these things . . .

  Then suddenly Chef writes about me. It was the second time I found myself written about.

  I do not think the boy Kirpal will stay for long. He does not really belong in the army. Kip is fixated on his father. That is why he is in the army. The boy has a sensitive sense of smell – almost like a dog. One day he will sniff out the truth.

  One day he will learn that to live properly, one must allow one’s parents to die. Once I saw his father kiss a Kashmiri woman in the Mughal garden. I was on the other side of the fountain – they could not see me. The woman’s face was wet from the mist, she spread a calico sheet on the grass under the plane tree, she sat at the edge of the sheet, hands dangling on her raised knees, she fussed about the embroidered dupatta on her head, tucked neatly behind her ears and falling on both sides of her blue kameez. It was then he took the woman in his arms and turned around to check if someone was watching and once convinced that no one was close by he kissed her. It was brief, but it was definitely a kiss. She pushed him away as if trying to tell him not to take such liberties again, but really she wanted him to do exactly the opposite.

  Kirpal’s father belonged to the tradition of officers who were gentlemen. Officers like Maj. Gen. Khanolkar and Maj. Gen. Thimayya, Gen. Harbaksh Singh and Gen. J.S. Aurora. They knew duty, honor, humanity. Officers like him (despite the fact that they succumbed to women during weak moments) are the main reason I am still in the army. Some of our commanders here on the glacier are extremely abusive. They make this hell a bigger hell.

  There are no trees here, Chef writes. One day I saw a tree and started walking towards it. But a soldier told me that it was three days away. The captain said that the tree did not exist at all. ‘Go to the CO’s tent if you want to see the real thing. Smaller than the size of your prick, a Japanese bonsai.’

  Yesterday I saw a djinn, he writes a week later. He was on a serac, smoking a cigarette. Save me, the djinn cried. I found it difficult to bear his agony. Save me, he screamed. Have you people forgotten how to scream? he asked. Stop it, I said. Stop smoking that bleedy cigarette, I said. Go away, you dwarf. You Ma-chod. Bhaen-chod. Bhon-sadi-day.

  This journal has a burnt smell. But.

  Flipping through these pages I begin to feel very cold. I am trying to find the precise page, the one I had discovered in the General’s residence, the one which had given me a hint as to why Chef had tried to kill himself:

  The soldiers take care of their clothes and bodies. How obedient and patient they are. When they die on duty they bring to their lips the name of their wife or simply ‘O my mother’. I have heard from other soldiers. There are always some who do not return. I cook thinking they will all return. There is always someone who does not. It is hard to throw away the food. At night I hear the missing soldiers’ cries: I am hungry, feed me. There is always a soldier who does not return. Sometimes to forget this hell I recite the comical names of our border posts: Khalsa 1, Khalsa 2, Romeo 1, Romeo 2. I close my eyes and recall all the street names and areas in Srinagar, where our base camp is. Habakadal. Brazulla. Jawahar Nagar. Pantha Chowk. Ganderbal. Raina Wari. Raj Bagh. Badami Bagh. The moment I do so I see the faces of real people, and I am able to endure this hell. Sometimes I hear the whistle of a train approaching. It stops at a platform on the mountains. Kirpal is headed to the Badami Bagh camp. I touch the face of Kip, the boy is standing outside the General’s residence. There is a tenderness in his look. Sometimes I walk by the tents at night and I feel as if we are a wrecked ship, and feel the glacier moving under my feet. Mocking me. My God, where am I?

  We are condemned. For us there is no hope. The Pakistanis fire at us from the other side. Are they filled with hope? They are on lower ground than us and yet filled with hope. They believe they will go straight to heaven after they die. When we capture an enemy prisoner I cannot wait to ask him. Tell me, what does your heaven look like? Here, please draw it on this sheet of paper. What food do people eat in heaven?

  Everything looks strange, he
writes near the end of the journal. The war is over. I am no longer on the Icefields. Back at the base headquarters things make no sense. Men polishing officers’ boots, men playing the brass band, bagpipes, the band master’s baton going up in the air, parade ground, signal center, MT workshop, men playing volleyball, dry canteen and wet canteen, burra-khana and chota-khana, burra-peg and chota-peg, recreation room – nothing makes sense.

  The entries from this point are written very very tightly and it is difficult to read them. They are a strange mixture of two-thirds Hindi and one-third Punjabi. His Hindi is superior to his Punjabi.

  She cooks me a meal, he writes. The nurse. And while she lays the table I ask – Why do we cling to the Rose Glacier, and why does Rose cling to us?

  She does not hear me. While she serves food I begin thinking about the garbage on the glacier. Our shit on the Icefields. Acres of wrecked Bofors guns and American and British weapons. Wrecked vehicles, tanks, jerry cans. What is the name of the wind that blows on the glacier? I would like to know the name of the wind.

  Why are you not paying attention to me? she asks. The nurse kisses me. She undoes her blouse. Her breasts fall. I say, I thought you wanted to do it after the meal. She is somewhere behind me now. I see her petticoat string dangling from the empty chair. I turn. My heart is beating fast, fluids are running inside fast. I have not seen a woman’s belly button for an entire six months. I eat her tortellini. I lick her tattoo. But I am not able to get my thing up. In the past I would have had her before the blouse and petticoat came off. This time minutes pass and become hours. I am not able to get my thing up. I am not able to get it up.

  She removes her three bangles and her wristwatch. Places them on the side table. Now she is completely naked and is panting like a dog and this arouses me but my thing does not harden. It does not. It is the tail of a dog. Wags a little. Only a little.

  She tells me to talk to the doctor. She is a nurse. She knows these things. The next day I sit outside the doctor’s door. But when my turn comes after a long wait I am unable to tell him my problem. Words remain frozen in my mouth. Instead I tell him I feel weak, very weak. He gives me Vitamin C.

  For half a day I run along the river, I do not return to the nurse’s quarters, I bike to the houseboat Texas Dawn in the red-light district to do it with a paid woman. The girl I choose is fair and sexy and well-endowed. Her name is Azra or Asma. But. The thing does not work.

  The thing is wrecked.

  A few pages later the address of Chef’s wife in Delhi is written. There are a couple more blank pages.

  Three

  15

  The river is brown and muddy and holy. The train roars over the bridge. The waters are sparkling with industrial froth. Naked children jump into the river. India, God’s naked country, is passing by. Mustard fields sway in the wind, they are the braids of air. Waves of tractors and bullock carts. (The fields make me think about yesterday’s news: mass suicides by starving farmers in the South.) Chimney smoke rises from an oil refinery. The smoke will blacken the white marble of the Taj. A pesticide factory flashes by. (The farmers killed themselves by drinking eight liters of agricultural pesticide.) Garbage. Streams of plastic. Hills of bottles, bags, wrappers. Cows chew on the plastic. Cell-phone towers. A cloud of butterflies, a little girl in a wrinkled pink frock is trying to catch them. A uranium mine. A huge banyan tree, the size of a village. Roots and knots everywhere. Nothing grows under a tree so thick. Thin dogs on a street. Fat goats. A butcher shop, condensation on the window. A temple, the gods are dancing. A ruined mosque. A herd of water buffaloes. Diseased mosquitoes hover on them. A mall building under construction. Water tanks. A receding platform, a receding city. A wave of nano cars. Then nothing. Only a profusion of signs. STD. BITS. ISD. HIV. C-h-i-l-d Beer. B-r-a-c-k-f-a-s-t. OK-TATA. 502 Bidi. Gandhi Spinal Hospital. FICCI welcomes the American President. Eat Cricket, Sleep Cricket, Drink only Coke. Veg-Non-Veg.

  M-a-c B-u-g-e-r-s. D-o-m-i-n-o-s. L-a-t-i-n (not ‘latrine’).

  God help us.

  In Kashmir in autumn there are leaves which turn yellow but don’t fall. They cling hard to trees. The plane leaves fall, but there are trees (whose names I do not recall now) with yellow leaves that cling to branches. Last year’s leaves cling to this year’s tree. Even the strongest wind cannot separate them. What force bonds them tight?

  When young I used to think if I picked up a terminal disease I would kill myself. But now my ideas on this have changed. I would like to cling to whatever life is left within me.

  But.

  There is one thing he wrote in the journal that burns me, and no matter how hard I try to forget, the thing still burns me. If someone else had said such things about me, I would not have given it much importance, but Kishen wrote those things with his own hand. That is why I was angry. I was angry at him and angry at myself for not expressing my anger. Despite his words I continued feeding him in the hospital while he was convalescing. I never brought it up.

  I am reading the journal again and my hands shake.

  Chef’s allegation involves General Sahib.

  The other day I was sitting with a soldier in the hospital canteen, he writes, and the soldier uttered something vulgar about the nurse. She is a cockteaser, he said. She has a tattoo on her belly. I grabbed him by the collar. She is mine, I said. Leave her alone. Are you sure she is yours, Major? the soldier asked. She only does it with the officers. The soldier’s remark fumed me, increased my anger, he writes. How do you know she has a tattoo on her belly when she only does it with the officers? When you were away to the glacier, Major, she went to the border post with General Kumar and they spent the night in the same bunker. Two months later Sahib sent her to the Delhi HQ hospital for a while. The staff in Delhi told us that the rose tattoo had become a grotesque-shaped flower when her belly had swollen, and even more grotesque when it shrank. Things do not shrink back the same way, he said.

  The General sent me to Siachen so that he could fuck with her, Chef writes. She says nothing has happened. I don’t believe a word. She is lying. She has never lied to me before, that bitch.

  Chef records a long string of dialogue in bad handwriting at the bottom of the page:

  She: ‘We slept on separate beds in the bunker. Nothing happened.’

  Me: ‘What about the tattoo?’

  She: ‘How many times do I have to tell you – tattoos on the belly get distorted with time.’

  Me: ‘It was abortion.’

  She: ‘Not true.’

  Me: ‘What has the General paid you to keep quiet?’

  She: ‘You are mad.’

  Me: ‘If the General is innocent, then I know who did it.’

  She: ‘Who?’

  THE GENERAL’S RATION

  No questions asked.

  AN OFFICER’S RATION

  Wheat flour/rice/bread 450g, sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, porridge 20g, custard powder 7g, cornflour 7g, ice cream/jelly 7g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, non-citric fruits 230g, citric fruits 110g, eggs 2, chicken 175g, meat dressed 260g, milk 250g, milk (for those who do not eat eggs) 1250g, cheese 50g.

  A SOLDIER’S RATION

  Wheat flour/rice/bread 620g; sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, fruits 230g, meat dressed 110g, milk (veg) 750g, milk (non-veg) 250g.

  I wish I were young again, he writes. Pretty Kashmiri girls, beautiful army wives, nurses – they all fall so easily for the boy. He doesn’t even have a full beard. Yet. He is fucking around that lun, that prick. Kip.

  Perhaps the words were written under the influence of rum. But rum is no excuse.

  None of it was true. General Kumar had not done it. Chef had no proof. Sahib was a man of highest morals. I, on the other hand, had yet to be with a woman. Other than my erotic reveries I had no experience. My body was simply going to waste. Chef was – that bloody bastard was simply wri
ting lies about Sahib and about me.

  Despite his lies I continued to cook for him when he was in hospital. I served him my ration of rum. I fed him his own recipes. I would take the tiffin-carrier to the hospital on bike. He never spoke. He did not speak to anyone. He looked so frail on that metal bed I could not hold anything against him. He lay on the white bed, wrapped in a blanket, his tattooed arm jutting out, stitches on his wrist, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking life had ended before it began. The glacier had sucked him dry, that field of snow and ice, that hazaar thousand ton of snow, layers on top of each other, had sat on top of him and demolished his erections. He could no longer get it up; it had become a bonsai. On his tongue clung the taste of a woman’s body and the smell of its hollows, but the glacier had numbed him, and he and his bonsai had even forgotten what it felt like to drown in a woman’s fluids. No, up there, twenty thousand feet high, his brain, his organs, were drowning in his own blood. He was thinking there was no justice in the world.

  Something fell from his hospital bed. His wallet in which he kept his wife’s photo. I picked it up and placed it beside him, and noticed he did not bat his eyes and he kept looking at me with bitterness. His breathing grew heavier, but he did not blink. He was thinking here is a young man, a tall cedar, and he is sleeping around with women twenty-four hours. Kashmiri women were delicate beauties, and the little ‘virile Sikh’ boy was sleeping around with them, and now and then older army wives, the memsahibs, invited him to their residences and made advances. I felt he wanted me to tell him about my sexual experiences. He wanted to listen to it all but he hated to talk to me. What he did not want to hear from me was the truth, I thought. I was twenty and still a virgin. Me, Kirpal, a virgin.