Chef

by Jaspreet Singh

  ‘You were going to lose your pension as well, Agha. But I have urged the colonel to reconsider.’

  ‘No, Sahib?’ He stood up.

  ‘Agha, the army fears for my life. We must let you go.’

  ‘But, Sahib, I am not my son.’

  The General stood up. He turned and started beckoning the uniforms. The ADC rushed to the bench.

  ‘Talk to Agha.’

  Agha would not leave. Two of the guards forced him to pack his things and threw him out. His feet crushed red and yellow leaves on the narrow path he followed.

  The General walked to the gate and looked at the bend in the road for a long time until Agha disappeared.

  Later he entered the mansion and climbed the stairs over the kitchen and walked slowly through the dimly lit corridor. In the bedroom he sat in a chair not far from the huge painting on the wall. The dead woman looked down at him from the painting.

  I served breakfast in the bedroom.

  Porridge. Upma. Papaya.

  Orange-pomegranate juice.

  Toast with unsalted cheese.

  His daughter was lying on the bed. Rubiya was on a special diet. The kitchen had to prepare two separate dishes. One for sir and one for the girl. The nurse examined the girl. Sir moved his chair close to Rubiya and checked her pulse.

  ‘What is my daughter’s wish?’ he asked.

  ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘I want to grow up fast.’

  ‘And,’ he asked, ‘what will she become as a grown-up?’

  ‘Emperor,’ she said.

  ‘Emperor or Empress?’

  ‘Emperor,’ she said.

  ‘His Highness!’ He saluted her.

  ‘Papa, I will kidnap people!’

  ‘Who will His Highness kidnap?’

  ‘You,’ she said.

  Sahib fell silent for a moment. Then he laughed. Being the Governor was a busy job filled with travel, and certainly the girl felt deprived of his presence. Rubiya was such a lonely child – she used to eat porridge and curds and khitchri, and now she is getting married. I am happy for her.

  I am on the train because I am happy for Rubiya.

  24

  Civ-i-ans. Whatistheword? I am

  sur-rounded by civilians in this compartment. What presighly is wrong with me? P-r-e-c-i-s-e-l-y? The tumor is in the speech area of your brain, Kip, the doctor explained. Sala asshole.

  I can no longer pronounce certain words correctly. But, I can spell them:

  R-a-d-i-o.

  Yes.

  Transformer?

  No.

  Tranjister?

  No.

  Spell it.

  T-r-a-n-s-i-s-t-e-r.

  Days later I found Agha had forgotten his transistor radio in the Raj Bhavan. He had packed his things hurriedly the day he was fired. I found the radio on in the scullery room. Agha was the only Kashmiri on the staff, and no one knew where he lived.

  There were food stains on the silver skin of his Philips radio. Agha, you clown, I said, changing the batteries. The new batteries didn’t improve the reception. But, in the slot at the bottom I found a little note scribbled in Kashmiri. Agha could not read and write. So he must have dictated the lines.

  His note led me to the Guest House at the tail end of the Raj Bhavan complex. It used to be the British Resident’s summer house, but now served as a lodge for high-ranking guests. The building faced the lake, and it had a proper roof terrace. Agha’s note said that the reception will improve on the roof, but it will get better downstairs. Unable to follow the logic, I started climbing down. The reception, as I had expected, became worse and worse. Begum Akhtar was singing ghazals. On the radio her voice sounded like a rejected Indian Idol.

  Downstairs was clean. Not a particle of dust. Big portraits of six or seven old Governors looked down from walls as white as snow. I turned off the crackling radio and entered the first room. It was called the Husain Room. The room was devoted entirely to M. F. Husain’s paintings of horses. The canvases were huge, twelve feet by eight feet. One almost touched the naked bulb on the wall. I felt dwarfed by the navy-blue and apple-red horses. Reared up on hind legs they looked absolutely alive and stunning. In college the teacher had told us that Husain was the best modern painter in our country, his work was also on display in the National Gallery. No one knows why he is possessed by horses . . . He is completely self-taught and his personal life is as eccentric as his art. Husain always walks barefoot, she told us. Did you know? Not only inside the house, but also outside. Even in the hot and bustling streets of Bombay he walks barefoot, and that is exactly how he arrives at the lobbies of five-star hotels and foreign embassies and airports and even English-style clubs. He has all the money in the world to buy hundreds of shoe factories, but he shuns shoes as if foreign objects. Why are you like this? a journalist asked once. When I wear shoes I feel I am eating supper with wrong people, answered the painter.

  Standing in front of the horses I removed my shoes and socks. My feet were able to breathe again. I felt connected not only to the painting, but also to the painter. When does a painter know that the painting of a horse is done? I asked myself. In kitchen we are able to tell precisely when a dish is done, but when is the horse done? There was something incomplete about the horses on the canvas, but it seemed to me that the fragments were completing themselves in my head. Cooking is different from painting, I thought. The key ingredients are never absent. Father knew horses . . . when I turned eight he made me feed a horse in the barracks . . . the animal’s lips had grabbed the apple swiftly from my hand.

  The next room was called the Sher-Gil Hall. Briefly I stood before a dazzling composition, Two Nudes. The women looked mysterious despite being naked. However, it did occur to me that the round breasts of the first nude really belonged to the second, and the pointed breasts of the second nude really belonged to the first. The longer I stood there the less I thought about the lips or thighs or breasts, and the more I experienced the warmth and the cold those two women carried inside. They appeared so alone. The reason the painter Husain walks barefoot, I thought, is because he must feel lonely. His art springs out of immense loneliness, I thought.

  Diagonally across from the Two Nudes were the stunning black and white portraits of musicians, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, the flute player, Zakir Hussein, the tabla player, and Vilayat Khan, the sitar player, and many others. The next room was dark and smelly. No windows. There was a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling on a single wire, and in that dim fragile light I noticed the form of a woman as if sitting on a toilet bowl.

  Sorry, I said and stepped out in panic. In the corridor I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Cook! What are you doing here?’

  The guard was armed with a light machine gun.

  ‘Nothing, Major,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Major,’ I explained, ‘I was looking for you only. Would you taste the dish I have prepared? Took me fifteen hours of hard work. I offer my new dishes to all the staff members and guards. This is how I learn how good they are!’

  ‘But, why are you carrying your shoes?’

  ‘This place is like a shrine, Major. That is why.’

  He looked utterly confused and stared at Agha’s radio.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing him the radio. ‘Listen to the latest cricket score. Let me bring you the dish.’

  ‘Bring it to the roof terrace,’ he yelled.

  I rushed back to the kitchen, and brought him a bowl of wild mushroom risotto, and a tall glass of cherry-blueberry l-a-s-s-i. The guard moistens his lips and lowers his nose. He smells the risotto. Italian, I say. Foreign food, Major. You are a good man, he says. But you must never enter the art rooms. Only officers. Honest mistake, I say. Why are you trembling? he asks. Is it any good? I ask him. You are the ustad of cooking, he says. Serious, Major? I ask. Tell me. What do you think about the Two Nudes? He stares at the bowl. Come on, I say. You must have seen the painting. He tunes Agha’s radio to the sports channel
. India is playing West Indies in Barbados. The reception is crystal clear. Then I pour him rum.

  ‘What do you think about the horses, Major?’ I ask.

  Horses, he says. The painter knows nothing about horses. How could one forget to show the most important thing, the horsehair . . . You are a good man, he says, but I don’t want you to feed anyone else in this building. Is there a guest? I ask. There is the woman, he says, spooning the risotto. She’s in the room next to the paintings, Major. She is a dangerous suicide bomber, he says. What is she doing here? Why is she not in a regular prison? I ask. He nods. I do not know. Perhaps she is here because this is the least likely place to find her, this is the cleverest way to dupe the enemy. She is still being interrogated. Officers come now and then to interrogate her.

  Next day I visit the Guest House again. With new dishes. Duck vindaloo and cardamomed mango. The guard and I have lunch upstairs on the terrace. Major, I would like to interrogate her, I say. He laughs. His breath stinks of rum. And what are you going to ask her? Hazaar things, I say. Like what kind of food the enemy eats, what kind of dishes the enemy’s General eats. How does he eat? How many times a day? Is he prone to diarrhea? Constipation? Does he fart? I will ask her very important questions. Plus I have Governor Sahib’s orders to interrogate her.

  ‘You have what?’ he asks.

  ‘Gen Sahib’s permission and order to ask her the questions.’

  ‘Major, in that case, I will open the room for you.’

  But, that was not the real reason he unlocked the door.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Try some gulab jamun.’

  25

  The room had the worn look of colonial times. The carpet was dark and moldy and the bathroom door open. Close to the ceiling there were huge military bootprints stamped on the wall.

  She was talking to herself. In Kashmiri.

  When she felt my presence her body stirred a little. She did not raise her bent head. Her hair had grown back and it was wild and she did not have on the headscarf. I sat in the chair across from the bed. Her gaze remained fixed on the floor. There was a table in front of my chair. I opened my bag and pulled out two glasses and plates and spoons, and Coke and fish and biryani and placed everything on the table. Now and then sounds of guards marching outside penetrated the room, and sounds of dogs barking. The muezzin’s call from a distant mosque penetrated as well.

  I served her.

  Not a single word had been exchanged between us so far. She ate slowly the fish and biryani, and I adopted her speed. Now and then I looked at her but our silence made the looking harder. I fixed my gaze on the bottle of Coke on the table. Bubbles at the top were bigger than the ones at the bottom. I wanted to ask her many questions. Instead, I was at a loss for words.

  I heard her finish, and looked up. She was staring at me. The steel plate, still in her hand, was shining in the light.

  ‘More biryani?’ I asked.

  She kept staring at me.

  ‘I know you,’ she said.

  My hair was short now, no beard, and I had removed my turban. But she had recognized me.

  ‘Why did you?’ she asked.

  ‘Because–’

  The dogs were barking louder outside.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said.

  To prove to her my identity I had walked into the room with Chef’s journal in the bag. But she had recognized me and there was no need to provide more proofs. That is why it was inappropriate to show her an object she could not even read.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’ I handed her the journal.

  She seemed indifferent.

  Then I said something I shouldn’t have.

  ‘He is dead,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who wrote these pages.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  I moved to the edge of her bed.

  ‘Why did you cut your hair?’

  ‘Irem, you are for me –’

  ‘Why did you?’

  The next ten or fifteen minutes I told her everything about Kishen. Everything. I don’t know why. Things I found difficult sharing with men in the barracks, I revealed to her in one single breath. At first she paid little attention to what I was saying, lost in some other world. Is she afraid? I asked myself. But somewhere down the line she grew drawn to Chef’s address to the soldiers on the glacier.

  ‘The biryani you consumed was really out of Chef’s recipes,’ I said.

  ‘Same to same man who taught you Rogan Josh?’

  I liked the way she said same to same.

  ‘Same-to-same man whose journal you read,’ I joked.

  She was quiet again.

  ‘No tomatoes in Rogan Josh,’ I said.

  Then I opened the journal. I didn’t read everything. I censored many passages. But there were words even I had no control over. Forgiveness is a strange animal: I felt the need to ask her forgiveness. Otherwise I could not sit next to her. Could she forgive me for being from the enemy side? I read the journal to her: Like most Indians I grew up prejudiced against Muslims. But unlike most of my country men I do not believe in caste. My difficult posting on the Siachen Glacier has taught me how tiny and fragile the human body is. It is a waste of time to be prejudiced. A waste of breath.

  She walked to the window. There was no window. She pretended there was a window. She stood there as if she was looking at the view outside. I knew what was outside: my cycle leaning against the plane tree, and next to it was the nurse’s cycle. The nurse and I had failed to connect, but our cycles had met and they were making love to each other.

  Thinking about the cycles I surveyed Irem’s back, her long hair and its entanglements. She was facing the so-called window. We were six meters apart. Light was dim, same naked forty-watt bulb hanging from a naked wire. From where I sat, she looked healthy and plump. I stared at her hair and feet and back, her entire form. To amuse her, I think, yes, it was to amuse her, or perhaps to ease the tension I said she had grown fat, and suddenly her breathing grew heavy, and although I could only see her back I felt she was trying to grasp on to something, but there was nothing around her. She tried again, and again she failed. Then she turned. She pivoted, suddenly uncom-fortable, trying to protect herself from my gaze. The color of her face changed, and then parts of her body convulsed with bleak laughter, as if she was laughing at me. It was only then I realized she was heavy with a child.

  ‘God,’ I said.

  I was at a loss for words.

  ‘So . . . you are . . . you are not infertile!’

  I did not know what else to say.

  ‘Who?’ I almost whispered. ‘Who did it?’

  She did not respond. She was not going to respond. It definitely could not be her husband in Pakistan. Who? Who was I going to report it to?

  I was standing not far from the General’s portrait on the wall, and all of a sudden I thought about the nurse’s cycle propped against the plane tree outside. She was in the Raj Bhavan to give medication to little Rubiya. I thought of persuading the nurse to help Irem.

  ‘The nurse,’ I said.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She will take care of you?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She will make your body normal again.’

  ‘I do not want to be normal.’

  ‘Please listen to me.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I want to help you. But I will only do so if you agree.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like saffron?’

  ‘Saffron?’

  ‘Saffron, I have been told, causes miscarriage, and it works quickly, not causing much pain.’

  ‘Please go away.’

  ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Why are you humiliating me?’

  ‘Humiliating you?’

  ‘By asking again and again the same-to-same question.’

  ‘You do not know what is good for you,’ I said.

&nbs
p; ‘Thank you for the biryani,’ she said.

  ‘Tomorrow. I will come again. Same time. I will knock on the door, and I will ask the same question. If you say yes, the nurse will help you.’

  Then I picked up the empty plates and glasses from the table and stepped out. I felt very disturbed. I remember focusing on her back as I was stepping out. She was looking out of the so-called window. I almost turned, but restrained myself. I stood outside her door for a long time as if I wanted to listen to the sound of the 1.5 hearts beating inside her. I did not know what to do. To tell someone? To tell someone and put her at more risk, and to put myself at risk?

  Next day at the same time I knocked on the door and asked her the same-to-same question. But. She said no. I urged her to change her mind. The nurse would do it without telling anyone. The nurse will make you normal again. But she said no. She wanted to keep the child. She told me something women normally tell only their husbands. She told me the baby was kicking inside her belly. The baby was crying and asking her to give her a name. Don’t be so emotional, I said. I have already given her a name, she said. What name? I asked.

  Two days later I returned to the room again and begged her to allow me to take her home across the border. She said she did not want to return home. Her family was not going to accept her now. I am damaged, she said. Khuda is punishing me, she said, for my sins. Why did I not die? I should have died. It would have solved all troubles. I am not going to commit any more sins. I am going to keep the child.

  There was a long silence. I walked to her and seized her hand. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Again I urged her to allow me to take her to Pakistan. But the moment I uttered the word ‘Pakistan’ she fell back on the bed. Her whole body convulsed, and her two hands started opening the drawstring of her salwar, and there she was partially unconscious and partially unclothed on the bed, with the naked bulb above us. It was at that point the ayah entered the room. I do not know from where she came and why, but she saw. She saw us together. Then walked in the guard, and then marched in the colonel in his trussed jacket.

  Four