Chef

by Jaspreet Singh

  The paper made no mention of Rubiya’s wedding plans or the postponement of the wedding. The front-page editorial talked about his sickness, the battle with disease, and praised the Hero of Kargil and the Hero of Siachen Glacier for exceptional leadership and vision.

  He took over the Governorship of Kashmir, the editorial said, when the State was going through a particularly difficult time.

  General Sahib was cremated on the slopes of the hill overlooking the river, not far from the ruins of the Mughal fort. Thin layers of ice on the banks of the river turned orange, reflecting the flames. A three-minute silence was observed before Rubiya offered her father’s body to nothingness. The battles stopped on distant mountains and transistor radios stopped and vehicles stopped on the roads and cooking and eating stopped. People paused, interrupted whatever they were doing.

  During those three minutes I heard restrained sobbing coming from the Kashmiri houses. Then agni, the burst of flames. The shadow of rising smoke flickered on the hard ground. The December chill disappeared temporarily. A can of Coke fell from an old woman’s hand and rolled towards the black boots of troops in ceremonial dress.

  The military band was part of the ceremony. Men in kilts played mournful bagpipes and snared the drums. Troops from 1 Sikh gave a twenty-one gun salute. Two or three dogs kept running by the ice, absolutely oblivious of the flag of our country, flying at half-mast. And all those who stood there, the officers and jawans and their wives, they had no idea about the battles the General was really fighting. They spoke in clichés, and they stared accusingly at Rubiya as if she had caused her father’s death. There are decent boys in our own country, their faces said, Why don’t you marry one of our own? Colonel Chowdhry and Patsy Chowdhry were absent, but so many others were there. Bina was there, holding a paisley hanky, weeping profusely. For nothing.

  ‘General Sahib, good man dee lal-tain,’ I raised my voice. ‘General Sahib, Emperor of Kulfi.’

  ‘What are you saying, sir?’ asked the young officer standing next to me.

  ‘Nothing. Gibberish. Bakwas.’

  Three days later I met Rubiya in the Mughal garden. I had arranged to meet her at three in the afternoon, but I got delayed.

  She was looking at the children playing in snow as I walked in. The children had on two or three layers of heavy woolens and they were making balls of ice. There was snow on the ground, on trees, on ruined walls and fountains. Everything sparkled.

  At first I saw only her back. Then I climbed up the stairs and saw her from the pavilion. She was looking at the children as if she wanted to tell them that the world was not what they had thought it was. I did not feel like disturbing her.

  When she turned towards me the first thing she said was, ‘Chef Kirpal, you smell of rum.’

  She looked younger than her age, and very sad.

  She told me that her fiancé, Shahid, and his parents had been denied visas at the border, so she was heading to Pakistan on the evening bus.

  But I am really here to tell you about Irem, Chef Kirpal. Irem and her daughter are back in Pakistan now. After many years the Pakistani authorities have allowed them to return home.

  I don’t know why at that time I did not tell her about my cancer. Or the fact that my feet were very cold.

  Instead I found myself talking about a cooking show on television, but as soon as I did that I was worried for her, and I wanted to urge her to stay. I worried Rubiya would not be safe in Pakistan, just like Irem was not safe in India.

  ‘Before you go,’ I asked her, ‘is it possible to apologize for my behavior?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I waited for very long to write to you about Irem.’

  ‘You have done nothing wrong,’ she said. ‘You are the nicest person I have come across.’

  ‘No, I am not nice,’ I said.

  ‘Please, what are you trying to say?’

  ‘Something has been bothering me, Rubiya. This thing happened on the way. I took the bus. The driver was very rash on the winding road. You know the way they drive. He was off the road most of the time and almost ran into an army convoy. Soon afterwards the bus collided with a pack of sheep, badly wounding an animal. The animal was squirming in great pain. It was dying. The gujjar shepherds yelled at the driver from the road, and began knocking. But all the passengers inside wanted the driver to hurry up. No one cared about the animal. I, too, wanted the bus-wallah to hurry. We all had something important to get to, and there we were aimed in a great rush, and no one thought of slowing down. No, Rubiya. I am not very nice. I am more like my countrymen. That makes me more, not less, ashamed of them.’

  ‘Chef Kirpal,’ she said, ‘I sense you have some other thing to tell me.’

  ‘There is one question that has been growing inside me for the last fourteen years. May I ask?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It is a question that has acquired the weight of a glacier,’ I said. ‘And I don’t say it lightly. When I try to ask the question, I feel paralyzed. Words freeze in my mouth. Rubiya, do you understand me?’

  She wanted me to continue.

  ‘Please, this is really a question for Irem. But I must ask you because you know a lot of things about her. If Irem were walking here with us today, I would have asked her the same question.’

  Irem was pregnant, I said. There were visible signs. It took me a while to open my eyes, but the signs were there. I saw them. She was pregnant. The court martial took place in the Badami Bagh camp. She told the presiding officer that I was not guilty. She had not even charged me. The legal officer had charged me. She withdrew the false charges. The court martial presiding officer cleared me. But the question remained. Someone did that thing. Who? Why? The press published the story that in a way closed the case. The papers reported that the ‘prison guard’ would enter her room every night and take advantage of her. The ‘prison guard’ was a Muslim, the papers said. Irem received a letter from him after the court martial, the papers said. ‘If she promises not to take me to the court, I am willing to marry her,’ the guard had written. I wanted to believe this. But I could not. If she knew it was the guard who did it, then why did she not charge him earlier, during my court martial? She knew that I did not do it, and when the court saw me as guilty she withdrew all the charges. But she refrained from naming the real culprit. To be honest, when I pleaded not guilty, I suspected the General himself, and a few other officers, were guilty. But I did not say a word. I was not sure.

  Rubiya and I were walking in the garden when it started to snow. Dry symmetrical crystals started falling on her black coat. Slowly, then fast. The children were far away from us, happy, playing in the snow. At first we did not seem to mind. But soon took shelter in a tea stall by the gates of the garden.

  ‘Two cups,’ I ordered.

  ‘I am paying,’ she said.

  ‘No, I am older. I am paying.’

  Smoke of hookah mixed with bakerkhani, the Kashmiri pastry, inside the tea stall. Smell of freshly baked bread filled the air. Not far from us two old men were breaking the bread, and sipping kehva tea. Outside, snow was falling slowly on military vehicles. On tombstones. On Sufi shrines. On ruined wooden houses. Big flakes, tens and thousands, swirled in the air. Tens and thousands settled on grass no longer green. Flakes were accumulating on Kashmir the way people in Delhi accumulate on trains. She took off her long coat. Shook her hair. Snow fell down.

  I continued: In the beginning I only suspected, but then something happened that made me absolutely sure. That day, a few weeks after the court martial, when the house was being rearranged Irem had shown up with a green bag. I do not know how she got out of the prison or how she entered the Raj Bhavan complex. Pretending to be a worker in the kitchen perhaps. Taking advantage of the lax security. Security is not always tight. I saw her enter. I saw everything from the kitchen window. There were vegetables in the bag and she dug her hand in the bag and pulled out a vegetable, then put it back in the bag. She repeated this kind of mo
vement several times as if unable to make up her mind. I saw everything through the window. She had chosen the precise moment when most soldiers step down the hill to the barracks for lunch. And she was going to throw a vegetable in the General’s room. General Sahib was inside, resting, and you Rubiya were outside, playing. She knew this. The thing in her hand looked like a vegetable, but it was not a vegetable, as I discovered later. It was a grenade. Made in Pakistan. But she did not throw the grenade. She changed her mind. I saw her struggle. Her hand touched her heart and she turned and then turned back as if she was looking at the house for one last time and disappeared behind the plane trees. I ran out of the kitchen after she had long disappeared. She had forgotten the bag by the verandah and I brought the bag into the kitchen and one by one I placed the things on the table and it was then I found the grenade. It was clear: she had meant to kill the General, and I understood why, but I never understood one thing. Why did she change her mind? Was it because she saw you, Rubiya, playing nearby? And she could not imagine making that child an orphan?

  Rubiya did not say anything.

  I threw the grenade into the river. I never reported the incident. Then resigned from the army. Rubiya, do you know where the bag is? I threw it away with the vegetables in the river. And the moment I threw it away I knew what to do next.

  Rubiya’s elbows were on the table and her head between her hands.

  ‘Chef Kirpal,’ she said.

  I remained quiet because I knew now she would tell me something on her own. There was water from melted snow on her brow and I felt like wiping it but I knew it might interrupt what she was about to say, so I did nothing. Her long jacket, dangling from the peg on the wall, had snow on it, as did the tips of her shoes. I had wiped my shoes clean, but my glasses were covered with little melted drops.

  The tea-wallah was yelling at his assistant.

  ‘Sahib, Memsahib, kehva!’ The owner brought us the cups himself. There were strands of saffron floating on top.

  ‘For special cases,’ the owner told us, ‘I have a room upstairs. No one will dis-ta-rub you up there.’

  How mistaken that man was about the nature of our relationship. But we decided to move anyway.

  The stairs creaked as we followed the man, cups and jackets in our hands. There was a shaft of light entering the room from the right side of the lake. The upstairs smelled of pine. He left a little brazier on the table for us. The embers inside were glowing.

  Her hands as she placed them on top of the brazier were as beautiful as her face. And very young. She moved a bit. The shaft of light lit up her face.

  ‘Chef Kirpal,’ she said, ‘Irem never told me this. She never said a word about that incident you describe.’

  Then we were silent.

  I don’t know from where the courage came but then I reached out and touched Rubiya’s cheek. She did not turn her face.

  ‘I feel relieved talking to you, Rubiya,’ I said.

  She did not say anything.

  ‘Why are you so silent?’

  ‘Chef Kirpal,’ she asked, ‘why is this world such a disappointing place?’

  I was at a loss for words.

  ‘Chef,’ she almost hit me, ‘I am angry at Father. Very angry. I am angry he did this, and I am sad he is dead. But I am also very angry that he is dead.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should not have –’

  ‘You did nothing wrong. But.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Now I must leave,’ she said. ‘The bus leaves at five in the afternoon.’

  ‘Please do not go.’

  ‘I must.’

  ‘In that case I must tell you for one last time how much your poems mean to me.’

  ‘Chef Kirpal, poetry makes not a thing happen.’

  ‘No. Rubiya. No. Your poems have changed me. I feel like running through the streets, through the narrow trails, I feel like climbing up the mountains to request the people of Kashmir not to lose compassion for us Indians, and I feel like telling my own countrymen not to lose compassion for Kashmiris. Rubiya, your words are helping people like me to say things we want to say.’

  ‘Chef Kirpal, are you all right?’

  Outside it had temporarily stopped snowing. The roofs of houses covered with layers looked beautiful. Black-and-white smoke arose from the chimneys. The boats in the lake were absolutely motionless. The chenar trees, on both sides of the road, were heavy with snow. The sky above them was filled with clouds and absolutely red. The road was white, but the sky was red. Two horsemen passed by.

  ‘I will accompany you to the bus terminal.’

  ‘No, please don’t. It is easier this way.’

  She removed her jacket from the peg.

  ‘Chef Kirpal, from this window at exactly five o’clock you will be able to see the bus to Pakistan. Just stay here. This is the perfect place to say farewell to me. I will wave at you from the bus.’

  ‘OK. I will stay.’

  ‘Chef Kirpal, I sense you are sick. Your eyes blink as if you are about to collapse.’

  ‘Please do not worry. Nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘Before I leave, Chef Kirpal, tell me about yourself. Tell me what you felt towards Irem.’

  ‘I do not know.’

  For some unknown reason at that moment I thought about my mother. The way she used to spend so many hours in the kitchen, never eating with those at the table, always serving. Cooking was her way to say how she felt towards people close to her.

  ‘I do not know,’ I said to Rubiya, ‘I do not know how I felt towards Irem, but now that I think of it, now that you have asked me, I think that that feeling must have been special.’

  In the brazier the embers were dying fast, and Rubiya hugged me, and then she left. She walked out of the door, I heard her steps on the wooden stairs, and I slowly sat down in the chair by the window, and started my second cup of tea, and dunked bakerkhani, the fragile Kashmiri pastry, in tea, and all of a sudden the past started coming back to me, and I felt as if I was soaking up vast expanses of time, and I recalled that long ago day when I had visited Irem in the hospital and the first thing she had said after a long silence, You smell of garlic. What can I do? I had asked. Garlic has entered the pores of my skin. Try a lemon, she had said. It always works.

  It has not worked, I almost say to her.

  Irem, I almost say.

  At five I stood up, and saw the bus to Pakistan pass by the tea house, and slowly, as I waved, the vehicle became a fuzzy vapor, indistinguishable from the road. Somewhere inside my brain I heard a vibration, the Ninth, coming to a close. Several times my hand tried to reach out for her, but her bus kept moving further and further, receding into that forbidden land, until it became a little black dot. I felt it was time to rest for a while, because there was still a lot more work to do, a lot more cooking. Then it began to snow.

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers’ Program, le Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and the Banff Centre for the Arts for providing assistance to create this work.

  The poem ‘Afterwards’ appeared originally in danDelion (vol. 33, #1). Irem is modeled partially on Shahnaz Kauser, someone I read about in newspaper articles by Mannika Chopra: ‘A Pakistani Mother Speaks of Life in Indian Jail Limbo’ (The Boston Globe, June 2002) and Khalid Hasan: ‘Jailed in India, Unwanted in Pakistan’ (Friday Times, August 2002). ‘Had Saadat Hasan Manto been alive, he would have written a story about Shahnaz Kauser.’ This one line moved and inspired me throughout the creation of this work. Shahnaz’s story has been best told in Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Harvard University Press, 2005). Thanks to Pankaj Mishra (New York Review of Books) and Basharat Peer (Curfewed Night) for bold reporting on Kashmir that brought attention to ‘interrogation camps’ like Papa-1 and Papa-2. I relied on several publications to understand Siachen or Rose Glacier, start
ing with the 1912 expedition accounts of Fanny Bullock Workman. No one has written better on Siachen than Amitav Ghosh in Countdown (Ravi Dayal, 1999) and Kevin Fedarko, ‘The Coldest War’ (Outsider, February 2003). I am indebted to both for valuable information. Other books I found useful include: Conflict Without End (Viking, 2002) by Lt. Gen. (Retd.) V. R. Raghavan, War at the Top of the World (Key Porter, 1999) by Eric Margolis, and Behind the Vale (Roli, 2003) by M. J. Akbar. Thanks to the outspoken Indian army soldiers and officers for sharing Kashmir stories. Every flake of snow (and if I may, every glacier) begins with a nucleation site, a tiny particle. That tiny particle (for this book) was my inability to comprehend the early death of the poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001). These pages are immensely inspired by his life and work.

  I would like to thank everyone at Véhicule Press (Montreal), especially Nancy Marrelli, Bruce Henry and Simon Dardick. To Bloomsbury, and Penguin India. For their generous advice on early drafts thanks to Umarraj Singh Saberwal, Chef Olivier Fuldauer, Renuka Chatterjee, Robert Majzels, Lissa Cowan, and Nidhi Srinivas. Thanks (for many reasons) to Adi, Rosa, Amit Pal, Janice Lee, Dilreen Kaur, Farhat Rehman, Denise Drury, Agatha Schwartz, Aparna Sundar and Taras Grescoe. To Chef Cameron Stauch, whom I interviewed in New Delhi, to Jerome Lowenthal, my ‘Beethoven consultant’, to Lorna Crozier (the line in italics on page 95 is inspired by her poetry collection The Sex Lives of Vegetables), to Maria José de la Macorra for the sketch on page 31, to Negar Akhavi for sharing the Dalai Lama ‘Chinese gulag’ story, to Nadia Kurd, Riaz Mehmood and Wajahat Ahmad for the Kashmiri translation and Perso-Arabic script on page 128.

  Special thanks to Andrew Steinmetz, Jackie Kaiser, Natasha Daneman and Alexandra Pringle.

  a note on the author

  Jaspreet Singh was born in Punjab, and brought up in Kashmir and in several cities in India. He is a former research scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Montreal. His debut short-story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for four awards including the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Region. He lives in the Canadian Rockies.