Baba returned from work and I went to the kitchen to fix us drinks. The kitchen looked like a chaotic, thick still-life that was not quite still. The pressure cooker, presumably with lentils inside, was on the hob emitting dying staccato whistles, the fire underneath it turned off. On a stainless-steel plate, the bombil were lying dusted in salt and turmeric. On another plate, the giant, flaky pat of a flame-charred aubergine rested. The worktop between the cooker and the sink was entirely covered with onion skins, vegetable peelings, wilted coriander stalks, garlic husks, sprinklings of flour, a careless scattering of green chillies, a disfigured finger of ginger. In a big steel mixing-bowl sat a lump of kneaded dough. In another small container there was rice soaking under a couple of inches of water. I could barely find space on a surface to rest our glasses and pour whisky and cubes of ice into each.
‘The kitchen is a mess,’ I said, handing Baba his drink.
‘Don’t worry, she’ll clean it all up before she leaves,’ Ma said.
‘Tell me now about why she can’t stand Milly.’
Ma began, ‘Renu is a difficult person, as you saw. She’s very lippy—’
Baba interrupted us. ‘I can’t believe the two of you are sitting gossiping about servants,’ he said with mild distaste.
Ma turned to me and said, almost in a whisper, ‘Later’; she always conceded to my father.
I was in no mood to start an argument with Baba; we had clashed before on the subject of masters and servants several times and it would be ploughing the same arid furrow now. While swallowing the words I could have used to challenge him, a memory from my boyhood came back with sudden, sharp-edged clarity.
It was the year before we left Calcutta for Bombay and it must have been either during the school summer break or on a Thursday or Sunday, since I was at home during the day. It was the height of summer, June or July, around one in the afternoon, when the sun was at its most killing. The temperature must have been touching forty degrees, if not slightly above that, because the tar on the roads had gone all soft and yielding. Baba sent out our live-in maid, a girl called Nisha, who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old, to get some batteries from the general store in the main market, which was about a fifteen-minute brisk walk from our home. In just over half an hour Nisha returned but with the wrong batteries. Baba shouted at her and sent her out again immediately. Nisha, crestfallen, made the trip a second time. This time it took her slightly longer than half an hour.
‘Wrong batteries, again,’ Baba roared and flung the packet at the wall. Nisha cowered. Her face looked shrivelled. My mother appeared but she looked timid too.
‘Do you have nothing in your head?’ Baba raged at the girl. ‘I told you to ask for the small red ones, not the big ones. Small, SMALL, do you get it?’
My heart was rattling in my ribcage.
Ma said, ‘Why don’t you write it down for her? She can show the chit to the shopkeeper.’
‘But the shopkeeper can’t read,’ Baba said. He turned to Nisha and barked, ‘Go now. Ask for the small red batteries. Small ones. Go, go!’
I could see her chin quivering but she fled. How could she, or any of her kind, have answered back? She was making the trip a third time in this temperature, which felt like it could turn a human into vapour within minutes, and she hadn’t had the chance to sit down to rest a bit and cool off and have a drink before she was dispatched again. I ran to the front veranda to see her tiny figure; it was running instead of walking, getting smaller and smaller as it reached the end of our long residential back street and turned the corner. There wasn’t a single human around in this heat, not even a stray dog or cat or the ubiquitous crows. The houses stood dreaming, utterly still, heavy with shadows on one side, flayed by burning light on the other. I was baffled by why she was running; wouldn’t walking be cooler, safer?
When she returned, it was with the wrong batteries again. Baba took one look at them, gave out a sound between a snarl and a groan, scrunched up his face and bared his teeth, an expression halfway between feral and despairing. He tried to utter some words but they didn’t emerge. Ma, who looked stricken, interposed herself physically between Baba and Nisha.
Nisha’s mouth twisted and opened; she could no longer check her tears. There was no restraint to it – she sobbed and hiccuped as she cried. Her knees bent and I couldn’t tell if she wanted to sit down and cry because it would be easier, or if she wanted to fall to my mother’s or my father’s feet and beg to be excused from being sent out again. I could hear my own blood pumping away furiously. Perhaps I had even begun to tremble. All I could think of was how the girl had had to run around without any food or water, for it must have been a long while since her breakfast and it was well past lunchtime. She was ripe for a heatstroke.
Then I noticed her feet. There were tiny black stone-chips, of the sort that were used to create the surface of roads, sticking to her soles in small clusters, and singly, here and there, an archipelago in an atlas. It all fell into place: she had taken off her slippers because they kept getting stuck to the road, made slightly gooey in this heat, impeding her journey to and back from the shop; but the road was too hot for her bare feet, so she had been obliged to run in order not to get blistered. The tar, beginning to melt, had had an adhesive effect on the area of contact between the skin of her soles and the stone-chips, some of which had come loose and got stuck to her feet.
A switch tripped: with all the cold fury that I could summon to my voice, I turned to my father and said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed to send this little girl out in this heat so many times? She has been running from pillar to post without so much as a sip of water … And you, a big, able, pampered man, standing here, giving orders to a slip of a thing …’
I rolled my fist into a tight ball and brought it up, as if to punch him. My mother screamed.
That was a turning point, and both my parents and I knew it. Something in the very air between us had been cleaved and it was going to make its presence felt every time the subject of domestic servants came up.
Later I found out that my parents had been baffled, more than anything else, by the side I had chosen to take: I had, inexplicably to them, crossed over to the wrong side of the ‘us versus them’ equation. Years later, in a similar situation, my father had taunted me, ‘Turned out to be quite a Gandhi type, haven’t you? All that expensive education I’m paying for is teaching you all kinds of fancy posturing.’ It had made my blood boil then; it still had the power to bring it to a low simmer if I dwelt on it for any length.
Baba’s comment on gossiping about servants animated that memory, but now was not the time to make the three of us acknowledge its presence, not one day into my month-long visit here, so I tinkled the ice against my glass as Baba went to change into his home clothes and Ma and I sat making inconsequential chit-chat. I was a world away from them, yet I could choose – and I did choose, for most of the time – to let this temporary suspension of my London life feel cosy and cocooning, as if I had escaped back to the age of irresponsibility.
Cooking-aunty returned and went straight into the kitchen. In an hour’s time, she put the food, in covered bowls and serving dishes, on to the dining table, set out plates and cutlery, said, improbably, ‘Bye’ in English to no one in particular while standing at the front door, then was gone.
‘She never says “Bye”. What’s got into her?’ Baba said; Baba, who normally never paid attention to domestic staff, or engaged in any way with them apart from paying their salaries.
‘Maybe she’s thrilled to have a shaheb in the house and to cook for him,’ Ma joked.
I went to the kitchen to pour us another drink. It was spotless.
The conversation meandered in a pleasant, aimless way, touching on mildly interesting things that were neither urgent nor terribly serious. It was all very agreeable, although I think both my mother and I were mindful of steering away from the topic of ‘the minutiae of servants’ lives’, as my father would put it, certainly in his presenc
e. But my curiosity had been piqued and I wanted to ask her to tell me a little bit more about Renu; she seemed so determinedly truculent, something so out of character for a cook that I wanted to will into being events and causes more profound than the simple explanation of personality.
Beyond my mother cryptically saying ‘Jealousy’ to my question of ‘Why can’t Renu stand Milly?’, we didn’t get much further on the topic. The food was simple and textbook-perfect. The grammatical error in spicing, as it were, that my mother found so offensive in cooking-aunty’s food, and that she thought she was prone to, was nowhere to be tasted: the green papaya and prawns had been spiced with cumin and bay leaves, with garam masala and ghee added right at the end; the aubergines were a mushy tomatoey medley, with caramelised onions and ginger and sparkling with raw fresh coriander and green chillies. It was as if Renu was countering, successfully, an accusation that had been silently – and not so silently – levelled at her and under whose yoke she laboured in my parents’ home.
‘Everything is exactly as it should be,’ I said to my mother. ‘Why did you say she has no clue about the rules of traditional spicing?’
Ma grimaced and said, ‘Yes, she hasn’t messed this up, but you wait and watch. It all depends on her moods.’ Then she repeated, ‘It’s because you are here.’
An idea was slowly taking on edges and shape in my head. I wanted to sound it out with my mother. She knew about my current project, the regional Indian cookbook. In a way, she had seeded this project in me: years ago, she had sent me one of a series that Penguin published – The Calcutta Cookbook. It was atrociously printed and organised, the index was a hot mess; clearly the people behind the book had no idea how to go about producing a cookbook. But that series – an Assam cookbook, a Goa cookbook, a Parsi cookbook, and so on – was an inspired idea, if woefully executed and commissioned, with some gems lurking here and there. The Calcutta Cookbook, for example, had any number of brilliant recipes, among them things I had always heard talked about, but had never eaten, such as a beetroot-and-egg dish, khagina, and a toasted moong dal with mango ginger. Amazingly, it featured the street food-stall favourite of the ’80s, chow mein. Indians have always known that there is nothing called Indian food, only different, sometimes wildly and thrillingly different, regional cuisines. This is a fact that has been flattened out in the West. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile, if only for the makers of my book, to produce something that amounted to a manageable guided tour around these regional cuisines?
So, prompted by that thought, I asked Ma, ‘Do you think she’ll be able to give us recipes from … from her part of Bengal?’ I had no idea where this was.
My mother snorted with open contempt. ‘What do you want Medinipur recipes for? What special things do they have, anyway? Why not go for a selection of general Bengali food? I can give you those recipes.’
I knew her ego had been slightly dented – why should her son ask this upstart cook for authentic Bengali recipes when she herself could give me any number of them, and better ones? – but she was entirely justified in her point. It was enough to give readers an idea of the differences between the different Indian states without having to get into the micro-details of intra-state district divisions. It was a cookbook after all, maybe even a coffee-table item, not a history-and-sociology book.
Over the next few days I mulled over the idea, called various friends who were well placed to help me with the book or had friends in the states that I would be visiting for research. I lazed around at home, read, wasted time online, depleted my father’s fine and seemingly inexhaustible collection of single malts and, above all, ate some food that Ankita would surely have called ‘life-changing’ or, literally translated from the Bengali, ‘life-turning’.
Milly came in around noon and on one occasion, when my mother was out somewhere, I gave her lunch, arranging all the dishes on a plate and telling her what each was. They were all leftovers from the night before, or even two nights previously, and Renu had done a fine job. In my rusty Hindi, I struggled to find the correct words for spices or vegetables whose names I had only ever known in Bengali and English and had to ask Milly once or twice if I was right or wrong. It was painful to watch her seized up with shyness or inhibition or whatever it was, so I quickly exited the kitchen, resolving never again to talk her through the dishes in future.
One day, as Milly was eating her lunch in the kitchen, the doorbell rang. I opened the door; it was Renu, with a plastic bag of vegetables and greens. She had already done her morning schedule and wasn’t due to come in again until the evening. Before I could say ‘Come in’, she launched into an explanation of her untimely appearance.
‘Tonight’s vegetables,’ she said. ‘No green bananas, coriander, curry leaves, chillies, pumpkin in the pheeej … so I thought I would get some because I was going that way’ – indicating the vegetable market – ‘and it would save you having to go out.’
She had taken off her slippers outside the threshold.
‘I’ll put them away, don’t worry,’ she said and ran into the kitchen. I heard the sound of the fridge door being opened, vegetable trays being brought out and pushed back in, the scrunching of plastic bags, but not a single word between Renu and Milly. Then Renu came out and left the flat in one swift movement like a puff of wind. She didn’t look back at me sitting in the living room, didn’t say ‘Bye’ or ‘I’ll be back in the evening’, just pulled the door shut from the outside and left.
She came back at half-past six to cook dinner. I had got into the swing of things by now, so I was ready with the menu – cabbage thoran, a Tamil pumpkin dish with tamarind and mustard paste, chicken chettinad – and with the recipes for two of the dishes she had never cooked before, the pumpkin and the chicken. Surliness I had come to expect from her, but not the degree of borderline rudeness that was on show that evening. She didn’t look at me once, spoke minimally (and when she did, it was with extreme curtness) and snapped at me, twice, when I paused in the reading out of the recipes because I could see that she was doing three different things at the same time – taking out the vegetables from the fridge, putting the cut-up chicken in the sink to wash, taking out the cooking pans and wok from a cupboard – and would perhaps have preferred me to read them to her when she had a minute to pay attention.
‘Arrey, read, read, I don’t have all the time in the world,’ she said.
‘I was waiting for you to listen. So many instructions at once, you may forget what goes in when—’
She cut me short with a very Bengali expression of contempt – ‘Arrey, dhur’ – then repeated, ‘Read, read. I’ll remember.’
I was taken aback. With any other person I would have asked for the reason behind the edgy tone, or taken mild offence, but the difference in our social and class standing prevented me from doing either. How on earth did echt-Indian people, who had no notion of taking lip from people they considered their inferiors, react to her? Or did she let herself go only at my parents’ home because my mother didn’t indulge in the hallowed Indian practice of shouting at servants, certainly not in my presence? I read out the two recipes, one after the other, decided against asking, ‘Will you remember?’ or adding, ‘Do ask me again if you need reminding’, and went to the living room.
I caught my mother’s eyes, raised my eyebrows and said in English, under my voice, ‘Bad temper today. Best avoided.’
Ma, also switching to English, asked, ‘What happened?’ She had clearly not heard the brief exchange; besides, there wasn’t much to hear – it was mostly in the realm of tone and attitude and facial expression. ‘Shall I say something to her?’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Absolutely not. She’s just in one of her moods this evening.’
‘We’re getting a bit tired of her moods. Sometimes she can be completely out of order.’
The conversation could potentially lead to a minefield, the ‘correct’ way for servants to behave, so I hastily and energetically tried to steer both of us away from t
he subject. It worked or, rather, Ma thought better of it, and I was relieved that we had avoided unpleasantness. Or so I thought; because sitting down later that evening to eat the food Renu had cooked brought everything back with renewed vigour.
Every single dish she had cooked was wrong. She had committed the cardinal sin, in my mother’s books: adding hing to the thoran. The pumpkin tasted of nothing, despite containing two of the most powerful ingredients in Indian cuisine, tamarind and fresh mustard paste. At first I couldn’t put my finger on what the chicken was lacking – it wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t the dish it was supposed to be – then I realised that she had left out the aromatics, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, that were supposed to be fried in hot oil right at the beginning. It was clear to me that she had not been able to retain – as who would? – the long list of ingredients for not one but two dishes, and the subsequent processes for each, slightly involved and complicated in the case of the chettinad chicken, that I had read out only once.
My father was indifferent, but my mother was incensed and jubilant at the same time: here was evidence for her point about Renu being a hit-and-miss cook who didn’t really have a proper understanding of the fundamental grammar and syntax of cooking. I felt nervous that we were again going to embark on the business of servant-bashing; such excruciatingly uncomfortable territory. Ma complained at length and my discomfort grew, to the extent that I found myself feeling slightly protective of cooking-aunty and defending her.
‘Hing is not an entirely unintuitive addition to thoran, don’t you think?’ I pleaded. ‘If there are already mustard seeds, curry leaves and coconut, hing seems to be naturally a part of that.’
Ma remained unconvinced. Baba, to his credit, added, ‘The chicken is actually lovely. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be like in its perfect incarnation but this is great.’
I wanted to lean over and give him a hug, which was a complete no-no in my family and would probably be seen as a frivolous Western affectation.
A State of Freedom Page 5