by Martin Suter
It was silent on the tram now, save for the recording which announced the stops. Maravan got off at the penultimate one, put up his umbrella and continued walking along the same road. The Number 12 drove past him, the illuminated windows heading off into the distance, until they were no more than just another patch of light on the rain-drenched road.
It was cold. Maravan wrapped his scarf more tightly around him and turned into Theodorstrasse. Rows of grey houses on either side, parked cars, wet and glinting in the white light of the street lamps, the occasional shop – Asian specialities, travel agent, second-hand, cash transfer.
When he came to a brown 1950s block of flats Maravan fished his keys out of his pocket and went through a graffiti-filled passageway, past two overflowing dustbins, to an entry door.
He stopped in the hallway by the wall lined with pigeonholes and letterboxes. He opened the one marked Maravan Vilasam.
His post consisted of a letter from Sri Lanka addressed in his eldest sister’s handwriting, a flyer from a firm hiring out cleaning ladies, election propaganda for a xenophobic party and a catalogue from a wholesaler dealing in specialist kitchen appliances. He opened the last of these while still beside the post box, and leafed through it as he climbed the stairs to his fourth-floor flat – two small rooms, a tiny bathroom and a surprisingly spacious kitchen with a balcony, all connected by a hallway covered with well-worn lino.
Maravan turned on the light. Before entering the sitting room he popped into the bathroom to wash his face and hands. Then he removed his shoes, put the post on the table, and struck a match to light the wick of the deepam, the clay lamp which stood on the domestic shrine. He went down on his knees, put his hands together in front of his face and bowed before Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and beauty.
It was chilly in the flat. Maravan squatted in front of the oil burner, pulled the ignition and let it spring back. The resonant sound of metallic hammering echoed through the flat five times before the burner ignited. Maravan took off his leather jacket, hung it on one of two coat hooks in the hallway, and went into his bedroom.
When he came out again he was wearing a batik shirt, a blue-and-red striped sarong and sandals. He sat beside the burner and read his sister’s letter. The news was not good. Deliveries were being stopped at checkpoints on the border of Tamil-held areas. Very few of the food deliveries from February and March had reached Kilinochchi District. Prices of basic foodstuffs, medicines and fuel had risen exponentially.
He put the letter back on the table and tried to soothe his bad conscience. It had been almost three months since his last visit to the Batticaloa Bazaar, the nearby Tamil shop, to give money and his sister’s ID number to the owner. It had been 400 francs, 37,800 rupees after commission.
Although he earned 3,000 francs per month, lived alone and paid a reasonable rent of 700, after the Huwyler deducted health insurance and tax at source, Maravan had just enough money left to eat. Or, more accurately, to cook.
Cooking was not just Maravan’s profession, it was his great passion. Even when the family still lived in Colombo he had spent most of his time in the kitchen with Nangay. His parents had worked in one of the city’s large hotels, his father at reception, his mother as a housekeeper. When not at school, the children were in their grandmother’s care. But because Maravan did not yet go to school, his great aunt Nangay would often take him with her to work, so that her sister could do the housework and shopping. Nangay had six helpers in the large kitchen. One of them always had time to look after the little boy.
Thus he grew up among pots and pans, herbs and spices, fruit and vegetables. He helped to wash rice, pick over lentils, grate coconut, harvest coriander, and when he was as young as three he was allowed, under supervision, to chop tomatoes and slice onions with a sharp knife.
From an early age Maravan was fascinated by the process of transforming a few raw ingredients into something quite different. Something not merely edible, not merely filling and nourishing, but – something which could even make you happy.
Maravan would watch carefully, taking note of ingredients, quantities, preparation techniques and sequences. At the age of five he could already cook entire menus, and at six, before he was meant to start school, he learnt how to read and write because he could no longer keep all the recipes in his head.
For Maravan the first day at school was almost an even greater tragedy than the death of his parents shortly afterwards, the details of which he did not discover until he was almost an adult. As far as he was concerned, all that had happened was that they had not come to Jaffna with the rest of the family; most of the time they had not been around anyway. He found the journey to Jaffna chaotic and his relatives’ house, where they stayed initially, small and cramped. But he did not have to go to school and could spend his days in the kitchen with Nangay.
The oil burner had brought some warmth into the small sitting room. Maravan got up and went into the kitchen.
Four fluorescent bulbs bathed the room in white light. It contained a large fridge and a freezer of the same size, a gas stove with four burners, a double sink, a work table and a wall unit covered with stainless steel, on top of which were various appliances and food processors. The room was spanking clean and resembled a laboratory more than a kitchen. Only by taking a closer look could you see that the various units were not all exactly the same height and that they had slightly different fronts. Maravan had bought each one individually, either second-hand from markets or from specialist exchanges, and installed them with the help of one of his compatriots, who had been a plumber back in Sri Lanka and who worked here as a warehouse assistant.
He put a small frying pan on the lowest flame, poured in some coconut oil and opened the door to the balcony. Almost all the windows opposite were dark; the back courtyard far below him lay silent and abandoned. It was still raining – heavy, cold drops. He left the balcony door slightly ajar.
Pots with mini curry trees were lined up in his bedroom, each with its bamboo cane and each a different age. The largest reached up to his armpits. He had got it as a sapling some years back from another Sri Lankan. Taking cuttings from this plant he had raised one tree after another, until he had so many that he could sell the odd one. He did not like doing this, but when winter came he did not have enough space. The mini trees were not hardy: it was only during the warm months that they could sit on his kitchen balcony; in winter he had to put them in the bedroom under a grow light.
He broke off two of the nine-leaved twigs, went back into the kitchen, threw them into the hot oil and added a ten-centimetre piece of cinnamon. Slowly the aroma of his childhood rose from the pan.
In a small cupboard under the wall unit he kept his distillation equipment: a flask, a bridge with a cooling jacket, a receiving flask, two flask holders, a thermometer and a roll of PVC tubing. He carefully assembled the glass elements so that the distillation flask sat over a gas burner, put the roll of tubing into one sink, and connected one end to the tap, the other to the cooling jacket. Then he filled the sink with cold water, took a plastic bag of ice cubes out of the freezer, and shook them in.
Meanwhile the fragrance of coconut oil, curry leaves and cinnamon had opened out fully. Maravan emptied the contents of the pan into a tall-sided heatproof glass jar and processed it with his wand mixer into a thick, nut-brown liquid, which he then poured into the distillation flask.
Maravan lit the gas flame under the flask, pulled up his only chair and sat beside his improvised distillation plant. It was important to control the process. He knew from experience that unless the liquid was heated gently, the aroma would change. He had often tried to capture the essence of this smell, the smell of his childhood. But he had never succeeded.
Now the sides of the glass flask were beginning to steam. Drops appeared, increasing in number, and ran down the misty condensation, creating clear lines. The temperature of the vapour rose quickly to fifty, sixty, seventy degrees. Maravan turned the flame down and the
tap on slightly. Cold water made its way up the transparent tubing, filled the double wall of the cooling jacket, exited the cooler, and flowed through a length of tubing into the plughole of the second basin.
The only sound in the kitchen was the occasional gurgling of the cooling water going down the plug. From time to time he could hear steps in the attic room above him. This is where Gnanam lived, another Tamil, as were all the inhabitants of Theodorstrasse 94. He had not been here long, and after the standard six months of not being allowed to work had found a job as a kitchen help, like most of the asylum seekers from Sri Lanka. He worked in the city hospital. The fact that Maravan could hear him wandering around at this time – it was just before two – meant that Gnanam must be on early shift.
Maravan had only asylum-seeker status and had to work as a kitchen help. But compared to Gnanam he was privileged.
There was no early shift starting at four at the Huwyler. When he was on days he had to be in the kitchen at nine o’clock. And he did not have to deal with 200-litre pots or scour blackened frying pans that were a square metre in size. At the Huwyler he was able to learn new things, even though they gave him no opportunity to do so. He had eyes in the back of his head; he picked up new techniques just by watching and learned from other people’s mistakes. He was not bothered that the other chefs did not treat him particularly well. He had suffered worse treatment. Both here and back in his homeland.
Marvan stood up, tossed two handfuls of wheat flour into a mixing bowl, added some lukewarm water and a little ghee, sat down again with the bowl and began to knead the dough.
During his chef’s apprenticeship in Jaffna, his teachers found it hard to accept that he was more skilful, talented and imaginative than they were. He had had to learn that he needed to play dumb in order to get on. And later, when he left Jaffna and worked in a hotel on the south-western coast, the Singhalese treated him with the usual condescension they showed Tamils.
The dough was now smooth and elastic. Maravan put the bowl to one side and covered it with a clean dishcloth.
Recently he had enjoyed working at the Huwyler. Or, more precisely, since Andrea had started there. Like everyone on the team, he was fascinated by this peculiar, slender, pale creature who looked straight through everybody with an absent smile. But he fancied he was the only one she ever paid any attention to – not very often, maybe, but it did happen. His suspicions were confirmed by the fact that the chefs behaved even more patronizingly towards him whenever she was around.
Today, for example, while he was rinsing plates and Andrea was waiting for Bandini to check a course, she had looked over at him and smiled. Not smiled through him, but at him.
Maravan did not have much contact with women. The unmarried daughters in the Tamil community were too sheltered to strike up relationships with men. A Tamil woman had to be a virgin when she got married. And traditionally her parents decided who she married.
There were some Swiss women who had shown an interest in him. But the Tamils considered them to be bad women because of their permissive lifestyles. If he got involved with one of them it would bring shame to his family in Sri Lanka. They would find out sooner or later; the community of Tamil refugees, the diaspora, would make sure of that. He had come to terms with the fact that he would have to lead a bachelor life, comforting himself with vague thoughts of a future as a husband and father in Sri Lanka.
But since Andrea had appeared on the scene, feelings were stirring within him which he had hoped to suppress with his intense and overwhelming passion for cooking.
The first drop of the distillate fell into the separating funnel, bright and clear. Another followed, then another. Soon, the distillate was trickling at short, regular intervals into the container. Maravan tried to think of nothing else except the drops. How they kept on falling, like the seconds, minutes, days and years.
He did not know how long it had taken for the contents of the flask to be reduced to a few centilitres and the trickling to stop. Maravan opened the small tap of the separating funnel and allowed the water to run off until all that was left in the lower part of the conical vessel was the essential oil. He mixed it with the concentrate from the flasks and put it to his nose.
He could smell the curry leaves, the cinnamon, the coconut oil. But he could not find what he was looking for: the essence of what these three things had combined to produce in Nangay’s iron pan over the wood fire.
Maravan took a tawa, a heavy iron pan, from the wall and put it on the gas. He sprinkled some flour on to the work surface beside the stove and made a few chapattis out of the dough. When the pan was hot enough, he put the first one in, browning it on both sides. Another aroma rose up from the pan, which transported him back to his childhood.
When Maravan was fifteen, Nangay sent him to Kerala in southern India. An old friend of hers was working there as an Ayurvedic chef in a newly opened hotel complex, the first in the country offering a broad range of Ayurvedic treatments. Maravan would work in the hotel kitchen and be initiated into Ayurvedic cuisine.
He had already learnt a lot from Nangay and made little effort to hide this. Like a child starting school who can already read and write, he got on the nerves of his teachers and fellow students with all his knowledge. Although they lived on top of each other in the cramped staff quarters, he could find little in common with his colleagues and superiors. Even Nangay’s friend distanced herself from him. She feared that he might have a more difficult time if he were seen as her protégé.
For the most part Maravan kept himself to himself, focusing on learning; this made him even more unpopular. In his spare time he would take long walks along the unending beach where not a soul could be seen. Or he would spend hours practising his elegant dives into the waves that rolled in unremittingly from the Indian Ocean.
In Kerala Maravan became a loner. And had remained one ever since.
The chapattis were ready. He took one, drizzled a little of the fresh concentrate on it, closed his eyes, and breathed in the aroma. He took a bite, chewed it carefully, then, instead of swallowing, pushed it to the roof of his mouth with his tongue and breathed slowly out through his nostrils – of all his failed attempts, he would give this one the second highest score: a nine. In a notebook labelled ‘Extracts’ he jotted down the date, time, ingredients, distillation time and temperature.
Afterwards he ate the product of his experiment as a seasoning on the chapattis, quickly and without much gusto, then washed the flasks and tubes in his kit, put them to dry on the draining board, turned off the light and went back into the sitting room.
On a small table by the wall was an obsolete, second-hand computer. Maravan switched it on and waited patiently for the machine to boot up. He connected to the internet and checked the auction for the rotary evaporator, which he had been following for some days. One thousand, four hundred and thirty, the same as yesterday. There were two hours and twelve minutes until the end of the auction.
A rotary evaporator would allow him to do precisely what he had unsuccessfully attempted again just now – in the correct time, at the right temperature, without any burning and no impairment of the taste. The only problem was that such a piece of kit cost over 5,000 francs, far more than Maravan could afford. Sometimes second-hand models were auctioned on the Internet, like the one on the screen in front of him.
Anything under 1,500 was a good price. Maravan had 1,200 put aside. And he could rustle up the rest somehow, so long as the price did not rise any further. He would sit tight for the next couple of hours and make a bid just before the auction closed. Maybe he would get lucky.
He took his sister’s letter from the table and read it all the way through. She only came to the point on the last page: Nangay was ill – Diabetes insipidus. It was not real diabetes. She was thirsty all day long, drinking water by the litre, and had to go to the loo constantly. There was a medicine to treat the condition, but it was expensive and very hard to find in Jaffna. But if she did not take it,
the doctor said she would dehydrate.
Maravan sighed. He returned to the screen. Still 1,430. He turned off the computer and went to bed. In the stairwell he could hear the footsteps of Gnanam on his way to the early shift.
3
A few days later there was a scene in the Huwyler kitchen which would have consequences for Maravan.
Anton Fink had created a starter which he called ‘Glazed langoustines with rice croquant on a curried gelée’, and which he wanted to put on the Menu Surprise for the following day. From the washing-up sink Maravan watched the chef preparing the curry sauce for the gelée: he sautéed some finely chopped onions, stirred in some curry powder and called out, ‘Maravan! Coconut milk!’
Maravan fetched a tin of coconut milk from a cupboard, gave it a good shake, opened the tin and gave it to the demi chef de partie. As the latter was emptying half of the tin into the pan, Maravan said, ‘If you like I’ll make you a proper curry next time.’
Fink put the ladle beside the pan, turned to Maravan, looked him up and down and said, ‘Oh right, a real curry. So some kitchen help is going to show me how to cook, are they? Did you hear that?’
His voice was raised and the chefs nearby looked up.
‘Maravan here has offered to give me a cookery course. Maybe one of you would like to enrol too.’ Fink had noticed that Andrea had come in holding her order pad. ‘How to make a real curry. Introductory course for beginners.’
Maravan had just stood there silently. But now he noticed Andrea and said, ‘I only wanted to help.’
‘That’s exactly what you should be doing, helping. That’s why you’re a kitchen help. You should be helping scrub pans, clean dishes, wash salads and wipe up spillages. But teach me how to cook? Thanks, but I think I’m all right, I can just about manage to put together a little curry on my own.’