For a long time now I have stayed away from certain people.
I was late getting to the station and almost missed the Express because of the American President. His motorcade was passing the Red Fort, not far from the railway terminal. The President is visiting India to sign the nuclear deal. He is staying at the Hotel Taj and the chefs at the hotel have invented a new kebab in his honor. All this in today’s paper. Rarely does one see the photo of a kebab on the front page. It made my mouth water.
Not far from me, a little girl is sitting on the aisle seat. A peach glows in her hand. Moments ago she asked her mother, What do we miss the most when we die? And I almost responded. But her mother put a thick finger on her lips: Shh, children should not talk about death, and she looked at me for a brief second, apologetically. Food, I almost said to the girl. We miss peaches, strawberries, delicacies like Sandhurst curry, kebab pasanda and rogan josh. The dead do not eat marzipan. The smell of bakeries torments them day and night.
Something about this exchange between mother and daughter has upset me. I look out the window. The train is cutting through villages. I don’t even know their names. But the swaying yellow mustard fields and the growing darkness fills me with disquiet about the time I resigned from the army. I find myself asking the same question over and over again. Why did I allow my life to take a wrong turn?
Fourteen years ago I used to work as chef at the General’s residence in Kashmir. I remember the fruit orchard by the kitchen window. For five straight years I cooked for him in that kitchen, then suddenly handed in my resignation and moved to Delhi. I never married. I cook for my mother. Now after a span of fourteen years I am returning to Kashmir.
It is not that in all these years I was not tempted to return. The temptation was at times intense, especially when I heard about the quake and the rubble it left behind. But the earth shook mostly on the enemy side. During my five years of service I was confined to the Indian side – the more beautiful side.
The beauty is still embedded in my brain. It is the kind that cannot be shared with others. Most important things in our lives, like recipes, cannot be shared. They remain within us with a dash of this and a whiff of that and trouble our bones.
The tumor is in your brain, said the specialist. (Last week exactly at three o’clock my CAT scan results came back to the clinic. The dark scan looked quite something inside that box of bright light.) His finger pointed towards an area which resembled a patch of snow, and next to it was a horrifying shape like the dark rings of a tree. Three months to a year maximum, he said. Suddenly I felt very weak and dizzy. My voice disintegrated. The world around me started withering.
I walked the crowded street back home. Cutting through my own cloud, stepping through the fog. My mother greeted me at the door. She knew. My mother already knew. She (who cooked every meal for me when I was young) knew what I did not know myself. She handed me a letter, and slowly walked to her bed.
The letter was postmarked Kashmir. After fourteen years General Sahib finally mailed the letter, and that thin piece of paper delighted me and brought tears to my eyes. His daughter is getting married. In hurriedly scribbled lines he requested me to be the chef for the wedding banquet.
I read the letter a second time, sitting at the kitchen table. My answer was obviously going to be a no. I was not even planning to respond. I felt dizzy. But in the evening while preparing soup I changed my mind. I make all big decisions while cooking. Mother is bedridden most of the time and I served as usual in her room at eight in the evening. I did not reveal the trouble brewing in my brain. During dinner I simply read her the General’s letter.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘You want to go?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It is impossible to say no.’
Dear Kip, Several times in the past I thought of writing to you, but I did not. You know me well, my whole life in the army has been geared to eliminate what is from a practical stand point non-essential.
My daughter (whom you last saw as a child) is getting married, and she is the one who forced me to write this letter. I have heard that your mother is sick, but this is a very important event in our life, and we would like you to be the chef at the wedding. I do not want some new duffer to spoil it.
You are the man for this emergency. I want to see you and I am tired and have much to talk over and plan with you. This wedding feast is perhaps my last battle and I would like for us to win it. I am sure you will not disappoint me.
Yours affectionately,
Lt. General Ashwini Kumar (Retired), VrC, AVSM, PVSM.
Former GOC-in-C, Northern Command.
The General’s daughter used to call me ‘Kip-Ing’ (instead of Kirpal Singh). Since then ‘Kip’ has stuck. In the army everyone has a second name. General Sahib’s nickname was ‘Red’, but it was rarely mentioned in his presence.
‘How many days will you spend there?’ Mother asked.
‘Seven,’ I said. ‘Seven or eight days. I must go, Mother. The neighbor will take care of you. Eating someone else’s food will do you good.’
Mother did not finish the dal soup. Her frail head rested on two white pillows and she held my arm as if we were not going to see each other again.
I urged her to take the yellow tablets and capsules. She agreed only after I raised my voice. I rarely raise my voice in the presence of Mother. Something inside me was definitely changing.
It was then I showed her the wedding card:
Rubiya Kumar
weds
Shahid Lone
‘So the General’s daughter has decided to marry a Muslim?’ she asked.
‘Not just a Muslim,’ I added, ‘but one from the other side of the border.’
Let me put this straight. Sahib is not prejudiced against the Muslims. There were Muslim soldiers in our regiment, and he never once discriminated against any of them to my knowledge. But, of course, General Sahib is not pleased with the wedding. I have read the letter twice, and I sense his hands must have been shaking when he held the pen. Sahib gave his youth to our nation to keep the Pakistanis away, he fought two wars, and now his own daughter is marrying one of them. Did so many soldiers lose their lives for one big nothing?
This train is moving slower than a mountain mule. The engine is old, I know. It resembles me in many ways. But the railway-wallahs insist on calling it an Express. I readjust my glasses, and my gaze drifts from one fuzzy face to another. They will last longer than me – the ears and eyes and noses of other people. Faint scent of pickles fills the compartment. Loud and hazy conversations. Flies have started hovering over the little girl’s peach.
Once I prepare the perfect wedding banquet, General Sahib will refer me to top specialists in the military hospital, and they will start treatment right away. I have a high regard for military doctors. For my mother’s sake, I must live a little longer. I don’t know why I raised my voice in her presence. She needs me more than ever. I must live a little bit longer.
Perhaps it was simply the selfish wish to live just a little bit longer that made me change my mind.
But things must sort out first. Before I begin work for the wedding I want the General to sort out things between us. For the last fourteen years every day I expected a letter from him. And now the wait is over, the letter is in my pocket. I had expected the letter to be heavy, to carry the entire weight of our past, but he offered me nothing. No explanation. I want him to sort out things between us. Not pretend as if there had been a simple misunderstanding.
I still remember the day I had arrived in Kashmir the first time. The mountains and lakes were covered with thick fog. I was nineteen. And I had bought a second-class ticket on this very train. For some reason I remember the train moved faster then.
I must have fallen asleep. I am woken up by a tap on my shoulder. ‘Is this bag yours, is this one yours?’ Two police-wallahs in our compartment. ‘Yes, that one is mine,’ says the civilian man occupying the aisle seat, the girl no longer there. One police-wallah sticks labels on already identified luggage. ‘And the brown suitcase on the rack belongs to my missus,’ the man says.
‘Whose is this big trunk?’
‘Mine,’ I say.
‘You don’t look like a commissioned officer.’
‘It used to belong to a general.’
‘Show me your ID card.’
‘I forgot my card.’
‘What is the name of the general?’
‘He is retired now.’
‘Name?’
‘He is the new Governor of Kashmir.’
‘Name?’
‘General Kumar.’
The police-wallahs look at me with contempt. They have rifles slung around their necks. The younger one turns on his flashlight.
‘What things are there inside?’
I do not respond. I take pity on their contemptible tasks.
‘Open it.’
One of them transfers the heavy trunk to the aisle, and I hand him the key. He is rough-handling the bottles, and he does not read the labels. His face resembles the face of people who don’t take responsibility for their actions.
‘What is all this?’
‘Don’t you see?’ The middle-aged woman sitting close by comes to my rescue. ‘This is heeng and that one is cinnamon… cardamom, coriander, cloves, fenugreek, crushed pomegranate, poppy seeds, rose petals, curry leaves, nutmeg and mace.’
‘Why so many spices?’ asks the first police-wallah.
‘Are you a woman?’ asks the second.
Chuckles from the two of them. ‘Carrying an entire kitchen on the train?’
‘The only reason we will let you go is because your trunk is not a real coffin,’ one of them says from the other end of the bogie, making eye contact with me, staring.
They chuckle louder after making that odd remark, and leave.
Then silence. Only the sound of the train.
Outside I see India passing by. I readjust my glasses. It is raining mildly, and I am glad it is raining because India looks beautiful in the rain. Rain hides the melancholy of this land, ugliness as well. Rain helps me forget my own self. I see a face reflected in the window. Who is that man with spots of gray in his hair? What have I become? But certain things never change. I have the face of someone who is always planning serious work, someone who does not know how to take time off. Now even that will be snatched away from me.
None of my fellow passengers understood the police-wallahs when they said, ‘The only reason we have let you go is because your trunk is not a real coffin.’ Our country is a country with a short memory. They don’t remember the coffin scam which took place in the army during the war with Pakistan and cost the General his promotion. Because of the scam he could not become the chief of army staff. He was innocent really. Officers below him, jealous of Sahib’s abilities, screwed him. Sahib did not get the respect he deserved. There is no way I am going to explain to the civilians the coffin scam. Even if I tried they would not understand.
The middle-aged woman is surveying me, looking at me from the corners of her eyes. She is eager to ask me thousands of questions. Her face resembles a plate of samosas left overnight in rain. The man sitting across the aisle just said he is proud of the Indian army. After the police-wallahs left, he asked me, ‘What did you do in the army, sir?’
‘I kept the top brass healthy and cheerful.’
‘What is it exactly you did, sir?’
‘I was the General’s chef for five years.’
‘Oh, you were a cook,’ he said and controlled his smile. His wife could not control herself. She looked up from the glossy magazine, laughed. The middle-aged woman could not control her laughter either. Civilians.
Then suddenly as if to break silence, he asked: ‘Have you ever won a woman’s heart with your cooking, sir?’
I did not reply.
‘But you must have?’
‘There are no women in the army,’ I said.
‘But sir. Women fall for men in the army. You, sir, had the biggest weapon in your hand. Cooking. Did you ever make someone fall in love, sir?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I am looking for a chai-wallah. Did you hear a vendor selling tea?’
‘Oh, we have tea in our thermos. Please pour some for sir.’
‘No, no, thank you very much.’
I turned to the window and the conversation stopped. The view outside the window was far more interesting.
India is passing through the night. Night, just like rain, hides the ugliness of a place so well. We are running behind the backs of houses. Thousands of tiny lights have been turned on inside them. Towns pass by, and villages. I remember my first journey to Kashmir on this train. It was a very hot day, and despite that, passengers were drinking tea, and the whole compartment smelled of a wedding. Girls in beautiful saris and salwar-kameezes sat not far from me; some of them spoke hardly any English. Their skins had the shine of ripe fruits. How shy I was then. How much I yearned to talk to them, but I pretended that I was not interested. I had picked up the paper the man in the corner seat had discarded, and hid my face behind the news. I would stealthily peek at the girls and when one or two returned my gaze I would hide once again behind words. One time my eyes locked with the eyes of an oval-faced girl, and this created an awkward moment. She started whispering, and then suddenly an exclamation was followed by loud laughter, and I felt they were all laughing at me, and I hid again behind the paper. How I yearned to talk to them, and how I desired for them to leave me alone in the carriage because I could not endure so many of them, and I wanted them to carry on with their usual business without bothering me, and when they disembarked at a strange platform how alone I had felt in that near-empty carriage. I had missed my chance. A beautiful opportunity had presented itself, but I had spoiled it. Partly to deal with loneliness and partly to deal with the absence of girls I began reading the paper. Several times I read the article which had shielded me from the beauties. It was accompanied by a large photograph of the body of a soldier.
BODY OF A SOLDIER FOUND AFTER 53 YEARS
Trekkers on a remote stretch of Himalayan glacier have found the fully preserved body of a soldier 53 years after he died in a plane crash. They discovered the corpse, still in an overcoat uniform, with personal documents in the pockets. The discovery was reported yesterday at the base camp. The team also found aircraft parts close to the soldier, suggesting there could be other bodies buried in ice.
It is believed the crash occurred in early 1934. The soldier may have been flying to or from Ladakh, the high altitude area in Kashmir.
In 1934 India had yet to be partitioned by the British to become ‘ India ’ and ‘ Pakistan ’. So it is not clear whether the body belongs to India or Pakistan. The two countries have fought four wars, three of them over Kashmir.
Kashmir. It was my first time, and I found the place different from the way Delhi-wallahs describe it, as paradise, or shadow of paradise. I was a young man, but old enough to separate romance from reality. There was thick fog and it was very cold. I did not have a proper jacket. I had arrived with only one suitcase and the recruitment letter in my pocket. By the time I stood on the lawns of the General’s residence the sound of the train had simply disappeared from my mind. A uniformed man accompanied me from the gate-posts to Sahib’s residence, the Command House, located on a hill overlooking the golf course. I must have waited for half an hour on the lawns. I thought I was going to die of cold when a middle-aged man stepped out of the house. He was wearing an apron. The hair on his head was closely cropped. His face, clean-shaven with thin eyebrows, ears unusually long. The man’s body had a muscular appeal to it. A black dog trotted ahead of him. The dog came to sniff me. I touched its muzzle.
‘How old is he?’ I asked.
‘We are all growing old,’ the man said. ‘Fourteen, maybe, the dog is fourteen.’
‘How long do dogs live, sir?’
He did not answer, but took off slowly in the wind towards a patch of vegetable garden, fencing around it. He opened a little wooden gate and shut it. The dog circumambulated the fence while on the other side the man stooped and plucked leaves of what to me looked like fenugreek or coriander. How the vegetables grew in the extreme cold was beyond my imagination.
‘Come.’ He asked me to follow him.
I handed him the recruitment paper.
‘Not now,’ he said.
On the way to the kitchen the man patted me on my back. He was an inch or two taller than me. Something about that pat made me feel uncomfortable.
‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘The General’s ADC has told me about you. He has given me the instructions.’
‘What do I call you, sir?’
‘I am Chef.’
‘Sir.’
‘Call me Chef Kishen.’
‘Sir.’
‘Just call me Chef.’
‘Yessir.’
‘Follow me with your luggage,’ he said.
We entered his room, which was between the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. The place reeked of shaving cream; cuttings from Hindi newspapers covered the walls: photos of Bombay actresses in revealing saris, including my favorite, Waheeda. On the side table a tape recorder was playing music unfamiliar to my ears. German music, he said. I wouldn’t have imagined, I said. Does this bother you? No sir. Top mewjik, he said. There were two beds side by side, and they formed a huge shadow on the floor. The square shadow on the wall came from the tape recorder. Chef pointed towards the smaller bed. Suddenly my body felt the exhaustion of a long journey. I dumped my suitcase and sat down on the bed.
‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Keep following.’
The kitchen. Scent of cumin, ajwain and cardamom. On the table, a little pile of nutmeg. Thick, oily vapor rose from the pot on the stove. The room was warm and spacious, the window high and wide. Tiny drops of condensation covered the top of the glass. Smoke soared towards the ceiling in shafts of light. I noticed many shiny pots and pans hanging on the whitewashed walls. And strings of lal mirchi, and idli makers, and thalis, and conical molds for kulfi. In the corner the tandoor was ready. Its orange glow stirred in the utensils on the walls. I walked to the oven and stooped over. A wave of heat hit my cheeks. It was then he put his arm around my shoulder and took me towards the dining room. He said, ‘Kitchen without a memsahib is a nice place to work in.’
‘Sir.’
‘See that woman looking down at us?’
‘Sir.’
‘She was the memsahib.’
The painting was seven or eight feet tall, and so was the beautiful woman. Her eyes were big and wide open. Her brows, fearless. Skin, the color of cinnamon. She was wrapped in a graceful red sari.
‘Sahib used to love her as if she were a Mughal queen and she in turn loved him the way she loved her dog.’
‘Sir.’
‘She loved me too.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What do you mean yes, sir? She was a bitch. Memsahibs is people that controls the kitchen. She counted spoons. She counted to test the reliability of staff. That woman banned cooking without a shirt on, and I had to wear at least a banian in her presence. Aprons appeared suddenly. She cooked the dessert herself on Tuesdays and made me taste it and one wrong (but honest) word would make that woman swear in English. It was hard for me. The hardest thing to do is to hold my tongue, Kirpal.’
‘Sir.’
‘That woman refused to change recipes. To disturb a recipe is to disturb the soul of the dead, she would say.’
Right then I heard loud voices coming towards the kitchen from other rooms. The bell rang for service. Chef replaced the server out on a cigarette break and dashed into Sahib’s room with the tray of tea and samosas. The samosas smelled of pork. Sahib is fond of pork, he said before leaving the kitchen. There was rhythm in his legs. In Sahib’s room I will also take ardor for dinner. He pronounced ‘order’ as ardor. It was one of the few English words in his vocabulary.
I soon learned about him. Chef had joined the army as an ordinary soldier, and after an injury in the war he was sent to the Officers’ Mess. During a meeting of the middle brass of the regiment he had committed his first error. He had refused to serve tea to a Muslim officer.
‘I refused tea to that man,’ said Chef. ‘The problem with those people is that they smell. Badboo. That is why. The colonel showed me his teeth and reprimanded me severely. I was transferred to the kitchen as a dishwasher, but within a few months I bounced back. I made the kitchen my territory and impressed the officers with my above average culinary abilities. The brigadier of the regiment chose me for a four-month training course in international cuisine conducted by the foreign embassies in Delhi. German, French, Chinese, Italian, Szechuan noodles, linguine with clam sauce, lamb provençal, Pavlova – that kind of food. You see, if I had not refused to serve tea to the Muslim officer I would never have become a chef. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
It is almost midnight. The train picked up speed close to Panipat Station. The light in the ceiling is flickering. A miniature fan swivels and hurls hot air. Not a single thought I have is peaceful. The screeching sound of metal against metal competes with passengers pushing and jostling even at this insane hour. A child lowers the window, raises it again. Her parents are stirring in their sleep, mouths half open. Their faces move left to right and right to left as if to a pendulum. Diagonally across from me a honeymooning couple is sitting underneath brightly colored bags. The wife is young and pretty. (A white jasmine tucked in her hair.) I like the nape of her neck, and henna on hands. Her husband, in brown corduroy, is glued to the World Cup cricket commentary. It must be day in Australia. He is holding the transistor radio close to his ear. Now and then he lifts his free hand and runs a finger through the brand-new wife’s hair. Such displays of emotion were not possible in public when I was a young man.
She asks him to turn off the radio; he smiles and raises the volume. The peasants sitting next to him applaud: they too would like to know the score. The child on my right yawns. She is no longer playing her window game. The cricket commentary is interrupted by commercials and the hourly news. The newscaster’s voice is convent-educated. Some would say sexy.
She begins with late-night news about the American President.
The President stunned our nation today by visiting the Gandhi Peace Memorial. Despite this gesture many of our countrymen are demonstrating in front of the American embassy in Delhi. The people have taken offence to dogs. This is what happened: yesterday just before the President’s visit the security-wallahs tested the site with sniffer dogs. The people feel that the dogs have desecrated the site. Some are also angry and shocked because the Prime Minister of our country was frisked by the American bodyguards (on Indian soil) before he was allowed to shake hands with the President, said the newscaster. Last night at the state banquet the President delivered a speech saying that America was definitely going to sign the nuclear deal with India, and his country was also going to allow the import of Indian mangoes. Now that is interesting, I say to myself.
The man’s pretty wife is putting kohl around her eyes, surveying her face in a miniature mirror, the shape of a perfect oval.
News is over. Back to cricket. The man, listening again. Please lower the volume, I request. He contorts his face. Please, I beg you, I say again. It is past midnight. He bows, apologizes, and to my surprise turns off the radio and begins reading the paper. As far as the dogs are concerned I don’t think we Indians should object at all. Gandhi loved animals. The dogs have done no harm to the father of the nation. If we are hell-bent on taking offence then we must take offence to the local thugs and criminals who deliver long speeches paying so-called homage at the Peace Memorial.
On the front page of the paper there is a picture of the American President eating a mango. He is eating the reddish-yellow fruit with a knife and a fork. I see it in the flickering light. The picture is making me increasingly uncomfortable. This is not the proper way to eat a mango, I say to myself. They are supposed to be eaten the way Father used to.
Father never used a knife to cut mangoes, he would suck them.
He would eat several at a sitting, one by one, all varieties, sandhoori, dusshairi, langra, choussa, alphonso. He loved good food. Good chutney. He was right-handed but held a chapatti in his left; he scooped up the chutney with a torn bit of chapatti. If curried lamb was served, he liked gravy more than the pieces. He ate kebabs without a piyaz. Even now I can see him clearly. Father is home on a two-day leave from his regiment, he is eating dinner with another man in uniform, also a Sikh, I call him uncle, they are talking about colonels and generals, and war and enemy, us versus them. I can see this although I am hiding under the table. And I can hear them. Uncle’s foot taps my leg. I run to my room, from under the table. Father scolds me mildly for not doing my homework. From behind the curtain I watch Father sucking on the fruits one by one. Uncle has stopped eating, he is telling Partition stories, but Father continues. Even now I can see him squeezing the pulp upwards. To this day I remember his hands. His fingers were those of a musician.
But.
There are things he will never know. He has no idea about the anger I carry around to this day. Deep inside – so many unresolved emotions. Perhaps my cancer is the consequence of the shame and guilt and anger that never found a passage out of my body. The most important things in our lives can’t be squeezed out.
I never wanted to join the army. In Delhi my desires were different. I had just had my eighteenth birthday. I woke up late that morning. Frying mustard oil and aloo parathas stung my eyes. Mother scolded me (from the kitchen) to hurry up. I rushed to the bathroom with soap and when I opened the door I saw my cousin was inside. I had opened the door thinking the bathroom was empty, but she was inside, washing herself. She was very beautiful, my cousin, a married woman, and later that day, at college, I could not forget her dark nipples. Drops of water moving, crawling on her cinnamon skin and wheat-colored breasts. I felt some strange forbidden joy. But at the same time I felt guilty, as if I had committed a crime. She was the first woman I had seen completely naked, and those two seconds kept coming back to me that day in the college, first during math class, and then during history. I saw her wet body everywhere in the classroom and I kept returning again and again to the moment she had buried her head in her hands (after a very brief eye contact) and I felt I could not live without touching her bare breasts. What was I doing in the classroom? The teacher was covering the subaltern history of Indians (especially Sikhs) who had died in Europe fighting the two World Wars. Outside it was very bright and hot. Through the window I noticed my mother rushing towards the college, accompanied by a man in a camouflaged uniform. I thought that my cousin had reported me, and I was to be punished.
Mother stood by the door and had a fast talk with the teacher, and right away the teacher instructed me in a soft voice to pack my books. Her face froze as I marched my shadow to the door. There was pin-drop silence in our class. It was then I sensed something terribly wrong had happened. The man standing behind Mother looked very stiff; his face had no spark and his uniform was crisp and starched without a wrinkle. He was holding a black cap in his hand.
They walked me close to the road beyond the spot where stray dogs were barking, a goods train passed by, parallel to the road, and the man asked if he could have a word with me.
‘Young man, the whole nation is very proud of Major Iqbal Singh.’
There was a mist in Mother’s eyes. Unlike other women she rarely wept in public. She held my hand and slowly quickened her step. We walked in the same direction. Home. That was the last time we walked together. The dogs didn’t come after us.
Now that I think about it she too was fighting battles. While my father was fighting a war in Kashmir with the Pakistanis, my mother was fighting battles with herself. She stopped in the middle of the road and hugged me, then let me go. She wanted to be alone.
At home instead of Father and death, I kept thinking about my cousin’s cinnamon body. That evening my cousin and her husband came along with many others to our house. They drank imported Coke and spouted the standard things. When the mourning was over I took the empty bottles into the street and lined them up and kicked them one by one, the bottles rolling further and further away from me. A plane passed overhead, creating a white cloud. The windows of our house rattled.
I knew then.
When I woke up the next morning stray dogs kept barking in the street, and my whole body felt sick. I felt his presence in the room. I see myself running up the stairs to the room where he kept his black military trunk. In the trunk I found his pistol and from the roof terrace I started aiming, shooting at the dogs in the street until mother screamed at me from the other side of the clothesline. People flocked to our house. What is wrong with you? Poor thing, I heard one say. You are the son of a very brave man. Why are you muddying your father’s name? This boy has done nothing wrong, said Mother. She could speak no more. When the crowd left I heard the single bark of a dog on the pavement. It was the only one that did not flee like others towards the bazaar.
‘How many did you kill?’ asked Mother.
‘None.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘One.’
‘Dog killer.’
‘One is injured,’ I said.
Mother begged me not to join the army.
‘You never wanted to.’
‘I’m going to join Father’s regiment.’
She begged me not to move to Kashmir. That place is foreign to us, it is filled with turmoil, she said. She tried to persuade me to follow my original plan: study two more years, get a civilian job and then get married.
‘You’re my only child,’ she said.
I clicked my heels and saluted her, the way Father used to.
On the way to Kashmir the first time I took the train, I carried an old black and white photograph in my wallet. I recall saying to myself that the thing looked different now, because the man in the photo was actually dead. The officer’s uniform, the medals on his chest, the epaulets, the turban with a red regimental ribbon, and the shining stars – everything looked different. Father is not alone in the photo, he is standing in the middle of the parade ground with three others. It is their graduation day. Father is the only one in a turban. With great amusement he is observing the caps of his fellow officers. The caps are floating in the air and are about to begin a sudden downward descent. (Cadets, the moment they become officers, follow an odd graduation ritual: they toss their caps up in the air to mark the turning point in their lives.) Father is unable to participate fully in the ritual. His turban is intact. He is one of them, but he is different. Like them he is young, filled with hope. Did he know then that soon he would become the yellow photograph in my hand? He could not have known then, and neither could I have known that soon his son would try to forget him, but the harder he would attempt, the more disastrously he would fail. On that train journey the photo terrified me. I remember opening the grimy window, tearing the thing into pieces, letting it go. There was thick fog outside, and the pieces went up and down in the wind and vanished in the fog. At the time a fellow passenger in the compartment was carrying a basket of unripe mangoes. Just like right now – this carriage has the same pungent odor.
When I think about my past, time begins flowing in a different way and my thoughts turn to the mountains of Kashmir, and to the river that begins at the toe of the glacier.
The river begins in India, crosses the border and flows into the enemy territory. In Pakistan time is half an hour behind India, and the moment the river crosses the border it moves backwards in time. But three or four mountains away it re-enters our side, becomes Indian again, and by doing so moves forward in time. This crossing of borders keeps happening over and over again.
General Sahib was the chief of Northern Command. He resided in the second biggest house in the capital city, Srinagar. From the slopes of the camp the river looked like a blue-skinned python flowing through the valley. There were nine bridges spanning the waters: the first was called Zero, and the second Bridge Number One and the last Bridge Number Eight. Not far from Zero Bridge was the old city with timber-framed houses and crowded bazaars and pagoda-shaped mosques. The most famous mosque was white, made entirely of marble, and it stood next to a green Sufi shrine. At the outskirts of the city were the ruins and the Mughal garden built by the Emperor in the seventeenth century. Our camp sat next to the garden on the slopes of a hill. Between the ruins and the camp was an eighteen-hole golf course and on its left was another hill with a white mansion on top. This was the Governor’s residence, the Raj Bhavan, the biggest house in Srinagar. The Governor, I heard, loved international cuisine and once or twice (before my arrival) Sahib had loaned Chef Kishen to him.
General Sahib ate breakfast at six-thirty in the morning. Two days a week papaya and stuffed aloo-parathas (which he ate with his hands), and the rest of the time English breakfast of the Raj (with knife and fork). Lunch he ate in the office. We sent hot tiffin to his office building through the orderly.
The kitchen window faced the golf course, and I would watch Sahib play in the evenings with other officers, and on occasions with the Governor himself. Often I worried for them because we were so close to the land of the enemy. On the right side of the golf course, across the river, was a little village, and beyond the village, on the blue mountains, was the enemy. Often fighting would start on the brown mountain, which belonged neither to us nor to them. The sound of machine guns would rebound in the valley and invade our lives. But then the guns would stop for a while and the delicious sounds of bugles and military bagpipes from our camp and the enemy camp would waft inside the kitchen, and mix with the sounds of coals in the tandoor.
Dinner was the main meal of the day. Sahib had good taste and appetite and a weakness for Kashmiri dishes. Mughlai mutton with turnips, rogan josh, kebab nargisi, lotus roots-n-rhizomes, gongloo, karam saag, the infinitely slow-cooked nahari, and the curd-flavored meatballs of gushtaba. He ate these dishes licking his fingers, and used knife and fork for foreign preparation only, for dishes from Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Russia.
Since Chef had received training at foreign embassies in Delhi, international cuisine was his greatest strength. But he taught me mostly to subvert those recipes. ‘Foreigners have colonized us for a long time, Kip. Now it is our turn. We will take their food and make it our own…
‘Pay attention to simple things, Kip. If one cannot deal with a simple dish properly, there is no way one will be able to handle the more sophisticated. Take a tomato, for instance. What is the taste of this tomato? There is no such thing as the set taste of a tomato. Taste lies in the surface, the way you cut it…
‘Before cutting a tomato, give it the reverence it deserves and ask: Tomato, what would you like to become? Do you want to be alone? Or do you prefer company? Apricot, what would you like to become? Would you like to become more than yourself in the company of saffron?
‘Saffron, who are you?’
The kitchen opened onto a smaller room. In that room I would skin chickens, peel battalions of potatoes, slice chilies, and pluck coriander leaves off stems. Connected to this room was a larger room. There we ate or played cards and had meetings at the wooden table with Chef. Spitting was forbidden in this room.
Chef began work at six in the morning, and two days a week he would invite me in the evening to bike with him along the river. Calling Kashmir paradise does not do justice. The first PM of our country once said (in English): Kashmir is the face of a beloved that one sees in a dream and that fades away on awakening. Nehru knew Kashmir better than the leaders nowadays. Chef and I would bike past the Nehru Memorial, past the bakery on Residency Road, past Zero Bridge, past hundreds of houseboats with names like Neil Armstrong, Cleopatra, Texas Spitfire, Dawn of Paradise, Heevan, past the Dal Lake Floating Market, where vendors of fruits and vegetables sat in motionless shikaras, and the smell of fresh produce mingled with the odor of defecation, and we would make a loop and bike back to the Mughal garden, and it was there on the slopes of the garden one day he put his arm around my shoulder and pointed to the buildings in the valley below. State Assembly. Cricket Stadium. Post Office. Mughal Fort. Radio Kashmir. Governor’s mansion. The city. It was a compact medieval city, punctuated by modern buildings and ancient ruins. Buddhist ruins. Hindu ruins. Muslim ruins. I was very moved by their presence.
‘It is difficult to breathe here,’ said Chef.
‘Because of the ruins?’ I asked.
‘No, because there are so many mosques here. Understand?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You see that white marble building by the lake?’
‘Yes, Chef.’
‘Guess what?’
‘Looks like a mosque. But it has only one minaret.’
‘In that mosque some dangerous Kashmiris meet to create trouble.’
‘Trouble?’
‘They talk about azadi. Freedom.’
‘I see, Chef.’
‘Lots of mosques down there.’
‘The place looks like the city of mosques, Chef.’
‘Fanatics!’
‘Even inside our camp, Chef. On the left, I see that stone mosque.’
‘No longer a mosque. The army converted it to good use. It is the military hospital, kid.’
The hospital windows (and the dome) were lit up orange by the last light. The sun was about to set.
‘I am feeling cold, Chef.’
‘There is a remedy,’ he said.
‘Remedy?’
‘Get yourself a phudee.’
‘A what, Chef?’
‘A cavity.’
‘What for?’
‘Get yourself a woman.’
I shut my eyes. The wind whistled between the mountains.
‘Chef, you should not say that.’
‘Get yourself -’
‘Chef, what does this city look like in winter?’
‘A white calico,’ he said. ‘Snow covers all the rooftops and streets down in the valley and hides all the ungainly parts, just like a sari hides the ungainly parts of a wom -’
‘White, the color of mourning,’ I stammered.
‘Kip, no more mourning-forning,’ he said.
‘What is that?’
‘You need a woman.’
‘Chef, in summers are there mosquitoes in Kashmir?’
‘Mosques and mosquitoes.’
‘What?’
‘The mosques we can manage, but we are still learning how to eradicate the mosquitoes.’
‘How does one eradicate?’
‘Hit them in the balls.’
‘Chef is joking.’
‘There is another way. If you make them fly out of the mosques, the wind will freeze their balls. You see the flags outside the mosques? Sometimes they flutter like insane creatures in the wind. Cold winds come from the glacier and madden them.’
‘Where is the glacier?’ I asked.
He pointed towards the distant mountains on my right, and my gaze remained fixed on the glaring whiteness that covered them.
‘Siachen Glacier, kid.’
So that was Siachen. It was staring back at us. I grew silent. I had been feeling its presence for a while. The beast had swallowed my father. Father’s plane had crashed on Siachen. The wing landed not far from the bakery in Srinagar, but the main body of the plane disappeared in a deep crevasse.
‘That glacier is bigger than the city of Bombay, kid.’
I took a deep breath.
‘I knew your father,’ he said, clearing his throat.
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Only from a distance. I knew him, he didn’t know me. I was only a cook.’
I kept silent.
‘Seeing the wing had fallen in the bazaar the loathsome Kashmiris stepped out of their shops and chanted anti-India slogans. Our boys had to shoot one or two to disperse the crowd. The wing as you know is now in the War Museum in Delhi.’
‘Did Father have his uniform on that day?’
‘Let the dead rest,’ he said. ‘At your age you must think about women.’
He moved closer. His breath fell on my face, smell of cardamom.
‘Your father has become one with the glacier, Kip. It was not long after the President decorated his chest with the Param Vir Chakra, the highest decoration our army gives to the brave.’
‘He fought two wars with the enemy.’
‘Yes. And because of that the army wanted to make you an officer.’
I said nothing. I turned my gaze towards the bikes, which were leaning against a tree not far from us, his saddle higher than mine.
‘But I have heard that you could not clear the medical exam, Kirpal. Is this true? Is this their indirect way? To make you a chef first, and then promote you? An officer’s son will always become an officer. Certain things never change in our country.’
I surveyed his face and thought ‘I am looking at eyes that have looked at my father.’ There were things he knew about my father that he would never reveal to me.
‘Is it possible?’ I asked, moving away from him. ‘My worst fear is that the glacier might release Father’s body in the land of the enemy and -’
‘No,’ he interrupted. That was impossible. He drew a picture of the glacier on a torn sheet of paper. Then he asked me to label it in ‘Inglish’.
‘You see, Kip, the tongue of the glacier is in India and the whole mass is shifting slowly towards our side. His body will definitely be released on the soil of our country. The only way the body might transfer to Pakistan is if the glacier starts retreating very fast and becomes a part of the river, which is unlikely.’
‘Nothing is unlikely,’ I said.
‘Certain things are unlikely,’ he said and touched my cheek.
I asked him to withdraw his hand. Chef took a while.
‘Not so long ago,’ he said, ‘there was an old Norwegian tourist who while trekking through the Himalayas found the body of his father at the foot of Siachen. The glacier had released the body fully preserved. His father was much younger than him.’
‘I read that news in the paper,’ I said. ‘Two days later the glacier released the body of a soldier whose plane crashed before the Partition.’
‘Good news,’ exclaimed Chef. ‘The soldier belongs to India.’
‘Do we know for sure?’
‘Hundred percent, kid,’ he said, pinching my cheek. I stood up and wiped my uniform.
‘Your face turns color like the plane trees,’ he said.
We biked down the hill, and bought eggs, goat meat, karam, lotus roots, and vegetables from the bazaar.
Autumn is not a season in India. In Kashmir autumn arrives in the month of October. Through the soot-coated kitchen window I would watch the chenar trees dance. They moved like dervishes in the wind. I had never seen autumn before. Both sides of the streets were lined by plane trees. The whole valley would burst into Technicolor. The leaves turned as they fell on the roofs and the streets, turning any surface into a red and yellow and orange carpet. The wind carried them, swirled them, then abandoned the leaves one by one. Contemplating their sadness I would forget my own, and I would forget, too, the Siachen Glacier. Even if blindfolded, I will still be able to detect the chenar leaves. I can’t forget the smell of cut grass, and the smell of plane trees. How sad the trees look when shedding leaves, and yet how happy, as if trying to kiss the whole world. Autumn is not the end of happiness. It is the beginning.
I was almost twenty years old, bursting with energy and I had yet to sleep with a woman. Realistically, what were my chances? In the camp there were wives of other soldiers and officers. Outside the camp lived the Kashmiris. So there was no chance at all.
Often I would cycle past the Kashmiris’ timber-framed houses and past children with runny noses and the old men with henna-dyed beards smoking hookahs. But it was rare to spot a woman. Then one day, standing by the banks of the river, I noticed a young woman washing apples. No sari, but loose drawstring pants and a loose knee-length robe, a pheran. Her breasts jiggled inside. The pheran was wet around her belly, the salwar was rolled up to the knees. Both feet inside the water, and the channel was clear and cold and transparent and very quiet. Now and then she stirred the quietness with the apples and her delicate feet. I observed her, standing on the rock. The nape of her neck was smooth and clean. Kashmiri women do not dress in a normal way. In summer the women wear light cotton pherans. In winter they prefer dark woolen ones made of pashmina. The garment is embroidered in front and on the edges. When it gets very cold the women tuck their arms inside. Some carry firepots close to their bellies (as if heavy with a child) and the arms of the pheran oscillate left and right like pendulums of time.
She turned only once and our eyes locked for a brief second.
‘What are you going to do with the apples?’ I asked.
She smiled, stepped out of the water and started heading towards the street behind the trees. She was more or less my age.
Next day, same time, I returned to the same rock by the river. Salaam, I heard a man’s voice.
‘Come have tea at our house.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘I am her relative,’ he said.
‘Whose relative?’
‘I am the brother of the woman you had a conversation with yesterday.’
‘Hardly a conversation,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry. I am a well-respected man with a very responsible job. I drive the city bus.’
‘I have no time,’ I said. ‘My break is over.’
‘Come for two minutes only.’
The man guided me through narrow cobble-stoned streets (with open sewer drains on both sides) to his house. Boys were playing cricket in the street. Just outside he requested me in good Urdu to remove my shoes. The moment we entered he said, ‘Two teas.’ We sat on a carpet with a variety of floral designs. Beautiful calligraphic scrolls hugged the walls, and the furniture smelled of pine wood. ‘Are you married?’ he asked. It was his first question. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘You looked to me as if you were not married.’
It was then the woman entered the drawing room. She was carrying a tray. On a plate, which trembled on the tray, she had brought along tscvaru. The shortbread was coated with poppy seeds. She did not look at me directly. She bent low and served us tscvaru. Her hair was long and alive and for a moment I thought she was going to join us.
‘The samovar is on,’ she said and disappeared into the kitchen.
‘I have never seen a samovar,’ I said to the brother. ‘May I observe it in the kitchen?’
‘She’ll bring the tea here only,’ he said.
‘Really I am in a hurry,’ I said.
The man remained quiet. I imagined her in the kitchen with her samovar, something amazing that I heard came from the Russians.
‘Does she go to college?’ I asked.
‘Sister was a brilliant student,’ he said.
‘What field?’
‘Bee farmer,’ he said.
‘Bee farmer?’
‘B. Pharma,’ he said. ‘Bachelor of Pharmaceutical. She had to discontinue because of the turmoil in the valley.’
‘I would like to get to know her,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I can go to cinema or theater with her?’
He cleared his throat and stared at me as if I had come from some other planet, and told me that the cinema houses (except the military theatre) had long been shut down because of the turmoil. Kashmir is not now what it used to be, he said.
The woman returned to the room and bent low and left the tea tray on a small table. This time she made a somewhat prolonged eye contact with me. Her face was very fair. Eyes cold blue. Lips, the color of apples.
‘Fast,’ said the brother.
She poured tea into two cups, chipped at the top. My cup cracked the moment it came in contact with hot fluid. I remember the sound of water being poured, the silence of water dripping on the carpet. But my hostess’s face revealed no embarrassment. Keeping her gaze fixed on the carpet she recited a couplet in Urdu:
Es ghar ki kya deekh bhal karain, roz cheese koi nai toot jatea hai?
How does one take care of this house, every day some new thing breaks apart?
The poem cheered me up, and yet her brother looked angry. She ran to the kitchen and fetched a brand-new cup. It seemed the thing was meant for very special guests. I drank the kehva tea greedily. It was delicious! Strands of saffron floated on top, releasing the color. It had come right out of the samovar and the brew was strong. I detected crushed cardamoms, kagzee almonds, and asked myself: why is it that places with the worst possible hygiene manage to manufacture the best possible tea?
‘The tea is la’zeez,’ he said. ‘Delicious!’
‘Why is she not sitting with us?’
‘She is in the kitchen,’ he said.
‘I, too, spend most of my time in kitchen,’ I said.
‘Let me be very upfront about your situation,’ he said. ‘I have no objections.’
‘What do you mean no objections?’
‘No objections to marriage.’
‘Marriage?’ I clarified. ‘Whose marriage?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘let us have a conversation. If you want to marry her, I have no objections.’
The tea was very good.
He gulped down his cup. ‘I do not like too much Indian military presence in the valley. Despite this I am happy you have a steady job. Will you marry my sister?’
‘I need time,’ I said.
‘No problem,’ he said.
I stood up with the cup in my hand and he rose to his feet. He pointed his index finger towards the calligraphy on the wall. I walked closer to read clearly.
‘This word means peace,’ I said.
‘I am surprised,’ he said.
‘I attend Sunday language classes.’
I thought he was going to thank me for learning his language. But he didn’t have the decency to do so, no meharbani, no shukriya, nothing; instead he started praising the language into which he was born, how beautiful it was, how elegant.
‘Kashmiri is the language of poetry,’ he said.
‘There is no such thing as the language of poetry,’ I corrected him. ‘Poetry can be written in all languages. No language is inferior. When I peel an onion in the kitchen there is poetry in it.’
‘You are not entirely wrong,’ he said.
It was then I felt the pressing need to pose the question:
‘So, you do not care about religion?’
‘I hope you have no problem converting to Islam,’ he said. ‘Because that is absolutely necessary for the wedding. You must first convert to Islam. Of course when I approached you by the river I knew you were born into a Sikh family. But I know one decent Sikh boy who converted because he fell in love with a Kashmiri Muslim girl.’
I took my last sip.
‘Good tea,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t the tea good?’
‘The tea was excellent,’ I said. ‘Salaam-alaikum.’
‘Valaikum-salaam,’ he said.
I hurried back to General Sahib’s residence. There were more leaves on the street now than on the trees. The wind tossed them and turned them and swirled them and blew them back to the khaki barracks. Rubiya was playing barefoot on the lawns of the residence with her black dog. I felt like talking to her, but the ayah was also present.
The ayah was certainly attractive, a Goan. Her eyes glowed like pods of tamarind. The General’s daughter was very attached to her. Because she had access to all the rooms in the residence the ayah thought she had fallen on this Earth as a superior being. She treated me as if I didn’t matter; only a bit higher than the sweeper, who drank tea from a separate cup. She would shield Rubiya from all the male members of the staff, including Chef. But I really felt for the girl because she was without a mother and her father was absent most of the time. Rubiya was not even allowed to order her own food. From a distance the sense I got was that Rubiya was shy, always hiding under the bed or table. But tell me, I would ask the ayah, what is the girl really like? This is not your concern, she would respond.
‘Rubiya refuses to eat the red beans I cook for her?’ I asked. We were standing just outside the kitchen.
‘Razma reminds her of kidneys.’
‘What is wrong with kidneys?’
‘Kidneys make urine.’
‘What?’
‘Pee-pee,’ she said.
‘Please don’t talk such things. I am cooking.’
‘I must. The girl just can’t digest your beans.’
Rubiya’s gas problem was solved by adding heeng to the dish. The English word for heeng is asafetida. I like the sound of ‘heeng’ better. The ayah preferred ‘asafetida’… One day she approached me on the verandah. She had a huge cleavage and her sari smiled with the weight of it. There was a little comb in her hand. I was plucking dhaniya leaves on the verandah, and the ayah asked me why I looked so unhappy. Is Rubiya sleeping in her room? I asked. Yes, yes. But we are talking about you, and she started combing her hair from side to side and probed me further about my unhappiness, and I told her to look down at the valley below. Look down at the parade ground, I said. See the troops marching in the parade ground. Young boys are learning techniques from older experienced boys. Learning warfare. Jumping. Crawling. Shooting. Aiming. Marching.
Then she asked me, what was it I wanted to learn exactly?
I said I really wanted to learn how to have sex, and perhaps someone like you could teach me? She stopped smiling. Have you gone crazy? she said.
I stepped out for a long walk by the river in the valley. Red leaves floated on the water, flowing as far as the mountains that belonged to the enemy. Later that night I drank rum in the barracks. A soldier told me: ‘Your only chance, Kip, is with the nurse in the hospital. She is a forward woman. A man like you deserves a forward woman, Major. She is ideal, Major.’
I don’t understand.
I-d-e-a-l W-o-m-a-n M-a-j-or.
Why am I thinking about these things? Life is withering away, and I should bring to mind only the essential matters. God. Reincarnation. Matters like that. Not food. Not women. Not even ravishing women. Not even women who understand the body, like the nurse. She took her afternoon breaks in the Mughal garden. One day without telling Chef I cycled all the way to say hello to her. There was a chill in the air. The garden was terraced, a royal pavilion in the middle, water flowed in straight lines and fell from one impatient chute to the next before entering the lake at the bottom. Locking my cycle by the gates I noticed she was standing on the uppermost terrace, not far from the ruined wall, smoking a cigarette. I waved. She beckoned me. The garden was filled with tourists and languages I didn’t understand. She leaned against the wall as I walked closer. There was a brittle red-and-black leaf stuck in her hair.
‘Did you finish your lunch already?’ I asked.
‘Generally I skip lunches,’ she said.
She was wearing a pretty salwar-kameez with flowery designs, and I said that the kameez and the white hospital coat looked funtoosh on her, and she smiled and asked why I was wearing a bangle, and I explained that it was not a bangle at all, the thing on my right wrist was actually a steel bracelet. All Sikh boys and girls wear the bracelet, I said. It looks cool on you, she said. What do you mean? I asked. In America, she explained, when something looks funtoosh on you, they say it looks cool on you. Thank you, I said and tried to hold her hand, but she frowned and said, ‘Touching this way doesn’t look nice.’ I didn’t know what to say, I felt I had done something very uncool, then for no reason I muttered a few words about the cold Kashmiri weather, and the sadness of Kashmir. This whole place is so beautiful, I said, and yet it is so sad. Look at the barren fruit orchards, the mountains, the lake which has been invaded by weeds. The temples, the mosques, the empty houses, the ruins – everything is sad. I sense a mingling of sadnesses here, I said. It seems as if all the people of Kashmir and all the people who come here, everyone is sad. It is not just a single person (like me) who is sad, rather the situation in the city sprouts the feeling of sadness in everyone. When one is unhappy one doesn’t even enjoy the food one cooks, the basic things in life, I said. One forgets how to love, and life is so short. What are you talking about? she asked. Sadness, I said.
Back in the kitchen, I stood by the window. The plane trees were bare now. The words she had uttered doesn’t look nice and what are you talking about and it looks cool left me anxious and happy at the same time, for there was still hope, for I had not lost her completely, for despite her lukewarm response she had not said a complete no and I felt a deep desire to transform the slim hope to reality.
That night in our bedroom Chef poured beer into two tall glasses. The beer was not bad at all. We clinked the glasses the way officers do. Cheers, I said.
‘You speak such good Inglish,’ he said. ‘Were you trying to impress the nurse?’
‘I was only talking.’
So he had seen us together.
‘Nurses do not like softies. Inglish or no Inglish.’
‘Me?’
‘You still don’t know how to handle a knife.’
‘Sir, I will… work hard.’
‘Look at me in the eye. Certain things cannot be changed, Kirpal. An officer’s son can never stop being a softie. You see, when I was a boy I found certain smells disgusting. I was repelled by the smell of fenugreek and bitter gourd. Now I have overcome that repulsion, in fact I have come to love the very same smells I hated as a boy. But, certain smells continue to be repulsive.’
‘Like what, sir?’
‘Kashmiris,’ he said. ‘Badboo -’
I ignored him. To distract him I said, ‘Sir, I would like to cook like you!’
He tasted the foam of beer, and flexed his muscles and the veins of his right forearm bulged. There was a tattoo on his arm, his name in green letters in Hindi. He wore a khaki shirt, the buttons open, underneath no banian and the hair on his chest was a forest of black-and-white curlicues.
‘Do you want to replace me?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Replace me,’ he said. ‘I want you to learn all I know. The day your training is over, Gen Sahib will promote me. He has promised.’
‘What rank would that be, sir, when you become an officer?’
‘That of a captain,’ he said, and put his tattooed arm around my shoulder, and stroked my cheek.
‘When will my training end?’ I asked.
Chef hopped on to his bed.
‘The day you lose your virginity,’ he said.
‘Pardon me, Chef?’
‘The smell of a woman is thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid.’
‘I would not know, Chef.’ I felt embarrassed.
‘Come sit next to me,’ he said.
He took another swig of beer.
‘Have you ever gone down on a woman?’
I lowered my gaze. He slapped my thigh.
‘You see, when I was younger I found the smell down there disgusting. Now I have overcome that repulsion, in fact I have come to love the very same smells I hated when I was young.’
I gulped down my glass of beer without stopping for breath. He pulled his red journal from under the pillow and showed me a dirty picture.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
Below the sketch there were long passages in Hindi and Punjabi.
‘Chef, what have you written in there?’
‘None of your business,’ he said. ‘Pay attention to the picture!’
‘I am looking,’ I said.
‘She is a memsahib,’ he laughed.
‘Yessir.’
‘Did you ever kiss a memsahib?’ he mumbled. ‘Give me another Kingfisher.’
When he fell asleep I surveyed the empty beer glasses. Chef groaned in his bed. His naked chest heaved up and down. There was a strange rhythm to his muscles. I spent the night eating berries. In Kashmir everything tastes of fruit. The days tasted of apples and the nights of bittersweet berries. I ate them very slowly, one by one.
We were preparing mutton yakhni. Dipping fingers in the marinade. The air in the room carried the scent of star anise. Turn the flame on high, he said. Now, he said. One by one I dropped the half-brown, half-crimson pieces of meat into the degchi. Stir, he said. The mutton must never stick to the bottom. Chef, when do I add yoghurt? Not now, he said and explained the difference between precision and estimation. Then he wiped his hands on my apron. I felt uncomfortable, but kept stirring. Cook without fear of failure, Kirpal. But you must never fail. Take good care of your hands, Kirpal. He stared at my hands while teaching. If you lose the use of your hands you will be useless in the kitchen. Don’t ever think of touching a memsahib. If you want to keep your fingers intact simply keep away from memsahibs. Observe them from distance only.
Now, he said. Now you add the yoghurt to the pot. Yessir. I followed his command, and covered the degchi with a lid. He stroked my cheek and started humming German music. The music was beautiful. His hands moved up and down as if they were guiding invisible instruments. Then he stopped. I mean it, Kip. Take good care of your hands, kid. Not like the Sikh guitarist. The guitarist? I asked. Yes, yes; he cleared his throat. The Sikh guitarist belonged to 72nd Battalion, 5th Mountain Division. The man was blessed with the most elegant fingers, and he used to play for Colonel Tagore’s wife at the colonel’s house. The colonel, said Chef Kishen, was keen on young men and he used to hang out at a special room in the Officers’ Mess and he had no problems leaving his young wife alone with the guitarist who would play for her till the wee hours of the morning. They had no children, the colonel and his wife, but in the beginning I simply could not believe that man’s fondness for boys. The colonel (who was a major then) would find boys in the hospital. He would visit the doctor during the season of recruitment or just before the troops were dispatched to the front. He would stand next to the doctor during the medical examination and survey the naked bodies of hundreds of troops – optimistically – with a smile on his face. But his eyes had indescribable sadness in them, said Chef Kishen. He would move his gaze from head to toe, from toe to head, and after the chest measurements he would ask each one of the soldiers their age and the reason for joining the army, and he would try to persuade the boys to quit the battalions and return home. This, said Chef Kishen, was the psychological examination. I cannot even begin telling you how I felt the day the colonel fixed his gaze on my chest (I was a young man then and I had felt the heat of the colonel’s desire on my body and a part of me had felt really flattered because he had desired my body but I naturally felt no desire for him) and a chill went through my spine, but at that very moment I noticed the colonel’s gaze move to the troop standing next to me. I must confess, said Chef, my neighbor was far more good-looking and handsome than me and as a result the colonel simply lost all interest in me and started persuading the soldier to quit the army and not go to the front and when the recruit responded with clarity that he was going to do his duty for the sake of our great country, the colonel patted thrice on the man’s back. The colonel’s eyes welled up there and then. Days later, said Chef Kishen, I was the one – new to everything – who discovered the Sikh guitarist in bed with the colonel’s beautiful wife and now that I think about it I should have not stirred things up. The guitar was lying on the floor. The guitarist was in a white banian only and she wearing a petticoat only. I remember her smooth-looking body down to the tassels of her petticoat. The burgundy color of her sweaty blouse, which was clinging to the guitar. They did not see me. If I had sealed my lips the regiment gossip would not have started, the rumor would not have spread inside and outside the barbed wires like orange forest fire and things would not have followed the ugly course they did. General Sahib had not moved to Kashmir yet. The one before him, General Jagmohan, had the guitarist arrested and in the prison they chopped off the top of his fingers and afterwards commanded him to play the guitar, which he did. The colonel I heard later, continued Chef, had begged the General to spare the guitarist’s fingers. (The guitarist looked a bit like you. I am not one of those who believes that all men in turbans look exactly like each other, but your face, Kirpal, has a striking resemblance.) To this day I think the colonel did the begging because the colonel and his wife had made a secret pact: the colonel was interested in men and he was going to sleep with them despite the marriage, and his wife was interested in other men and she was going to sleep with them despite the marriage. This was their arrangement, which I did not know, around the time. Because of my intervention, said Chef Kishen, the colonel’s interest in men was revealed and afterwards he found it difficult to face certain persons in the army. When Colonel Tagore died ‘accidentally’ in the war with Pakistan some of us knew that his death was not an accident. His wife, the young widow, was pursued by a major (who is a colonel now) and exactly eleven months later she yielded and the two of them got married. Tonight they are coming to dinner. Who? I asked. Colonel Chowdhry and his wife, he said.
‘Tonight, from behind that curtain, I will show you the real thing.’ Chef cleared his throat. ‘The real memsahib,’ he said.
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes, observe her attitude. She speaks polished Inglish. And observe her nakhra. The way she holds a fork.’
Everything is ready, almost ready, in the kitchen. Fumes are rising from simmering pots. Soup is cream of corn. Starter is sheekh kebab. Main course is seven items, including pork in mango-coriander sauce. Memsahib is vegetarian, Chef tells me. Navrattan paneer and dal makhni have been prepared especially for her. Lady Fingers are also for her. Biryani, kakori and fish are for the colonel. Trout is ready – from Dachigam in the morning.
Evening approaches. Tonight the real memsahib is coming. The sun reddens the kitchen walls before it sets in the enemy’s land.
Everything is ready.
General Sahib stands on the verandah, hands clasped behind him. He is an inch or two above six feet and he always stands in this manner. The black American suit gives him a stately air, the red scarf on his neck depicts a leaping leopard. There is a fresh shaving mark just below his left cheek. His skin has an oily sheen, no wrinkles yet. Everything about him is what I had imagined to see in a General, even his eyes, which are at once intimidating and filled with compassion. He bends his neck, listening to the sound of footsteps on the gravel path. The guests are approaching.
The colonel, a short man wearing a black beret, walks a little ahead of his wife. She has Bombay actress good looks, but he is a bit on the heavier side. He looks restrained but angry as if already tonight someone has offended him deeply.
The two men shake hands firmly.
Sahib kisses the memsahib on her cheek, which is red because of make-up. She giggles. Says something in English.
‘ India and Pakistan all right?’ asks General Sahib.
‘Both of us are very well, sir!’ says the colonel.
‘I don’t believe a word!’ says Sahib.
‘No. Please don’t believe him,’ says Memsahib and giggles.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ Sahib guides them to the living room.
‘More fire power,’ says the colonel, now looking more relaxed.
‘Darling, stop it,’ she says with a sparkle in her eyes.
She is wearing silk. The sari clings to the curves of her body, tight, as if purely out of desire.
Inside, Chef explains the meaning. ‘Gen Sahib calls all married couples as India and Pakistan.’
‘But who is Pakistan?’
‘Women are.’
There are three sofas in the drawing room, and a grand fireplace with glowing red coal. The painting of the dead woman looks down at the guests from the wall. Not far from the painting there is a glass cabinet. The artillery mementoes inside the cabinet demand one’s attention. Next to the mementoes are bottles of finest quality rum and scotch, and Kingfisher beer.
She sinks in the sofa, the real memsahib.
Chef and I are standing just behind the gap in the curtain. He is holding a sharp knife; he keeps wiping the blade with his apron. Now and then he points a finger. At first I find it hard to observe the colonel’s wife properly. All I can see clearly is the back of her blouse.
‘Where is the little one?’ she asks.
‘Rubiya, your Aunty and Uncle have arrived,’ says Sahib a bit loudly.
Rubiya is in her room with the ayah.
‘Papa, I am trying to commit suicide,’ she shouts from her room.
General Sahib laughs.
‘She learns these words. Don’t know from where. She doesn’t even know the meaning of “suicide”. Two days ago she told the ayah that her mother actually committed a suicide.’
India and Pakistan laugh.
The colonel rubs his hands.
‘Whiskey?’
‘With soda, sir.’
The colonel clears his throat.
‘Your wife was very beautiful, sir.’ He admires the painting; so does the memsahib.
‘She was a coastal woman.’
‘The beauty of Kashmiri women, sir, is overrated. Real beauty belongs to Indian women, especially from the coastal regions, as you very rightly said. Coastal women are real. They have real features. They may be darker, but with impressive features. That is why they get crowned Miss World, and Miss Universe also. Our Aishwarya Rai, sir!’
‘Kashmiri women here have a delicate beauty,’ says General Sahib. ‘The kind of beauty hard for Indian women to match. They are fair, they are lovely. What else can I say? I disagree with you, colonel.’
The two men look at the colonel’s wife.
‘What does Pakistan say?’ asks the General.
She wants to say something, but decides against it. She smiles tactfully, changes her seat. Her heels click when she moves next to Gen Sahib on the sofa. Sahib sips his drink.
‘But to us, Patsy, you are the one most beautiful,’ he says. The General touches her naked arm. Then he laughs and she, too, giggles and squeezes his hand.
The colonel chews his lips. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ he says after a long pause.
The curtain flaps on my face.
‘What do you think about Memsahib?’ asks Chef, wiping the knife with his apron.
‘She is all right,’ I say.
She is wearing a low-cut blouse. Observe the shape, whispers Chef. She drinks two or three glasses of port and, I observe, the drinking is making her sad. The two sahibs raise their voices reminiscing about younger days when they were in the Military Academy, where they had been trained alongside batch-mates who were now running the enemy army in Pakistan. Memsahib’s nails are long and red and her hair is red too because of henna.
Chef wipes his hands on my apron and takes a mirchi and chops it like a surgeon and garnishes the Wagah biryani. Smell it, kid. Jee, sir… He applies a sizzling tarka to dopiaza and yells at server: Is the table ready? Chef hurries back to his position behind the curtain and with his finger makes me taste his new invention, the Mhow chutney. Then he puts his arm around my shoulder.
Memsahib flips through a foreign magazine, which has many photographs. She is comparing herself to the photos.
It is our time to come to existence, Chef tells me. We come to existence only to carry out orders. He parts the curtains briefly and enters the drawing room. There is a rhythm in his legs. He clicks his heels.
‘Dinner is ready to be served, sir.’
‘Dinner, Memsahib.’
Gen Sahib and India-Pakistan move to the table. Back in the kitchen, ghee sizzles and the air tastes pungent and Chef orders the assistant to start slapping more naans in the tandoor and phulkas on the griddle. Perfect puffed-up circles. No maps of India, he warns.
Yessir.
The guests keep an eye on the General’s plate. When he eats fast, they eat fast. When he slows down, they slow down. Sahib keeps an eye fixed on Memsahib’s face, even while chewing the lamb. He is liking the Rogan Josh. Sometimes his fork makes circles in the air, sometimes his knife hits the plate like artillery. But, he is liking the lamb. She eats with her mouth shut. She stops chewing now and then and flashes a smile.
Memsahib will stop eating only when he stops, says Chef. The General is aware of this. So he will keep eating until he is sure that Memsahib is almost finished.
They talk about classical music, beekeeping, carpets, silkworms, diameter of the most ancient plane tree, absence of railways in Kashmir, loathsome Kashmiris, and picnics in the Mughal gardens. Also about Nehru when he was the PM: an army helicopter would fly to his residence in Delhi with Kashmiri spring water. They pause just before their conversation drifts towards hometowns, educational institutions, well-settled brothers and sisters. Then one of them mentions death: the soldier who killed his own sergeant, the Major who hanged himself at the border, and the young Captain killed recently during the Pakistani shelling on the glacier.
‘Excellent biryani.’
The napkin touches the General’s lips.
Chef shoves the server in, bearing finger bowls. He returns for the dessert tray. Halva. Ashrafi. Jalaybee. Crescents of watermelon, and aloobukharas and peaches and strawberries. The colonel’s wife has become unusually silent. She closes her eyes and breaks out of silence slowly. Not a single Kashmiri fruit can make me forget the taste of a mango, she says.
‘The best way to eat a mango is to suck it,’ says the colonel.
‘Yes, yes,’ says Gen Sahib.
‘Every time I eat a mango I think of Major Iqbal Singh’s Partition story,’ she says. ‘And that Muslim woman who saved his life…’
Memsahib stops talking in mid-sentence.
The two men avoid the subject.
(Father never told me anything about someone saving his life in 1947.)
I look at Chef. Those real Pakistani women can’t even save a dog, he says. Memsahib watches too many films, he whispers.
The three of them are sitting on the sofas again.
‘More dessert for Pakistan?’ asks the General.
‘No,’ she says.
‘ Pakistan must have more?’
‘No, no,’ she says.
General Sahib starts the records.
Time passes.
It passes very quickly, then slows down. Music makes time pass slowly.
How could the woman save my father’s life? I ask myself.
Sahib raises his voice. ‘Kishen,’ he beckons.
Chef dashes in with fennel seeds and tea on tray.
‘Food was all right, Sahib?’ he inquires.
‘Excellent trout and biryani.’
‘Was it Hyderabadi?’
‘A-One Rogan Josh!’
‘Good brinjals!’
‘Local produce?’
‘Many things came from our own vegetable garden, Memsahib.’
‘I have only one complaint,’ she says.
‘Yes, Memsahib?’
She is stirring her tea.
‘Did the knife touch meat? I smelled non-veg in paneer.’
The General stares at Chef.
‘Sorry, Memsahib. If you would allow me, I will check with the trainee cook.’
‘The Sikh chap?’ asks the General.
‘Sir.’
‘Sir, my wife has a sharp nose,’ says the colonel apologetically. He wipes dust off his green regimental blazer.
The General is not looking very happy.
Chef dashes back to the kitchen. He pulls me up by holding my ears and stares at me angrily and drops me on the floor with a thud. I murmur an apology. He shoves me towards the tandoor, parts the curtain, and returns.
‘Separate knives were used, Memsahib,’ he assures her. ‘The trainee says he added mushroom water. The non-wage taste was coming from mushrooms.’
I breathe a sigh of relief.
‘Who is this Sikh in the kitchen?’ asks the colonel’s wife.
‘Major Iqbal’s son,’ says Gen Sahib, hesitating.
‘Our Iqbal’s boy in the kitchen?’
‘Don’t worry. He is on the fast track.’
‘I see,’ she says.
I watch the ayah enter the room with Rubiya. The child is in a pink frock, looks sickly. The ayah forces Rubiya to say good evening, uncle, good evening, aunty. She acts shy. Sahib scolds her not to be shy. Only a minute ago you were going to commit suicide, and now, my sweet pisti, what happened to your tongue? Suddenly the girl says: Colonel, uncle can help me! Uncle can help me! How? Asks Sahib. Uncle is a fat man, says Rubiya. Bad manners, says Sahib. Uncle has thick fingers, he can choke me to suicide. Don’t talk like that, says Sahib.
‘He is fat, uncle is fat.’
‘Sing the National Anthem, Rubiya,’ says ayah. The girl pauses, then does exactly what she has been told. She sings jana gana mana in a baby voice and runs and hides under the table.
Memsahib wants to say something to her husband but changes her mind and turns her gaze towards the curtain. She starts walking towards us. Pakistan is going to invade the kitchen, whispers Chef. He shoves me towards the clay oven and parts the curtains and smiles a fake smile. Memsahib would like to have a word with the trainee.
I lift my hands and fold them to say namasté. My brain fogs up. I bow. She says something in Hindi, I respond in good English. My attention moves from her feet to her ringed finger. She is standing very close to me now, a very tough moment, and Chef doesn’t utter a word, he observes with tiger eyes. Memsahib in her convent accent inquires about my hometown and education and thousand other things, including, if I was really Iqbal Singh’s son, and I feel like talking to her more and more, and I want to ask her about my father’s Partition story, but meanwhile I am liking her feminine presence in the kitchen, and the old vaccine mark on her upper arm. She is wearing a sleeveless blouse, but abruptly she turns, her sari spins like a top, and her high heels start clicking and it hits me hard the sound of her heels clicking as she returns to the drawing room. Before she leaves she says: come see me sometime. Chef scolds me: why did you talk to the memsahib in Inglish? Rubiya is still in the drawing room with the ayah. Memsahib sits next to the motherless girl. She strokes the girl’s ruddy cheek. The girl is the spitting image of the dead woman in the painting. The men are not paying attention to the girl or the memsahib. Sahib is talking, the colonel is listening. Now Sahib is listening, the colonel is talking. Conversation turns to Kashmir. Conversation always turned to Kashmir. The air in the room grows absolutely still.
Colonel: ‘Sir, the way these people live.’
Colonel’s wife: ‘Darling… what do you mean?’
Colonel: ‘If I may say so, sir. Each bloody Kashmiri has a bloody second wife.’
Colonel’s wife: ‘This means there must be twice as many women in Kashmir?’
General: ‘Your wife does have a point.’
Colonel: ‘No, sir. The brides come to Kashmir from bloody Bangladesh. And they bring along bloody men from bloody Islam, who are in touch with militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they have occupied the bloody mosques, sir. They want bloody azadi, sir.’
Colonel’s wife: ‘The girl! Rubiya is listening.’
Her husband stands up abruptly and walks to the window.
Colonel: ‘Outside it is very dark, sir. Array baytah! You sing soooo well. You are a big girl now – If I may say so, sir, the way the bloody bastards think -’
Colonel’s wife: ‘Shhh! The girl.’
Colonel: ‘Sir, I love my India, sir… Array baytah! What will you become when you grow really big? Tell me?’
Rubiya: ‘Suicide.’
Colonel: ‘Jokes apart, baytah. What will you really do?’
Rubiya: ‘Go to Amay-ree-ka.’
Colonel’s wife: ‘Why so?’
Rubiya: ‘Papa says so.’
Colonel: ‘ America is an astonishing country, sir. The doctor’s daughter studies there at NYU. She loves it.’
Colonel’s wife: ‘Let’s leave. We all love a good night’s sleep. Don’t we, darling?’
She giggles.
Colonel: ‘Let me tell General sir one last thing, darling. I have found the perfect solution to deal with Pakistan, sir! Now that we’ve the N-weapon, it is very simple… I shared my idea with Mr. Ghosh, sir, but he didn’t seem to get it… Few nights ago, sir, I woke on my bed thinking the idea. Why don’t we – and I am just thinking, sir – why not drill a hole in the glacier, bury the bomb inside, the way we do it in the desert sands, sir, and blow it up? The glacier would melt and millions and billions of liters of water will flow to their side and flood our enemy out of existence, sir?’
General: ‘But, colonel. The enemy too has an N-weapon.’
Colonel: ‘We’ll do it first, sir.’
Colonel’s wife: ‘Darling, you and your ideas.’
‘Please allow us, sir, to take our leave.’
‘It was a delight.’
‘Delighted, sir.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night, sir.’
‘Good night, uncle. Good night, aunty.’
‘Good night, baytah!’
‘Good night.’
The colonel and his wife departed. It took them a long time to say bye-bye, but eventually they departed. The General waved them off from the verandah. They lived close by, and they used torch lights walking on the narrow pebbled path. I was standing outside the kitchen taking a little break to try and settle myself, and overheard their conversation. The colonel’s ideas about the glacier had made me very worried.
‘Come on, darling, I know there is something else bugging you.’
‘Now you have spoiled my chances of getting promoted.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why did you say the thing about the knives?’
‘Darling – don’t you get the point?’
‘You have destroyed me.’
‘Darling, come on.’
‘Don’t say dar-ling war-ling. Did not you see the General was silent after you said that nonsense?’
‘He likes you.’
‘Now I will never become a Brigadier.’
‘But, darling, why did you run to the window so abruptly?’
‘The view.’
‘Don’t lie. Do you think I do not know? You disappeared because… Do you think I do not know why you ran to the window and laughed so loudly and banged your fist against the table?’
‘There is nothing wrong with concealment.’
‘A fart, darling? One must simply say excuse me the way one says before sneezing, and do it.’
‘Like the General? I must say he is more honest.’
‘Down to his farting. Darling.’
Their voices receded and the torch lights became little dots and were gone. Sounds of crickets took over. Bats and wolves reclaimed their territory. I saw the night humming with stars. I had never heard a married couple talking privately. They talked like civilians. Of farts and farting.
The kitchen was still filled with her nice smell. I found it difficult to express my feelings to Chef, so I made tea quickly and thanked him – as he was waiting for it – for saving my ass. To make up for my error, I shared the conversation with him, the exact exchange that took place between India and Pakistan. I mimicked the memsahib in English. But he grew unusually silent.
‘Something wrong, Chef?’
‘No Inglish.’
He started slurping tea noisily.
‘What is wrong with English?’
‘No Inglish!’ he yelled at me.
Normally he lost his temper in the kitchen when the assistants licked their fingers or picked noses while marinating. I will ban you from the kitchen, he would yell. He banned Biswas, who was dumb like a cabbage, and Thapa, who scratched his groin while preparing dough. Ramji left because he was caught reading porn. (Later we found that he would also frequent the red-light district of the city to sleep with Muslim women.) Barring a few exceptions Chef was very lenient with me. But that day he simply lost it. He started cursing me. All because of Inglish. English came, and became a wall between us.
I had made a minor error, nothing in comparison to the error he had made. I refused to serve tea to the Muslim officer. He would repeat the story often when in an exceptionally good mood. In pure Hindi he would brag: I refused tea to that man. Several times when I was his apprentice I intended to ask why he had really done so. Was it just because of the smell? Would he still do so? What about the gardener, Agha? Did he dislike Agha, too, because he was a Muslim? But I could never gather the courage to pose the question.
I must be a weak character, I say to myself on this train.
In Srinagar whenever Colonel Chowdhry was away on border duty, during his long absences I would go out of my way to walk past his residence. There was an old plane tree in the garden with a rope swing attached to a high branch. Sometimes the convex swing would move on its own in the wind, and sometimes Memsahib would make it move with enormous force, her feet touching the ground now and then. To this day I can’t forget her perfect feet, stained a little by the soil of Kashmir.
But there was something that troubled me whenever I looked at her or thought about her in my room. The sound of a guitar would echo in my head. I would try to conjure up the guitarist and his chopped fingers making love to the memsahib. A chill would go through my spine. Before her I had not experienced such a combination of fear and desire, and because I am a weak man the fear started swelling and the desire started shrinking. What saved me from that fear was a sudden bout of indigestion. The diarrhea took me to the hospital and there I encountered the nurse again, and all my desire towards Memsahib transferred towards the nurse, now that I think about it, just like a few months earlier all my desire for the nurse had transferred towards the memsahib. The nurse’s feet resembled the memsahib’s, her hands, her entire body was almost like Memsahib’s. Only difference: the nurse was a little dark, the color of cassia.
But.
I am jumping ahead of myself.
I did gather courage once, I did walk into Colonel Chowdhry’s house once. I was under the impression he was away, but the man was home. Both he and his wife received me on the lawn. She asked me to sit down in the chair, but I looked at the colonel and his face didn’t approve that I accept her offer. Lower ranks are not supposed to sit with commissioned officers, even if one happens to be the brother of the officer in question. I kept standing, hands clasped behind my back. It is good you came, said the wife. She was also standing. The reason I came, I said, looking her in the eye, is because I would like to hear Father’s Partition story. Father never told me the details.
Yes, I thought so, she said. I think about you often since our meal at the Gen’s.
‘Who? This boy Kirpal?’ interrupted the colonel.
‘No, no. Major Iqbal,’ she said. ‘He was the silent type, he rarely opened up. This happened before I met you. Once my ex-husband and I invited Iqbal for dinner. God knows what it was really, perhaps the combination of food and drink and music made the Major open up that evening, but when conversation turned to the Partition he grew silent again. I poured him another drink.’
The colonel’s wife stopped briefly and sat down in the chair. Why don’t you two sit down as well? she said, hitting her forehead with her delicate hand. The colonel sat down immediately, and I sat on the ground. But she stood up and stepped towards me and extended her hand and helped me move to the empty chair. The colonel looked in the other direction. At first I felt uncomfortable in the chair, but it became increasingly clear to me that she wanted to treat me like a son. This is how she related my father’s story to me in the colonel’s angry presence.
Month of August, 1947. India had just been partitioned by the British. Thousands of Sikhs in the city of Lahore suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the new border, your father, Major Iqbal, told me. I was nine, he said. I used to tie my long hair into a knot on my head; I had not started wearing a turban yet. I used to cover the knot with a tiny patch of muslin (my mother had devised a rubber band mechanism to hold the patch tight). Breakfast was ready, and my uncles and aunts and grandparents were all gathered in the living room. I can see the carpeted floors, I can see the velvet sofas, and through the window I can see the mango tree in the yard. Grandmother had prepared aloo-parathas in the kitchen, she tried to persuade Mother not to send me to the class because of tension between communities, but Mother said education was important. I ran all the way to the school with my heavy satchel only to find a big notice at the gates. School was cancelled. The city was on fire. The cinema halls were closed, and there was fire and smoke all over and Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim bodies were burning everywhere, and I ran back to our house through charred streets. When I got home, I found all the doors open and the water faucet running for no particular reason. In the living room, on the velvet sofas and on the red carpets, I found the chopped-off heads of my grandparents and mother and siblings and other family members; the killers had gathered them up, and piled them up neatly, as if they were market fruit.
That evening, I boarded the train to India. But it ended up it was the wrong train, said your father. It was filled with Muslims. The train had come to the newly created Pakistan from India and it was not returning to India. He said, I cannot forget the look on the faces of my fellow passengers, it was as if they were worried for me. I was very afraid, but I tried not to show it. I kept staring at the woman sitting on the seat across from me. She stood out from the human mass around her, she was eating a mango, sucking it (that is the right word), and now and then drops kept falling on her green toenails. She was wearing heels, and three layers of her clothing were touching her feet, the innermost circle or the hem belonging to her white petticoat, the second hem belonging to her red sari and the outermost belonging to her black burqa. Her face was not covered, but her head and the rest of the body was covered by the black burqa. Her hands and feet were not covered, and they appeared so liberated. The three circles or the three hems of petticoat, sari and burqa were swelling and shrinking in the wind, the train window was open and the wind was hitting us all a bit violently.
The train stopped at a crowded platform. The wind stopped as well; now the air in the carriage grew hot and stagnant and oppressive. Through the window another train was visible on the other side of the platform. The carriages were painted red or simply rusty, with as many people inside as there were on the roof. On the platform five or six Muslims with naked swords were asking regular passengers if they had seen a Hindu or a Sikh on the train. The woman stopped eating her mango. She started staring at me, so hard it appeared her eyes were going to explode. Suddenly she grabbed my right wrist and pulled me towards her and shoved me quickly under her seat. I was not a very tall nine-year-old, so the squeeze was all right. The voices were now moving up and down the aisle of our train demanding Sikhs and Hindus. The woman started on the mango again. Drops started falling down, she was sucking it. The men were now extremely close to our compartment. For a moment I felt the woman was going to hand me over to them. She began tapping her heels and this terrified me under the seat. Why was she tapping? Why was she drawing attention? Were the heels trying to convey something to me? She tapped forcefully one last time and lifted the three hems of her burqa-sari-petticoat a bit in the air, then higher, and it was then I understood. I crawled inside. She immediately lowered the garments; now they touched the floor again. Suddenly it grew very dark around me.
Where is the Sikh boy? demanded the mob. From the platform we definitely noticed a boy on this train, said a voice loudly.
What Sikh? said a passenger.
The men were suspicious and opened up several suitcases and looked under the seats. I heard them, I could not see a thing. I was trapped inside absolute darkness. It was like being in a movie theater alone, wrapped by the white screen, and no movie on. It was as if the real movie was happening in the world outside the theater. The woman kept eating her mango. Drops kept falling. No other passenger in the compartment said a word. I imagine they simply turned their heads in the other direction. They all were Muslims. When the train stopped again it was very dark and I crawled out from under her and she quickly untied the knot on my head and made my hair tumble down to look like a girl. This is all I can do, she said, I can do nothing more for you. Allah will protect you now. He will protect you. She kissed me on both cheeks, gave me a little food and walked me to the refugee camp on the edge of the city.
This story, said the colonel’s wife, I don’t think I would have shared with you if you had not asked me the details. I will not be able to sleep tonight, she said.
Memsahib was shaking now. My gaze remained fixed on her shoes. To this day I don’t understand, Kirpal, why your father shared this painful story. I recall when he was sharing the details it was as if he was not there, it was as if he did not care if we were there or not. Normally men censor certain parts of a story when in the presence of a woman, but Iqbal was elsewhere that evening and to him it did not matter if I was listening or not.
‘Listen, my boy,’ said the colonel, ‘it is time you go back to General Sahib’s residence.’
‘Sir.’ I stood up and clicked my heels.
Memsahib ran indoors. I could not, therefore, say a proper shukriya to her. I have never been able to do what I really wanted to do. I am so weak.
Being a Sikh I am interested in hair. Some of my most sensuous memories are not connected to food at all. They are about hair. The way my mother would wash it, oil it, massage it, comb it, braid it, and tie a knot on top of my head. My hair was long and black and curly and whenever I dried it outdoors the wind would turn my head into a vortex. I cut my hair short fifteen years ago. But, during my time in Kashmir (the first four years) I had it long and used to tie a black turban. Sikhs believe in the holy book, the Adi Granth, and ten masters, Guru Nanak the first one and Guru Gobind Singh the last one. No one knows what the gurus really looked like, but in calendars they appear as if lost in deep meditation, unaware of the bright halos behind their Sufi-style turbans. Their beards are black or gray, but always long and flowing gracefully.
In Kashmir I tried to buy the Prophet Mohammed calendar. There was no such thing, I was told. It was hard to conjure him up. Every time I tried he would resemble one of the Sikh gurus.
In Srinagar, in the mosque with a single minaret, there was a strand of the Prophet’s hair. It had been transported in a vial to Kashmir (in the luggage of a holy man) two or three centuries ago. Thousands of people gathered every year on a special day to be blessed by the holy relic. At first I thought the hair in the vial belonged to the head of the Prophet, but Chef corrected me. It comes from the Prophet’s beard, he said.
If I have forgotten certain details from that time it is because I rarely got any sleep those days. The mosque was the holiest in Kashmir, but it had been hijacked by a group of militants, who used to gather in the hamaam to talk azadi.
The vial was kept under heavy security. But one day it disappeared. We read about the theft in the papers. The Kashmiris took to the streets in millions demonstrating against our country, blaming our leaders. Government buildings and vehicles were set on fire and the situation got out of hand.
My thoughts during those days of demonstrations kept turning to the colonel’s wife. On the third day of the demos I gathered the courage to walk again to her residence, but the orderly told me that Memsahib was in the living room taking dance lessons from an instructor. I waited on the lawns. Their dark forms, visible through the window, whirled and spun, but I could not hear the steps. ‘Kip,’ she beckoned me finally on the verandah.
I folded my hands by way of greeting.
‘Why did you come?’
‘Are you disappointed?’ I asked.
‘No, no.’
‘I have come to talk to you.’
‘Talk to me?’
‘Yes.’ I hesitated for a moment. ‘You don’t look happy,’ I said.
‘Perhaps you have come to look at my kitchen?’
‘Yes, yes, Memsahib.’
‘Come in then.’
We passed through the living room. On the sofa a familiar man was sitting, the General’s ADC. Seeing him my heart froze with terror, but I saluted anyway. He was wearing a French-cuff shirt and his shoes looked expensive and gleamed with confidence.
‘Kip has come to inspect our kitchen,’ she told him.
‘I see,’ he said, staring at me.
I followed her. There was nobody in the kitchen.
She stood next to the fridge and I next to the sink.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said. ‘Now tell me -’
‘Yes, Memsahib.’
‘What have you heard about me?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Tell me.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Your father was different.’
‘So far nothing, Memsahib.’
‘In that case soon you will start hearing things.’
‘Yes, Memsahib.’
‘I am like your Aunty,’ she said.
‘Yes, Memsahib.’
‘Understand?’
‘I do.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘If I hear things about you I will shut my ears.’
‘You will shut your ears?’
‘Yes, yes, Memsahib.’
‘Show me how.’
I put fingers in my ears. I felt like a child.
‘Shut your eyes as well,’ she said.
I did exactly as I was told. I closed my eyes.
I heard her steps approaching me. Yet I felt uncertain. Then I felt her sari touch my shirt, and for a brief second she stabbed me with her pointed breasts. Then she stepped back and started slapping my face with the back of her hand. Left cheek. Right. Left again.
‘Aunty!’ I opened my eyes.
‘Don’t return,’ she said. ‘You are like a son to me.’
She rushed to the next room and said something inane to the ADC and they resumed the dance lessons.
I took the long way home to General Sahib’s residence. Wet inside my pants, I felt like running. Instead, I slowed down. The chants and slogans of the Kashmiris demonstrating in the city kept insulting my ears, and I could not shut them out.
Two days later in the kitchen. I watched from behind the curtain, General Sahib was alone in the dining room with the colonel’s wife. She was looking beautiful, her voice carried on waves of laughter. The colonel was supposed to be there, too, both had been invited, but Sahib dispatched him for an emergency law-and-order meeting with the Police Chief and the Governor.
The English they were speaking was fluent, with good idiom. Lunch was ready. Kebabs and rumali rotis. They were about to start when the red phone rang. Chef, he was standing close to the phone, answered.
‘General Kumar’s residence.’
Sahib: ‘Who is it?’
Chef: ‘Sir, the Prime Minister’s secretary is on the line… the PM would like to talk to you… Matter is urgent, sir.’
Sahib: ‘Is he on the line?’
Chef: ‘Sir, the secretary will now tell the PM you are available. She has asked me, sir, to tell you not to move away from the phone, sir.’
For ten minutes there was absolute silence in the residence. It was hard for the colonel’s wife to remain silent, but she too was silent.
Chef walked to the dining table on the tips of his toes to cover the dishes. That was the loudest sound during those ten minutes.
The secretary called again.
Chef: ‘PM is on the line, sir.’
He stood glued to the dining table during the phone coversation. Later Chef shared with us in the kitchen the key details. The PM had basically told the General to locate and restore the holy relic to its proper place within forty-eight hours, no questions asked. The police failed to deliver so I am asking the army to take over, the PM had said.
Never before had the General looked so worried and anxious, Chef told us back in the kitchen. Sahib’s face acquired the look of a man who had just been ordered (for the first time in his life) to slaughter a little goat. He scratched his head, plucked his hair while talking on the phone.
‘Sir,’ said the General to the PM. ‘We will do our best, sir. Yes, sir… No, sir… It will be done, sir.’ Right after the call ended he picked up the kebab on the table and for a long time kept moving the thing from left to right in his mouth without swallowing it.
‘What now?’ asked the colonel’s wife.
Sahib kept working on the kebab.
No one to this day knows how and where the vial containing the relic was found. But after forty-eight hours calm was restored. The army faced one more hurdle. Before the relic could be installed in the mosque, it had to be validated.
The mosque named five holy imams to validate the holy relic. They were flown to Srinagar on DC-3 Dakota planes. Their job was to determine if the hair in the vial was authentic.
The General’s ADC asked us in the kitchen to prepare a proper meal for the clerics. It is important to make them appreciate the high quality of our dishes. The ADC stared right through me during the conversation. Chef told me after: this is your real test, kid. The recruitment test was a fake. At this critical moment in my career and your career and General Sahib’s career, and at this critical juncture of Kashmir’s relationship with India, what food would you prepare?
‘Authentic Kashmiri,’ I suggested.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘we will have to become Muslims.’
‘Convert to Islam?’
‘Of course. Yes.’
‘Chef is not serious.’
‘Chef is serious.’
‘If cooking Muslim food in the kitchen is going to establish peace in the country then I am willing to convert for a day,’ I said.
‘Bewakuf,’ he said. ‘Idiot.’
Chef cooked Muslim Kashmiri delicacies with his own hands passionately and with great care, like a wazwan. Who taught him? I asked. Later, he said, I will tell you later, you Sikh. But he never did. For me it was a god-sent opportunity to learn the exotic cuisine, the names of Kashmiri Muslim dishes (thirty-six to be exact) unfamiliar to me, some right out of a fairy tale. I knew the Hindu Kashmiri dishes, but they were different. Certain Muslim dishes involved pounding the meat for seven or eight hours until it separated into fibres as thin as silk. We cooked in a tent pitched in the garden behind the mosque. I am still able to recall the copper vessels and slow fire. I remember setting up the long dining table under the plane tree. Tarami plates. White linens fluttering in the wind.
Food was served. Fenugreek gosht. Nadir kebab. Aloobukhara korma. Goat tails. Haakh saag. Tabak maaz. Dum aloo. Rista-63. Gushtaba. Saffron pilaf in the middle. Shirmal. Rumali roti, yellow and thin like a two-day-old newspaper. No part of the tablecloth was uncovered.
They were about to start.
But.
The chief cleric asked the General to beckon the ‘cook’. The cleric said: I want to have a word with the ‘cook’.
Chef put on his military (jungle) hat and asked me to accompany him. I adjusted my black turban and buttoned up my white jacket. We walked together to the tree and stood before the table, silently, waiting. The colonel of the regiment, sitting on the left of General Sahib, said, ‘Kishen, Pir Sahib would like to ask you a question.’ The imam was sitting on the right of the General.
Chef stood confidently, just a bit ahead of me, his hands clasped behind his back.
The imam opened his mouth. I only want to double-check if the meat used in Rogan Josh is halal? he inquired.
I sighed in relief. Chef reassured the imam and the other clerics that the meat used was pure halal, but he didn’t stop there. He uttered a few things, a few extra things, which I think ruined him.
This is what he said, I hear those words even now: One hundred percent halal was used, sir, we procured the meat from a genuine Muslim shop in Lal Chowk. Many interesting dishes can be prepared with pork, sir – whether it is halal or not. But we did not use pork. Only lamb was used, sir. Personally I am not for slaughtering pigs.
The situation around the table grew tense. The imam looked as if he was about to vomit.
General: Pork has not been used?
Chef: Lamb meat was used, sir.
General Sahib looked at the imams, then at the colonel of the regiment.
Colonel: No pork has been used, sir.
Chef: Only lamb was used, sir. Hundred percent halal, sir.
The imams did not touch the meat dishes. They ate very little, and hurried to the inspection tent in their dark cloaks. Some of us from the kitchen followed as well.
Our army had set up a huge shamiana tent on the uppermost terrace of the garden. The imams were seated on the carpet, and I saw the General and the police chief standing close by with burning anxiety on their faces. The vial passed from one hand to other, and eventually it ended in the hands of the holiest man, the head imam, and he sat there gazing with wonder, and it took him twenty minutes to pass his verdict, and I did not see him nod, but I saw the tense expression on the police chief’s face change into a smile, and I heard the General’s sigh of relief.
The vial was returned to the mosque, put in the high-security room, and the protests stopped on the streets. I did not know then that those hours were the last few hours of my apprenticeship.
The next day Chef got a written order from the colonel’s office. He had been demoted, and was being transferred (with immediate effect) to the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram mountains.
So I was now Chef.
Before he left I cooked Italian tortellini and poured him a tall glass of Kingfisher beer. During that dinner he played the slow movement of the German music on the tape recorder and told me many personal things, which to me at that moment sounded a bit comical. But with time the same things have become less and less comical. He talked about his family.
He began by telling me that the Kashmiri Hindus had no problems eating meat.
‘Brahmins do not eat meat,’ I protested.
‘They do, Kirpal. In Kashmir the Hindus eat goat and mutton. In olden days they used to eat cows, peacocks… Don’t give me that look.’
He poured another glass of Kingfisher.
‘In this country, Kip, we have too many taboos, and sometimes I get sick of them, really sick of them.’
‘But, Chef, in college the teacher told us that because of these taboos we Indians, Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims, were able to rise up against the British in 1857. The colonial officers introduced the Enfield rifle. It was bad technology, the soldiers were told to bite the cartridges in order to load the rifles. The cartridges were greased with offensive pig fat or cow fat… We refused. Mutiny! Our first war of independence!’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But that was then.’
‘But it is true, Chef,’ I said.
‘In 1857 you Sikhs sided with the British.’
‘Chef, you are trying to lump all Sikhs into one,’ I said. ‘As if there is only one kind of curry powder? One kind of mango? One kind of Rogan Josh?’
‘One kind of woman!’
‘But, Chef, I am serious.’
‘So am I,’ he said. ‘So am I. You see, Kirpal, the foods I don’t eat, the things I find disgusting, have more to do with my memories and less with religion. Take chocolate. I run away from rooms in which I sense its presence.’
‘Why so?’
‘Because of my father,’ he said.
‘Father?’ I said.
‘In the hospital on his deathbed my old man had desired chocolate,’ said Chef Kishen. ‘I hurried to the shop in the bazaar. By the time I returned he was dead. Since that moment I find the smell of chocolate repulsive. Sometimes I hear my father saying to me, Son, eat a chocolate, for my sake eat it. But the moment I see or smell it the desire gets crushed.
‘But the story I really want to tell involves my grandfather,’ said Chef Kishen. ‘Despite being a Brahmin my grandfather didn’t believe in caste. He did not believe in taboos, Kip. Grandfather rarely entered the kitchen. He was not a cook, yet he knew his food well. He didn’t care who cooked in the kitchen as long as the veg or non-veg or whatever it was was good. Grandfather was married to an old woman who was a bad cook and she believed in caste. She made it very clear that she would die if a low caste ever cooked for her. One day the old woman was unwell and a low-caste woman took over the kitchen, and the moment grandfather revealed the identity of the cook, the old woman died. Her head fell on the bowl of curry on the table. The whole table became yellow with stains. The low-caste woman, the cook, became my grandmother.
‘And yet, in the end,’ said Chef, ‘no matter how hard we try – we are low-caste peoples and we do not matter. Army belongs to officers, Kirpal. I am worthless. I feed them, serve them, take ardors. I endure the heat of the tandoor, and then I am let go, or I leave on my own. My life has come to nothing. My work has come to nothing. What will I do there on the glacier? They eat canned food on high altitudes. We are the people who do not matter. Bleedy bastards,’ he said.
This was one of the few English words he knew. He said it in a thick accent. ‘What is the meaning of ‘‘bleedy bastards’’, Kip?’ I told him the meaning, and he confessed that all along he had imagined it to be the equivalent of bhaen-chod or ma-dar-chod.
We are the people who do not matter, he said. Bloody bastards.
There was a single tortellini left on his otherwise polished plate. He picked it up with his thumb and first finger.
‘Kip, this thing reminds me of a woman’s belly button.’
‘A woman’s what, sir?’
‘Navel.’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Hold it.’
I held the tortellini in my left hand for a brief second and touched it with the first finger of my right, and surveyed the curious irregular shape. Then I turned it and turned it again and without hesitation put it in my mouth.
‘Congratulations, Chef!’ he said.
Next day Kishen took the bus to the glacier.