Chef (16 page)

It’s strange, I am looking at Irem’s back and she is looking at the women in the photo. Perhaps there are more than six women. The tall one is hiding the short one, and they are all standing on a cliff. Irem moves slightly to her right; now I see more clearly. At the bottom left corner, a lonely shoe. One small push and it would fall into the valley.

Slowly Irem is becoming a part of that work of art. I do not feel like disturbing. But my breath is becoming heavy.

The nurse begins tapping her feet.

‘Irem ji,’ I say, switching to Kashmiri, ‘I have cooked Rogan Josh for dinner. Halal for you. Non-halal for us.’

No response.

So I start telling her about the recipe I had followed, and then I recall at precisely that moment she turned and muttered something. I ask her to repeat it, and she says: One never uses tomatoes in Rogan Josh.

The nurse asks me to translate.

No tomatoes in Rogan Josh
.

This makes her laugh. She laughs at me, the nurse. The enemy doesn’t laugh.

‘How is that possible?’ I say. ‘A dish without tomatoes is like a film without sound.’

‘No tomatoes,’ says Irem.

‘Irem ji, please write down
your
recipe of Rogan Josh for me.’

But as soon as I open my mouth, I realize my mistake.

‘I am sorry. You cannot write.’

The nurse stares at us.

‘But, why is the Rogan Josh so red? If there are no tomatoes then why is it red?’

Irem remains silent.

‘Tell me,’ I insist. ‘Please.’

‘The color comes from the mirchi.’

‘But why is the dish so intensely red?’

‘Redness comes from the Kashmiri chilies,’ she says. ‘And mawal flowers.’

‘I accept. But, in the absence of tomatoes where does the khatta taste come from?’

‘Khatta is due to curds only.’

‘I am hungry,’ the nurse roars in English, unable to comprehend Kashmiri.

Irem would not sit on the sofa or in the chair. She sat on the carpet. So I spread a white calico sheet on the carpet and transferred the dishes there, and that is how it all began. She closed her eyes and lifted her palms and said a small prayer to Allah and started eating slowly, then picked up speed. Suddenly she remembered she was not alone in the room and slowed down again. She used her left hand to eat, and once or twice licked her fingers.

During dinner she opened up to us and shared her story. She was no longer hesitant.

She had jumped into the river to end her life. To end one’s life is against religion, she said. It is a sin. But the life she was leading was worse than death. Her husband and his mother criticized her constantly for not being able to bear a child.

It was a sunny October morning, she told us, and there was taste of bitter almonds in my mouth and suddenly I
knew
what I was going to do. I walked to the high rock by the river, and jumped in. Before I jumped I saw a vision of angels and prayed to Khuda to please kill me. Now, I am being punished by him for wanting to commit
khud-qushi
.

I did not drown. Instead I floated down the river to the Indian side, where I was fished out by a border guard. I told the guard that I was from
border-cross
and that I was not a rebel. Where is your passport and visa? he asked me. Why have you entered the country illegally? he asked me. It was then he handed me over to the military, and the military sent me to this hospital, she said.

Irem’s pheran had a strange embroidery on it. She had jumped into the river wearing that very pheran, and it had clung to her body during her
journey
from the enemy’s land to our land. That night, after listening to her story, I biked to the General’s residence not only with the tiffin-carriers and cutlery, but also with Irem’s pheran. She had stained the pheran during dinner, and the nurse had asked me to drop the garment at the washerman’s hut on the way.

Cycling to the General’s residence I kept returning to everything that had transpired during the dinner. It was like replaying a black and white film again and again. Every attempt was unsatisfactory. So I would start again. Fail again. Start again. I took the pheran to my room. When my assistant was not around I smelled the garment. It smelled of the sweat of a beautiful woman. The embroidered pattern on the hem was almost like a leaf. I did not know the name of the pattern, but a few months later a different woman would reveal to me the name of it. It is called
paisley
, she would tell me. Back in those days (and nights) the more attention I paid to paisley, the more I felt that the pattern ought to be a symbol of something.

That was the first night Kashmir felt like home to me. Despite that I lay in bed with my shoes and uniform. The assistant reminded me once or twice to change my clothing, but I asked him to bugger off, and I kept recalling the five minutes I spent absolutely alone with Irem. The nurse had stepped out to attend a patient in the ward, and I had spent five full minutes alone with Irem.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘This morning I raised my voice.’

‘No problem,’ she said.

‘Is there something you would like me to do?’

‘No.’

‘I would like to help you.’

‘No.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘If possible, bring me the Qur’an.’

‘But?’

‘But what?’

‘You cannot read.’

‘I can hold the Qur’an.’

There was an awkward silence. Her eyes were red. She needed the book more than she needed my food.

‘There are many varieties of Muslims?’ I asked. ‘I have heard about the Shia, the Sunni and the Sufi. What kind of a Muslim are you?’

‘Homeless,’ she said.

Her response eased some of the tension between us.

‘You see that mountain up there, where the bright lights are?’ I pointed through the window. ‘That is where my room is.’

She nodded.

‘I have lived there, in the barracks, for a while now. Sometimes when I am down in the valley, or here in the hospital at night, the mountain up there looks like a huge aircraft. When the lights are turned on in the evening it appears as if the aircraft is ready to depart.’

She remained silent. I kept talking. Now that I think about it what a fool I made of myself. To this day I have not figured out how to stop talking when in the presence of a beautiful woman.

‘On certain nights,’ I said, ‘I hear the sound of sirens, ambulances rushing towards this hospital, and I feel as if the aircraft is about to explode.’

She moved closer to the window, carrying her plate of Rogan Josh. There was a slight limp in her walk.

‘You talk like men in Bombay films.’

The way she said this so fearlessly, so unexpectedly, impressed me a lot.

‘The mountain is visible from our side also,’ she continues. ‘From the other side of the river, we too get to see it. The children in our village point at the memorial at the very top of the mountain. Have you been there?’

‘No,’ I say.

She turns. She is so beautiful. I can’t point at a concrete detail of her face and say
that is why she is beautiful
. I just turn away my eyes.

‘Mihirukula’s memorial,’ she says.

I force my gaze and desperately try to find a flaw in that beauty. I fail. Then, I succeed. There are big gaps between her teeth. Her teeth are not beautiful.

‘Mihirukula?’

‘The White Hun’s memorial,’ she says.

‘The Hun?’

She speaks very slowly, revealing her teeth. She tells me something women don’t usually tell men they have just met. There was a garden in our village. Now it is a ruin. The White Hun came with a huge army of elephants. Elephants? I clarify. Yes, she says. Elephants. One of them fell from the cliff, 10,000 feet below. The Hun loved it. He was amused by the shriek of the falling animal. With one little finger he commanded his men to kick off four hundred elephants purely for his amusement. Trumpet-like sounds. For days afterwards my ancestors heard the echoes of dying creatures.

Then all was silence.

In my village the ambulance sirens remind us of elephants, she says.

Why did you tell me this?

She tries to sit down. The plate falls from her trembling hand, staining her iridescent pheran. Then the spoon lands in slow motion on the carpet. Why did you tell me? You Kashmiris from top-man to bottom-man are all anti-India. Her eyes turn red like a brick. Saheb, I am not like that, she stammers. Some militants in our village are planning to kill. But I don’t want Kashmir back if most of us end up dead.

‘Who are the men going to kill?’

‘The biggest officer of your military.’

‘The General?’

‘I think so.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I heard it in the village. Please save him. His car must never pass the Zero Bridge.’

‘Not a word more.’

The nurse was angry with Irem when she returned. There was Rogan Josh on the carpet, and its long trail was visible on Irem’s pheran. She asked me to step out for a minute, and when I re-entered the room Irem had changed into a striped kurta-pyjama. She looked uncomfortable in the oversize pyjama-kurta. The drawstring dangled. I turned my gaze downwards and focused only on the carpet, her feet, and her words.

Next morning I woke up with the enemy’s pheran under my pillow. It had a mysterious odor. I sent my assistant to the bazaar and washed the pheran along with my clothes, and dried it on the line in my room, hidden between my clothes. While ironing I was very careful not to break the buttons at the back. Two were missing. While ironing I thought, isn’t it funny that in the Hindi language the word for
iron
and the word for
woman
is one and the same. I sprinkled water on the garment and ironed till all the wrinkles disappeared.

In the evening I looked at the mountain again. The plane trees were turning color. The mountain carried no memory of the falling elephants. If there was something falling it was a red leaf, falling very slowly, without a shriek. I cycled down the mountain with the neatly folded pheran in my kit. When I see her, I thought, I must tell her to stand by the window again, and look at the slopes in the light of the evening. What makes some leaves linger on trees in autumn? I wanted to ask many questions. I wanted to know what was she like before she got married? What was she like as a girl?

How did other strangers respond to her? What were the foods she disliked? Did she have enough to eat? Who taught her to cook? I wanted to ask her all these questions and know all the answers.

When I got to the hospital I parked my bike and walked into the ward. But she was gone. I did not know what to do. So. I cycled to the Hazratbal Mosque via the Zero Bridge. There were people on the bridge. Two cops were guarding the structure, the green trusses. The river was muddy and overflowing. The mosque was in the low-lying area just six hundred yards from the bridge. Flooding was a possibility. An old woman was feeding pigeons inside the compound of the mosque and I removed my shoes and walked barefoot on marble towards her. She was old, but still beautiful. Women in Kashmir were always beautiful. I had no idea how to buy a Qur’an and as I proceeded towards her I noticed the men looking at me suspiciously as if perhaps in my turban I had come to steal the relic. Their eyes were fierce. Their bodies were wet and dripping; it seemed as if they had just stepped out of the hamaam. The old woman pointed her finger towards the store in the street. You do not buy Qur’ans inside the mosque, she said. Then she resumed feeding the pigeons. Patiently she tore the bread into tiny morsels. There were thousands of them, pigeons, shitting in the same compound where they were being fed.

Allah u Akbar

Allah u Akbar

Allah u Akbar

Allah u Akbar

Ash-hadu Alla Ilaha-ill-allah

Ash-hadu Alla Ilaha-ill-allah

Ash-hadu Anna Mohammadan Rasul-allah

Ash-hadu Anna Mohammadan Rasul-allah

Hayya-Alas-Salat

Hayya-Alas-Salat

Hayya-Alal-Falah

Hayya-Alal-Falah

Allah u Akbar

Allah u Akbar

La-ilaha ill-allah

The boy at the store was not paying attention to
azan
. He was solving math problems. His Philips radio was playing qawalis, Shahbaz Qalandar, and to this day I am able to recall the problem he was struggling with. Years before I, too, had to deal with the same complicated equation in school.

X
3
+ Y
3
= L
3
+ M
3
= 1729

I coughed. He looked up. His nose was running.

‘Do you sell the Qur’an?’

‘How many?’ he asked as if I was going to buy them by the dozen.

‘Kid,’ I said, ‘first explain to me the proper way to give respect to the Qur’an.’