Chef (20 page)

‘No, Sahib. I will not accept extra money.’

‘But you must. I insist.’

‘Don’t worry, Sahib. You served in the army.’

‘How do you know I served?’

‘The whole train knows
you served
. News travels fast on trains, Sahib.’

Even on trains there is no privacy, I say to myself.

‘Has the train
covered
time?’ I ask. ‘If it does not
cover
, I will miss the bus.’

How and when they moved my body and luggage to this compartment, I have no recall. He is the first man on the train I feel like talking to. The man is wearing a khaki uniform. Says he used to work as a lineman. The Railways made me a lineman. For thirty-one years I worked as a lineman. For thirty-one years I was unhappy. But when I started growing old the Railways transferred me inside the train, Sahib. We were so overworked, he said, sometimes on two hours of sleep we changed the lines, gave signals, and it was a lot of responsibility. So many lives depended on me. I could not imagine making a mistake, Sahib. Making even one would equal mass murder.

The air inside the bogie is refreshingly cold. From very hot I have moved to very cold. I do not say this to him. Instead I ask the attendant for a blanket. When he returns with my blanket I ask: Now that you work inside the train, are you not worried that some other lineman on two hours of sleep might make the same mistake you feared the most?

‘No, Sahib, it will not be my mistake. Working inside the train is much better than the duty of a lineman outside.’

‘So, you are not afraid that you might die?’

‘If I think about death all the time, I will not be able to work, Sahib. Now if you will please allow me.’

He disappears to his cabin (as I found out later) to play cards with the second attendant.

I hear the hum of air-conditioning, and many foreign accents, in this bogie. From my berth I can see two foreign women, dressed in Indian salwar-kameez. The more they try to look like Indians, the more they stand out. The women are quite fair and beautiful. One has blue eyes.

First: Canadian?

Second: No. From Texas.

First: But you carry a Canadian flag on your bag?

Second: The American flag lands me in trouble.

First: My name is Veronica. I am from Mexico City.

Second: Willow from Texas. From across the border!

They shake hands.

One of them says:
The only bloody thing in India on time was the train
.

Who said it? Willow or Veronica?

My head is pounding. My body is shivering. I beckon the attendant.

‘Please, it is very cold,’ I say to the man.

Not as a complaint, but by way of making a simple request.

‘The temperature is pre-set, Sahib.’

‘Can you do something about the noise at least? I have a bad headache.’

‘AC makes a lot of noise, these coaches are old, Sahib. This one is from the time of the British. The air-conditioning was installed where the iceboxes used to be in these bogies. Those days the compartments were kept cold by using blocks of ice, Sahib. When the train stopped at big junctions, coolies standing on platforms would transfer ice to the boxes, sahib.’

‘Please, my head is pounding.’

Willow and Veronica are both carrying cell phones. They seem to have developed a quick friendship. I don’t know who took more initiative. Willow or Veronica, or maybe both? They laugh a lot. At first I thought they were laughing at the poverty of our country. I was wrong. Laughing was basically a way to forget all the difficulties they were encountering dealing with the civilians in our country. They laughed a lot about toilets and latrines.

Just to hear them has made me feel young again. I am not dying, I say to myself.

Tuh-dee Tuh-dee Tuh-deeee Tuh-deeee

Tuh-dee Tuh-dee Tuh-deeee Tuh-deeee

Catering-wallah comes into our bogie. The women order hard-boiled eggs. He says he has no more eggs left. I have potato cutlets only, he says. They buy the cutlets. Too bad you don’t have eggs, I demand. And the man smiles and produces a perfect hard-boiled egg.

‘You did not sell the girls the eggs?’ I ask.

‘Sahib, I have only one egg, and they are two. I could not choose who gets the egg, so I decided not to give either one of them the egg.’

One girl makes eye contact with me. I translate from Hindi to English. I tell her the catering-wallah’s exact reasoning, and the moment I finish they break into a fit of laughter.

‘Where in India are you from?’ asks one of them.

I am at a loss for words.

‘Not an Indian,’ I say. ‘Brazilian.’

Then silence.

Aren’t they nice, my shoes. They will outlast me. They will continue to live. They will not be cremated. I do not want to be cremated. There is nothing sacred about fire. I have no fondness for burials either. I like the towers of silence. The Parsees leave the bodies of the dead for the vultures. The birds eat while flying, one is neither on this earth, nor in the heavens yet. Sometimes a limb falls on ground from the beak of a flying bird and worms on earth feel graced, a river or a jungle gets nourished.

What will happen the day I die?

Clouds will collide with mountain tops. Thunder. Then nothing.

Once gone, I do not want to return to this earth. No more reincarnations.

Five or six of us had an audience with His Holiness in Dharamshala, Willow tells Veronica. The
Dali Lama
told us a story. (She meant Dalai Lama, but she pronounced
Dali Lama
.) A monk who served eighteen years in a Chinese gulag was finally released under the condition that he would not return to Tibet. When the Lama first met him, the monk said that he was in great danger and several times he didn’t think he would make it. The Lama asked him what kind of danger was he in? The monk replied that he was in great danger of losing compassion towards the Chinese.

Good story, says Veronica.

I urge you to please replace China with America and Tibet with Iraq. There is a real danger, Veronica. Danger of losing compassion towards the Americans.

This time the women did not laugh.

When people talk religion and politics, I turn my thoughts to food. The catering-wallah’s egg is over-boiled. It has the odor of sulphur. The pleasures of eating food cooked by others! I can’t eat this egg. I will throw it away. No food is better than bad food. But.

The girl-woman is beautiful.

Willow or Veronica?

Maybe both.

They disappear to the toilet for a while; one returns in an oversize red T-shirt. No. 1 International Terrorist – it is written on the T-shirt. Under the writing is a photo of a face which resembles the American President.

The girls start laughing again. I feel very tired. Their laughter reminds me of the bleak laughter of the Kashmiri people. They are real jokers, the Kashmiris. I hear them everywhere. Impossible to escape them. The Kashmiri laughter wounds me wherever I go. Kashmir was a beautiful place and we have made a bloody mess of it. Will the Kashmiris, too, lose compassion for us Indians? I ask myself. Will I lose compassion towards certain people?

There are, and there were, people who occupied my mind all the time – and they ruined me. They made me what I am today, and I bow before them, and am thankful, but, it is certain, these people have also managed to ruin me. They had a weakness for giving commands and I had a weakness for accepting them more or less. Sometimes just to please them I would do whatever they felt like doing and I would pretend I liked whatever they liked. Chef used to go biking and I would say I too like biking but really if I could help it I would have slept longer, there was so little time to sleep in the army.

I wish I had a mind of my own, a free mind. I wish I had led a life separate from influence. I was like a child, and my fingers were in the hands of two or three important people and they pulled me this way or that.

After Chef died I did not read the papers for a while. But when I did, there was no story about him anyway. He died for a big nothing. There was nothing on TV. The press and the media had reported nothing to the nation. That is why I think in the larger scheme of things the man died for one big nothing.

On the other hand there were reports about the colonel who had staged fake battles on the glacier, and filmed them, to get a gallantry medal. The papers were also filled with ongoing talk about the coffin scam. But there was no mention of Kishen. The government censored the story. Chef’s fate was similar to the fate of the Pakistani troops and officers who died in the war. Pakistan had sent them to India posed as
freedom fighters
, and when they died Pakistan did not even acknowledge them as dead soldiers. Muslim troops in our regiments buried the dead Pakistani soldiers, because the enemy army refused to accept the bodies back. Pakistan maintained a fiction. They had to. And what Chef said that morning during his address on the glacier was the truth, but we had to maintain the lie. In the barracks rumors flowed like rum. But after his first suicide attempt, people started saying they did not know him at all. Those who had consumed his delicacies started saying Kishen? Who is Kishen? He was the most serious and sincere of us all. But he was dead. Not a single watch lost a second in our country. This country produced him. This miserable, melancholic, cowdungofacountry produced him. Then
it
took him away. He did not kill himself.
It
killed him.

Now this is killing me.

The reason I wanted to read the papers and watch TV was to find out how his parents and loved ones had responded. Not to get the details I already knew, but to find out about his family. I walked to the hospital, and I saw the nurse in white. She was always in white, but that day the color took special significance.

She knew he was gone. And she was expecting me. She asked me if Chef had mentioned her.

I did not respond.

She wept. She held my arm and wept.

‘He talked about you a lot,’ I said. ‘He only talked about you.’

‘Was the fire an accident?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘it was a kitchen accident.’

‘What a way to die,’ she said.

She was grieving him. But I do not think anyone should grieve him. For once he did exactly what he felt like doing. He had designed the complete menu. It was a perfect glacier meal. Chef dared to question the universe.

He questioned the Siachen coffin scam and the ration scam, which ran into five thousand crore millions of rupees, I didn’t tell her. The colonel, the brigadier, the major general and other senior officers involved in the scams were not even charged. Instead they received early retirement with full pension and benefits. Now they run big hotels and malls, and reside in fashionable glass towers and drive yellow Hummers. Two or three represent our country in foreign lands as ambassadors. Isn’t this the biggest shame on this earth that the man who wanted to improve the army is forgotten, not even acknowledged, and the men who destroyed it every month receive fat pension checks and benefits? Why was I born in this country?

The cancer that has grown inside me is not my fault. This country caused it. Despite that it has no shame. There are voices inside me, voices of people close to me, and they keep saying that I am personally responsible for bringing the disease and illness on myself. But it is not my fault at all.

I walked to the ladies ward. There was no one inside. Normally when Irem was not there, her shoes or at least her few belongings were visible under the metal bed. Now the ward was empty. I stood by Irem’s bed. Her name and number were gone and insects were climbing the wall. The nurse told me that the captive had been moved elsewhere.

‘Where?’

She did not know.

‘They are looking for you.’

‘For me?’

‘You must report at the colonel’s office.’

There was a fog and I followed the gravel road to the khaki office building. The colonel was alone in the room, so I did not have to wait long. His office orderly announced me, and although the colonel didn’t look up I marched in anyway. His cap was lying on his desk, and he was reading a thick file.

‘Jai Hind, sir,’ I said.

No response.

I noticed the circles left on his desk by cups of chai and coffee.

I coughed.

Suddenly he raised his head, stared at me and snapped his fingers and asked the office orderly to bring the
thing
. I noticed the colonel’s trussed jacket, his curly hair. Coconut oil glistened on the curls.

The orderly unlocked the Godrej almirah in the room, and pulled out the
thing
.

‘Play it.’

The orderly played my tape recorder.

‘We confiscated this from the enemy woman in the hospital ward,’ said the colonel.

‘Sir.’

‘You gave the enemy woman this American music?’