Tim Parks - The Server

I should have grabbed one of the exercise books and got out. Or not gone at all. It’s dumb running risks like this. What for? But if I take the one he’s writing in now, he’ll know. And that’s the one I want to read. I want to see what he thinks of the Dasgupta. What he thinks about the servers, about the food. Maybe he’s mentioned me.

People must be profoundly sick to want to sit through all this pain, listening to all this claptrap . He wrote that last night, after the second video, the one about the noble eightfold path, sila, samādhi, paññā . On the next page there was just one sentence written quite small. It’s you that’s profoundly sick, mate. You you you .

But aside from the diary I just wanted to sit in his room for a few minutes. There was an aura. Maybe it’s a smell. He’d left the bed unmade. A sheet and three blankets. He must have asked for an extra. Probably feels the cold. Like Jonathan. Like dad. Older men. Jonathan loved it when I took risks, flashing my tits in the pub or peeing between parked cars. The time we made love in the cinema! Match Point . What a yawn of a film. ‘You’re breathtaking, Beth!’ He kept shaking his head. It was the risks excited him. I took more and more. The evening together with Carl! He loved how self-destructive I could be.

This guy leaves his clothes all over the floor too. Dark blue underwear. Pretty large. Tracksuit pants. I sat on the bed and breathed deep. Not anapana , but a big deep sigh. All this men’s stuff. Dirty socks on the radiator, a heavy coat over the wardrobe door. Nail parings on the bedside table. Breathing deep, I began to feel an electric current of happiness and unhappiness. Beth-ness. Something about his coat tells me he’s a smoker. I stood up to smell. Yes. I went back to the bed, clicked his biro, turned a page and wrote, ‘Your pain is a door. Go through it.’

I LOVE WASHING rice and kichada beans. The rice is milky white, the beans bright yellow. ‘Mix together rice and beans in equal amounts in eight oven trays and rinse clean.’ I use lukewarm water. The steel trays fit neatly over the sink under the tap. Three rinses, the recipe says. I never do less than four. If you use cold water your fingers freeze and you can’t enjoy it. In the warm water the grains feel delicate and friendly, you can imagine you’re moving your fingers in someone’s hair. Stupid. The thing is not to imagine anything, just to be happy with white rice and yellow kichada beans. As soon as you run the water in the tray everything goes milky. The rice disappears and the tiny beans lose their yellowness. The water turns soft and slippery on your fingers as you run them back and forth through a sludge of grains. Tip the pan gently to drain and the white and yellow come back, but changed, softened.

At the second rinse, the cloudiness is thinner, like muslin curtains, or mist when you’re in a plane and the ground shows pale beneath. When we went to Berlin. No. Like itself, like nothing but itself. Water rinsing rice. The third time you have to work hard to bring out a few wisps of milkiness. Probably the recipe’s right and a fourth rinse is unnecessary, but I like to watch the clear water run over the clean wet grains.

Since it’s an odd day today, a day of blessing, when I got to the fifth or sixth tray I remembered to bless the rice and the beans. I was trying to be a hundred per cent present with the soft feel of the grains between my fingertips and the water going from transparent to milky to transparent again. Matter changing in my hands. Anicca .

There is something specially lovely about seeing things through clean water, even if they’re not lovely in themselves. Carrots, celery, even turnips. Like when you’ve meditated for two hours straight, all the thoughts and mental mess have settled, your head is clear, and when you put on your shoes again and step out of the Metta Hall every blade of grass, the leaves on the trees, even people’s clothes on the washing line have a transparent underwater weirdness.

Then you wish your mind would stay like that for ever, which is a mistake, because it won’t, it can’t, so you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Dukkha . Maybe wishing things would stay as you’re seeing them is actually the first step away from the experience, the way saying ‘I’m happy’ is definitely the first step back to being unhappy. You’ve got to look at the rice and beans as things you enjoy but don’t need in any way. You love washing rice and kichada beans, but if you don’t wash any more rice or any more lemon-yellow kichada beans for another ten years, another lifetime, it won’t make a jot of difference. That’s how you should have treated Jonathan. That’s how you should have treated everything.

I couldn’t. I was enjoying the rice and beans, sort of, but I couldn’t bless them. I started to mutter, ‘From the bottom of my heart, I bless you, rice and beans, rice for your milkiness and beans for your bright yellowness.’ Stupid. The whole point of blessing days is to bless things without words . You see something positive and your heart goes out to it, but free from any desire. When you need words, you’re performing, you’re forcing yourself. You don’t love the beans at all, Beth. You’re just trying to get your head back to where it was before you found that diary. I finished rinsing the rice and beans and went to put the oven on to preheat.

Vikram, the mind behind the kitchen, drops in once or twice each retreat and gets upset because people are improvising: they’re not following the recipe book to the letter. Usually it’s the foreign women; they want to show off how much better their French or Spanish or Indian cooking is. They come to a place where we’re supposed to be unravelling our egos and start showing off how much they know about herbs and sauces like we were on TV. Ines is standing over the bratt pan. Her face is bright with goodness, currying broccoli with red peppers, tasting it and adding this, tasting it and adding that. Not me. Beth Marriot sticks strictly to recipe. I do music, not food. Though I do know a thing or two about the whims of the bratt pan, which is more than Ines does. I’ll step in and explain, if she asks before it’s too late. The first time we went out together Jonathan asked, ‘Can you cook, Beth?’ ‘My mum’s so good at it,’ I told him, ‘no one would dream of competing.’ ‘I love a girl who can’t cook.’ He laughed. ‘Gives me a chance to show off the restaurants I know.’

With Jonathan you always wondered whether he had said the same thing to ten other women before you. Or fifty. Later I realized what he meant was, I love a girl who doesn’t act like a wife, who isn’t trying to possess me. Carl cooked. We had no money to eat out. ‘You’ll have to learn when we have a family, Beth,’ he said. ‘We’ll have maids by then,’ I told him. ‘We’ll be rich and live in hotels.’ Carl hated it when I said that. He had no idea what he’d do with the loot if Pocus made it big. ‘You spend so fast, Beth,’ he said.

Is Vikram gay? I don’t think so. Dasgupta men are beyond sex. They’ve taken vows. He’s squat but trying to be tall. With a neat little beard. He makes you feel fantastically stupid if you ask a question. ‘Anyone who experiments with the recipes is guilty of an act of vandalism,’ Vikram says. His visits coincide with the arrival of the delivery van. We tramp out into the rain and pick up boxes of celeriac and carrots and lettuces. The van driver winks at me as he slaps down a sack of oats. He must be pushing sixty.

‘The deliveries are carefully calibrated to fit the recipe schedule,’ Vikram says. His accent is Indian, but upper class. ‘If you swap ingredients, one day you’ll find you haven’t got something you need.’ He stands in the cold room stacking the stuff on the shelves while we tramp back and forth. He knows where everything goes. Ralph was risking a hernia, carrying three boxes of spuds at once. ‘You’ve left your apron on,’ Vikram told him. Ralph looked blank. ‘The apron is not to keep your clothes clean. It’s to protect everybody’s food from coming into contact with where those clothes have been. When you’re going to get dirty you take the apron off.’ Ralph cocked his head. His long hair dropped and showed an earring. He really is a cute boy.