Jaspreet Singh - Chef

‘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.