Jaspreet Singh - Chef

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.’

‘Are you buying?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘One.’

‘Then I will teach you,’ he said.

The boy wrapped the book in a velvet cloth.

‘Wash your hands before praying,’ he said.

‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘We do the same in Sikhism.’

He didn’t seem interested in learning about my religion and returned to math. I almost told him the correct answer, but changed my mind. 1729. The smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

X = 1

Y = 12

L = 9

M = 10

The man who first solved this problem was the South Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He was a genius and he solved this problem on his deathbed at the age of twenty-nine. In school the teacher used to tell us many stories about math. She also told us that zero – the most important ingredient of math – was invented in our own country, only later the concept migrated to Arab countries.

It was getting dark. I cycled back to the camp with the Qur’an in the front carrier. In my kit there were apples and a trout wrapped in a paper. Nearing the camp I noticed something I had seen several times before but had never thought to be important. Not far from the bridge the road rises sharply, and from an elevated spot, while pedaling breathlessly, I saw sudden points of light, I witnessed the precise moment the electric lights were being turned on in our country and in the enemy’s country. The enemy turned on their lights (on the brown mountains it had occupied) at precisely the same time, I realized, we turned on the lights on our mountains. Both sides declared night at the same time, I thought, despite the time difference. I stopped my bike and waited by the railing for a long time, and thought about the kitchens on both sides of the border, the culinary similarities and differences, and I thought about rain, which was now falling, too, on both sides, making the lines fuzzier and fuzzier.

General Sahib’s residence hummed with its yellow lights. It was the second brightest place on our side of the border, I noticed. The brightest was the Governor’s mansion on the hill, shimmering with mystery.

That night as I served tea in Sahib’s room, I felt I was at two places at once. I was on the Zero Bridge looking at the bright lights of Sahib’s residence and I was inside as well, inside the residence holding a tray. The General was back from his travels. Perhaps he, too, felt he was in two places at once. I knocked at the door.

‘Come in.’

Sahib separated himself from the book he was reading.

‘Kip!’

‘Sir.’

He requested me to switch on the fluorescent light.

‘I must tell you,’ he said, ‘the turmeric you add in the tea is helping my stomach ache.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘And Kip -’

‘Sir.’

‘More on the enemy woman?’

‘She is clean, sir.’

Sahib took slow sips of tea as I told him Irem’s drowning story.

‘Something else?’

I wanted to, but I could not reveal the bombing story because I was afraid for Irem.

‘No, sir.’

‘Why are you trembling?’

‘Sorry, sir. Been cycling in the rain, sir.’

‘Any knowledge of terrorist activity?’

‘No, sir,’ I lied. ‘But, we must investigate more.’

‘Why?’

‘Sahib, perhaps if we slow down the investigation.’

‘Slow?’

‘So far I have investigated very fast, sir. But I plan to proceed slowly from now on. The way it is with the golf balls, sir.’

‘Kip. Sunno. Your assignment is over.’

‘Over, sir?’

‘No need to interrogate the enemy any further.’

‘But, sir, I have just started.’

‘Kip, we have excavated enough information. Now the interrogation must stop.’

I kept my eyes fixed on the spine of the book now shut on the table top.

‘Sir.’

‘The colonel will soon issue a commendation certificate to you.’

‘But, sir -’

‘You may go now.’

‘Sir.’

Every morning I would check with Sahib’s car driver about the routes he was planning to follow. The Zero Bridge, because of the rain, was never on the route and this was reassuring. But I was really worried, and for that reason I cycled in civilian clothes to the city post office and mailed an unsigned note to the army HQ warning about a possible attack on General Kumar. The letter had immediate effect. The army beefed up security around the bridge, interrogated the locals and raided many Kashmiri houses in the area. A journalist wrote confidently in the national paper, Peace has returned to the valley. Days later when the General’s black military car (with a flag and four stars) passed the Zero Bridge nothing happened. Three seconds later the bridge exploded.

The river carried away the ripped parts, the blown-up arches, and for days the waters looked high and muddy and black, and not just because of the rain.