The Hundred-Foot Journey (5 page)

The only thing I remember feeling afterward was a ravenous hunger. Normally, I am a moderate eater, but after Mummy’s murder I spent days gorging on mutton masala and dumplings of fresh milk and egg biryani.

I refused to part with her shawl. I was in a torpor for days, Mummy’s favorite silk shawl wrapped tightly around my shoulders, my head lowering again and again over lamb trotters soup. It was, of course, just a boy’s desperate attempt to hold on to his mother’s last presence, that fast-fading odor of rose water and fried bread wafting up from the diaphanous cloth around my head.

Mummy was buried, as is the Muslim tradition, within hours of her death. There was dust, a choking red-earth dust that got into the sinuses and made me wheeze, and I recall staring at the red poppies and ragweed next to the earth hole that swallowed her up. No feeling. Nothing. Papa beat his chest until his skin was red, his kurta soaked with sweat and tears, the air filling with his dramatic cries.

The night my mother was buried, my brother and I stared into the dark from our cots, listening to Papa as he paced back and forth behind the bedroom wall, bitterly cursing everyone and everything. The fans creaked; poisonous centipedes scurried across the cracked ceiling. We waited, on edge, then . . . wallop—the horrible clap that came each time he brought his bandaged hands violently together. And that night, through the door of his room, we heard Papa whisper, a kind of half moan, half chant, repeated over and over again, as he rocked back and forth on the edge of his bed: “Tahira, on your grave I promise, I will take our children from this cursed country that has killed you.”

And during the day the fiery emotions in the compound were intolerable, like a vat boiling and boiling and boiling but never running dry. My little sister Zainab and I hid behind the upstairs steel Storwel closet, curled into balls and pressed against each other for comfort. There was a horrible wail from downstairs and the two of us, desperate to get away from the sound, climbed into the closet and buried ourselves in the hundred scarves that were Mother’s simple vanity.

Mourners came, like vultures, to pick over us. Rooms filled with the deathly fug of sour body odor, cheap cigarettes, burning mosquito coils. The chatter was constant and high-pitched, and the mourners ate marzipan-filled dates while clucking over our misfortune.

Mummy’s snooty Delhi relatives stood in silken finery in the corner, their backs to the room as they nibbled on crackling papad and grilled eggplant. Papa’s Pakistani relatives loudly roved around the room, looking for trouble. A religious uncle wrapped his bony fingers around my arm and pulled me aside. “Allah’s punishment,” he hissed, his white head shaking with palsy. “Allah’s punishing your family for staying behind during Partition.”

Papa finally reached his limit with my great-aunt, and he dragged the shrieking woman out through the banging screen door, roughly shoving her into the courtyard. The dogs pricked up their ears and howled. Then he went back inside to kick her sack of belongings out after her. “Come back in here you old vulture, and I’ll kick you back to Karachi,” he yelled from the porch.

“Aaaiiee,” screamed the old woman. She pressed her palms against her temples and strutted back and forth in front of the charred remains of the restaurant. The sun was still hard. “Wah I do?” she wailed. “Wah I do?”

“Wah you do? You come into my house, eat my food and drink, and then whisper insults about my wife? Think because you old you can say what you like?” He spat at her feet. “Low-class peasant. Get out of my house. Go home. I don’t want to look at your donkey face anymore.”

Ammi’s scream suddenly hurtled through the air like an ax. In her hands she clutched clumps of her own white hair, like hairy-root onion grass, and she was bloodily raking her face with her nails. There was more roaring and confusion as Auntie and Uncle Mayur jumped on her, pinning down her arms so she wouldn’t do more damage to herself. A blur of
salwar kameez,
a gasping scuffle, followed by a stunned silence as they dragged shrieking Ammi from the room. Papa, unable to take it anymore, stormed from the compound, leaving flapping chickens in his wake.

I was sitting on the couch next to Bappu the cook during all this, and he protectively put his arm around me as I pressed myself into his fleshy folds. And I remember the human crush in the living room stiffening momentarily during Papa’s and Ammi’s outbursts, samosas frozen halfway to open mouths. It looked like they were playing some parlor game. For as soon as Papa left, our guests looked furtively about from the corners of their eyes, reassuring themselves no other unhinged Haji was about to jump out at them, and then happily resumed their gold-toothed masticating and palaver and tea-slurping as if nothing had happened. I thought I might go mad.

A few days later a pudgy man with slicked-back hair and black-framed glasses appeared at our door, smelling of lilac water. He was a real estate developer. Others came after him, like betel-spitting bugs, often at the same time, outbidding one another on our front porch, each desperately trying to snatch Grandfather’s four acres for another apartment high-rise.

It was destiny that our losses coincided with a brief period when Bombay real estate suddenly became the highest in the world, more expensive than New York, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. And we had four unencumbered acres of it.

Father turned icy. All afternoon, for several days, he sat pudgy on the damp couch under the porch, occasionally leaning forward to order the half-dozen developers shot glasses of tea. Papa said very little, just looked grave and clicked his worry beads. The less he said, the more frantic became the table-slapping and the red-juiced squirts of betel spit hitting the wall. Finally, however, exhaustion set in among the bidders, and Papa stood, nodded at the man with the hair doused in lilac water, and went indoors.

From one day to another, Mother was gone, forever, and we were millionaires.

Life is funny. No?

We boarded the Air India flight in the night, the sultry Bombay air pressing against our backs, the smell of humid gasoline and sewage in our hair. Bappu the cook and his cousins openly wept with their palms pressed against the airport glass, reminding me of geckos. Little did I know that was the last we would ever hear or see of Bappu. And the plane ride is largely a blur, although I do recall Mukhtar’s head was in the airsick bag all through the night, our row of seats filled with his retching.

The shock of my mother’s death lasted for some time, so my recollections of the period that followed are odd: I am left with weird, vivid sensations but no overall picture. But one thing is without doubt—my father stuck to the promise he made Mummy at her graveside, and in a stroke we wound up losing not only our beloved mother but also all that was home.

We—the six children ranging from ages five to nineteen; my widowed grandmother; Auntie and her husband, Uncle Mayur—we sat for hours on harshly lit plastic seats at Heathrow Airport as Papa bellowed and waved his bank statements at the pinched-faced immigration official deciding our fate. And it was on these seats that I had my first taste of England: a chilled and soggy egg-salad sandwich wrapped in a triangle of plastic. It is the bread, in particular, that I remember, the way it dissolved on my tongue.

Never before had I experienced anything so determinedly tasteless, wet, and white.

The entire experience of leaving Bombay rather resembled a certain technique for catching octopus found in the Portuguese villages living off the rough waters of the Atlantic. Young fishermen tie pieces of cod to large treble hooks attached to ten-foot-long bamboo poles; at low tide, they work the rockiest shorelines, jabbing the cod under half-submerged rocks normally inaccessible under pounding surf. An octopus will suddenly shoot out from under the rock and latch on to the cod, and what ensues is an epic battle, the grunting fisherman trying to drag the octopus up onto the rock with the grappling hook secured at the end of the pole. More often than not the fisherman loses the battle in a squirt of ink. If the fisherman is successful, however, the stunned octopus is plopped on top of the exposed rocks. The fisherman darts in, grasps the octopus’s gill-like opening on the side of its head, and turns the entire head inside out so the internal organs of the octopus are exposed to the air. Death is fairly quick.

That’s what England felt like. Wrenched from the comfort of our rock, our heads were suddenly turned inside out. Of course, our two years in London were undoubtedly most necessary, for this period provided us with the time and space we needed to properly say our good-byes to Mummy and the Napean Sea Road before moving on with life. Mehtab correctly calls it our Period of Mourning. And Southall—not India but also not yet Europe—I suspect was the ideal holding tank as we became acclimatized to our new circumstances. But such is the benefit of hindsight. At the time it seemed as if we had wandered into hell. We were lost. Maybe even a little mad.

*   *   *

It was Uncle Sami, my mother’s youngest brother, who picked us up at Heathrow Airport. I sat in the van’s backseat, sandwiched between Auntie and my newly discovered cousin, Aziza. My London-born cousin was my age, but did not look at me, or talk, just put on Walkman earphones and beat her thigh to crashing dance music as she looked out the window.

“Southall very good neighborhood,” Uncle Sami yelled from the front. “All the Indian shops, right at your fingertips. Best Asian shopping in all England. And I’ve found you a house, just around the corner from us. Very big. Six rooms. Needs a bit of work. But not to worry. Landlord said he would have everything tip-top.”

Aziza was unlike any of the girls I had known in Bombay. There was nothing simpering or coquettish about her, and I stole glances at her from the corner of my eye. She wore, under her leather jacket, sexy things, ripped lace and a black leotard. She sent off heat, too, a powerful mix of teenage body odor and patchouli oil, and made us all jump to attention every time she cracked her gum like pistol shots.

“Just two more roundabouts,” Uncle Sami said, as we once again screeched around a traffic circle on the Hayes Road. And as we leaned around the corner, I felt my cousin’s hot knee push back against my thigh, and instantly a cricket bat was poking up through my pants. But my hawkeyed auntie seemed to read my thoughts, for she had a face on like a mouthful of lemons, and she leaned against me on the other side.

“Better Sami had stayed in India,” she spat in my ear. “That girl. So young and already a dirty toilet seat.”

“Shush, Auntie.”

“Don’t shush me! You stay away from her. You hear? She only make trouble.”

Southall was the unofficial headquarters of Britain’s Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi community, a flatland in the armpit of Heathrow Airport, its Broadway High Street a glittering string of Bombay jewelers, Calcutta cash-and-carries, and Balti curry houses. It was terribly disorienting, this familiar noise under the gray skies of England. A sprawl of semidetached houses split into flats crowded the surrounding residential streets, and you could always tell who were the latest arrivals from Mother India by the dingy sheets hung across the leaky windows. And at night the sulfuric orbs of Southall’s streetlamps glowed eerily through the evening fog, a permanent wetness that moved in from the marshes of Heathrow Airport, heavy with the smells of curry and diesel.

When we arrived, a few streets of Southall were also in the throes of gentrification, worked over by ambitious second-generation immigrants. Papa called them the “Anglo Peacocks,” and their renovated white stucco houses rather looked as if they had been pumped up on steroids, massive extensions front and back rippling with mock-Tudor windows, satellite dishes, and glass conservatories. A secondhand Jag or Range Rover often straddled these crescent driveways.

Mummy’s relatives had lived in Southall for thirty years, and they secured for us a large stucco house, just two streets over from the Broadway High Street. The house belonged to a Pakistani general, a bolt-hole the absentee landlord rented out while awaiting the day he might have to flee his country in a hurry. The house—which we quickly nicknamed the General’s Hole—desperately wanted to be one of the grander Anglo Peacock homes, but failed to live up to its own ambition. It was squat and ugly, narrow in the front, but stretching back almost an entire block to a small garden where a rusted barbecue and a broken fence finished off the property. A sickly chestnut tree stood on the buckled street in front, and when we moved in, there was litter out front and litter out back. And I recall that the house was always filtered through gloomy light, hunkering as it was in the shadows of a local water tower, the rooms inside covered in tatty linoleum or threadbare rugs. Bits of glass-and-chrome furniture and wobbly lamps did little to cheer the place up.

That house was never home and I forever associate it with the constant din of a prison: the clanking radiators, the alarming shuddering of pipes throughout the house whenever a tap was turned on, the constant creaking and cracking of floorboards and glass. And every room soaked in a chilly damp.

Papa was obsessed with finding a new business he could build in England, only to abandon the idea a few weeks later when another bit of foolishness caught his attention. He imagined himself an import-exporter of firecrackers and party favors; then a wholesaler of copper kitchenware made in Uttar Pradesh; this was followed by an enthusiasm to sell frozen bhelpuri to the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain.

Papa’s final entrepreneurial brainstorm, however, came to him as he was sitting in the bath with Auntie’s shower cap clapped over his head, his torso, like a hirsute iceberg, thrusting up from the milky-white water. A mug of his favorite tea spiked with garam masala stood at his elbow and his face was running with sweat.

“We must do research, Hassan. Research.”

I sat perched on the laundry hamper, watching Papa as he feverishly washed his feet.

“On what, Papa?”

“On what? On new business. . . . Mehtab! Come here! Come. The back.”