The Hundred-Foot Journey (7 page)

Good heavens. What a mess I was in when we finally emerged into the dark and wet night of Islington. I was sullen, snappish, totally embarrassed for having blubbered like a girl during this strange play. But women—this I will never understand—they are touched by the oddest things, and Abhidha was on her cell phone, ringing a chum, and the next thing I knew she was shoving me into the back of a black taxi, and we were on our way to her friend’s flat in Maida Vale.

The friend, she was out, just a cat on the windowsill looking rather offended by our arrival. There was a wooden bowl of bananas on the dining room table and the flat smelled of rotten fruit, cat litter, and moldy old carpet. But it was there, in the narrow bed under the dormer window, that Abhidha peeled off her V-neck sweater to give me a good nuzzle in her coconuts, while her hands down below tugged at my belt. And that night, after a good bounce, we slept with her bottom pushed up against my groin, contentedly curled together like a pair of Moroccan crescent pastries.

Time and gravity: several weeks later, one perfect day in April, Abhidha asked me to meet her at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly, for an exhibit on Jean-Siméon Chardin, an eighteenth-century French painter she was researching for a paper. We walked hand in hand through the gallery, eyes up on the walls at the thick crusts of paint portraying tables set with a Toledo orange, a pheasant, a piece of turbot hanging from a hook.

Abhidha walked smiling through the light-filled gallery—that incredible smile—clearly admiring Chardin’s work, and I followed her, at a loss, scratching my head, until I finally blurted out, “Why you like these paintings so much? They’re all just a bunch of dead rabbits on a table.”

So she took me by the hand and showed me how Chardin painted, again and again, the same dead rabbit, partridge, and goblet—in the kitchen. The same wife and scullery maid and cellar boy—in the kitchen. Once I saw the pattern, she began reading to me—almost in an erotic whisper—from a pedantic text written by some old fossil of an art historian. “ ‘Chardin believed God was to be found in the mundane life before his eyes, in the domesticity of his own kitchen. He never looked for God anywhere else, just painted again and again, the same ledge and still life in the kitchen of his home.’ ”

Abhidha whispered, “I just love that.”

And I remember wanting to say, it was at the edge of my lips,
And I just love you.

But I didn’t. And after the exhibit we dashed across Piccadilly, to eat the packed lunch she’d brought us from home, some sort of grilled chicken wrap, laughing and running across the street as the lights turned and the cars came roaring down at us.

St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, facing the traffic but set slightly back, was a sooty gray brick building, by Christopher Wren, the flagstone courtyard out front occupied by a few antiques stalls selling china, stamps, and silver flatware. But the church’s small garden, tucked around the corner, was deliciously British: wispy stalks of lavender, starwort, and granny’s bonnets, all slightly messy and wild, growing between aged trees of oak and ash.

A woman—Mary, I suspect—stood in green bronze among the flowering shrubs, hands aloft, beckoning London’s lost to this oasis in the hubbub, where at the edge of the pocket garden a green motor home was parked. And as we made our way to the bench, we passed the open door of the battered old caboose and furtively took a peek: a tousle-haired social worker was flipping through a glossy magazine, sitting patiently, we assumed, until the next homeless person dropped in for a cup of tea and an earful of advice.

It was in this idyllic garden, as we sat and ate our lunch, that Abhidha dropped her bomb. She asked me to come next Saturday to a poetry reading and dinner party in Whitechapel so I could meet her friends from the university. I immediately understood what she was saying, that this was no small thing she was asking me to do, trying me out with her college peers, and so I stammered in response, “Of course. With pleasure. I will be there.”

But this you must know: the violent murder of a mother—when a boy is at that tender age, when he is just discovering girls—it is a terrible thing. Confusingly mixed up with all things feminine, it leaves a charred residue on the soul, like the black marks found at the bottom of a burned pot. No matter how much you scrub and scrub the pot bottom with steel wool and cleansers, the scars, they are permanent.

At the same time I was getting to know Abhidha, I was regularly dropping by the basement lair of Deepak, a boy from the neighborhood in Southall. Deepak was one of the Anglo Peacocks and his parents, wishing he would just go away, turned over their entire basement to their son, who promptly filled it with state-of-the-art hi-fi and TV, the floor covered in fat beanbags. And in the corner—a foosball table.

Foosball, I tell you, it is a devilish invention of the West. Makes you forget everything in the world. Nothing but twirling that handle and smacking that little ball, just so you can hear the marvelous sound of that white sphere whizzing through the air and smacking the back of the goal with a satisfying wooden
thwock
. Increasingly I was down in Deepak’s basement, the two of us first smoking a couple of spleefs of hashish, and then, my God, four hours gone, just like that, and we were still twirling handles and sending those little wooden men into deadly head spins.

On the Friday before I was supposed to meet Abhidha’s university friends in an East End flat, I went down to Deepak’s basement, and there were two giggly English girls sunk like plump little peaches among the beanbags. Deepak introduced me to Angie, a chubby little thing with an upturned nose, her blond hair swirled up in a kind of rat’s nest and fastened atop her head with hairpins. She wore a shiny black miniskirt, and the way she was reclined in that beanbag, I kept on getting a peek of her blue cotton panties. And those chubby white legs, I tell you, swinging open and shut, banging up against my knee.

We chatted for I’m not sure how long, and then, when I passed Angie the joint, she put her hand on my leg, ran her chipped nail polish down the seam of my jeans, and I got all pokey down there. In no time, heavy snogging. Well, I won’t go into all the details, but she and I, we eventually went over to her house—her parents were gone for the weekend—and spent two days in bed.

I never went to Abhidha’s party. I never even called to say I wouldn’t be there, just didn’t show up. A few days later, full of remorse, I did call, again and again. And when Abhidha finally came to the phone, to listen to my groveling apologies, she was as lovely as she always was.

“It’s all right, Hassan,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world. I’m a big girl. But I do think it’s time you found someone your own age to be with. Don’t you agree?”

This, then, became my lifelong pattern with women: as soon as things between us were on the verge of becoming close, I withdrew. Difficult to admit, but my sister Mehtab—who oversees the restaurant’s accounts and maintains my flat—is really the only woman I have ever maintained a relationship with over time. And she insists my emotional clock stopped, that part to do with women, when Mummy died.

Perhaps. But remember this, too: freed from the emotional demands of wife and children, I was able to spend my life in the warm embrace of the kitchen.

But back to the rest of the Haji family, none of whom were faring much better. We didn’t think anything wrong, at first, when Ammi sang the old Gujarati songs and forgot our names. But then she became obsessed with her teeth, pulling her lips wide as she forced us children to examine her diseased gums, the rotten and bleeding stumps that made us gag. And I’ll always remember that horrible night when I came home, opened the front door, only to see Ammi becoming incontinent on her way up the staircase, a river of urine running down her leg.

It was, however, my irritating London-born cousin who first made us aware Ammi was suffering from dementia. Every time the university boy strutted through the General’s Hole—lecturing us on macroeconomic this and money-supply that—tiny Ammi could be seen quietly maneuvering herself to his side of the room. He would go on so, and then, midsentence, he would yelp in pain, furiously turning on the tiny crouching figure behind him. The sight of his Indian bum squeezed into a pair of Ralph Lauren slacks simply set her off, and our roars commanding her to stop pinching his bottom only incited her to chase the poor boy through the halls. My cousin got even, however. It was he who spelled out to us in clinical detail how Ammi’s mental health was deteriorating.

But she was not alone. A kind of madness was in the air.

Mehtab became unduly preoccupied with her hair, ceaselessly primping for men who never came to take her out. And I myself retreated into the basement haze of hashish and foosball.

*   *   *

But even in hell there are moments when the light reaches you. One day, plodding to the Southall branch of the Bank of Baroda on an errand for Auntie, a shiny object caught my eye. It was what the English call a “chippie”—a food cart—standing between Ramesh “Tax Free!” Jewelry and a cash-and-carry selling bolts of faux-silk. The chippie had been modified: a silhouette of a train cut from sheet metal was oddly bolted to the front of it.
JALEBI JUNCTION
, read the sign overhead.

The odd stall, I suddenly realized, was designed to sell the delicious deep-fried dessert that Bappu the cook used to buy for me at Crawford Market. A pang of homesickness and a craving for the old taste suddenly hit with great force, but the unmanned cart was cold and chained to a lamppost. I shuffled forward and read the pink sheet of paper taped to the carriage, fluttering forlornly in the wind:
PART TIME HELP WANTED. ENQUIRIES: BATICA CHIPS
.

That night I dreamed I was driving a train, joyously blowing its whistle. The caboose rolled through stunning, snow-peaked mountains, taking me through a world rich beyond my wildest imagination, and I was exhilarated at never knowing what new sight lay in store for me through the next alpine tunnel.

I did not know what the dream meant, but the movement of the train spoke to me somehow, and the next morning, like a shot, I was down on the High Street. Batica Chips was one of Southall’s two “quality sweet manufacturers,” its windows filled with honey and pistachio and coconut shreds. The door tinkled when I entered and the shop itself smelled of dried banana chips. A large woman ahead of me was preordering pounds of galum jamun, fried curd in syrup. When she left I handed in the pink note torn from the Jalebi Junction and timorously announced I’d like the job.

“Not strong enough,” said the unshaven baker in his white coat, not even looking at me as he filled a carton with almond crescents.

“I’ll work hard. Look. Strong legs.”

The sweets merchant shook his head, and I realized my job application was already over, case dismissed. But I stood my ground. Refused to budge. And eventually the man’s wife came over and squeezed my skinny arm. She smelled of flour and curry.

“Ahmed, he’ll do,” she said. “But pay him the minimum.”

And so, not long afterward, I was wheeling the Jalebi Junction down Broadway High Street, in my Batica Chips uniform, selling sticky twists of jalebi to children and their grandparents.

The Jalebi Junction job paid £3.10 an hour, and it consisted of making the house-style runny paste of condensed milk and flour in a cheesecloth, and then squeezing a continuous looping string of the mixture into the boiling oil. Squiggly loops, like pretzels. When done, I scooped the golden dollops of jalebi from the vat of boiling oil, dipped them in syrup, then carefully wrapped the sticky things in wax paper for the outstretched hands, collecting eighty pence.

I can still feel the joy that was triggered by the sound of the simmering oil and my manly voice crying out in the street. By the smell of syrup and the cool feel of wax paper against my hands splattered and scarred by hot fat. Sometimes I’d roll the Junction to a spot in front of the Kwik Fit, or, if the spirit took me, sometimes outside the Harmony Hair Salon. Such a sense of freedom. And I will always be grateful to England for this, for helping me realize my place in the world was nowhere else but standing before a vat of boiling oil, my feet wide apart.

Our departure was as abrupt as our arrival two years earlier.

And I, consciously or unconsciously, was the architect of our hasty exit from Britain.

It was women. Again.

I missed the Napean Sea Road and the restaurant and I missed Mummy. It was in this feverish state of longing, alone sneaking a cigarette in our backyard one evening, that I felt a cool hand on the back of my head.

“What’s up, Hassan?”

It was dark and I could not see her face.

But I could smell the patchouli oil.

Cousin Aziza’s voice was soft and—I don’t know why—but her sweet tone touched me.

I couldn’t help it. Tears rolled down my face.

“I miss my old life.”

I sniffled and rubbed my nose on my shirtsleeve.

Aziza’s fingers softly twisted my hair.

“Poor boy,” she whispered, lips against my ear. “Poor thing.”

And then we were kissing, hot tongues down each other’s throats, groping through the clothes, while all the time I was thinking: Bloody marvelous. Another girl you really feel something for—and this time she is your bloody cousin.

“Aaaaiieee.”

We looked up.

Auntie was banging at us from the other side of the glass doors, and her downturned mouth had that famous bitter-lemon look.

“Abbas,” Auntie screeched behind the glass.

“Come quick! It’s Hassan. And the Toilet Seat.”

“Shit,” Aziza said.

Two days later Aziza was on a plane to Delhi and relations between Uncle Sami’s family and ours were cut. Papa got a bill for work on the house that Uncle Sami claimed to have done. There was great drama, tears—blows, even—and screaming matches in the streets of Southall between Papa and Mummy’s relatives. But the uproar finally woke Papa from his deep sleep. He threw off the blanket and for the first time really looked around that Southall house, at what had become of us, and a few days later three secondhand Mercedes stood in front of the house—one red, one white, one black. Just like fishmonger Anwar’s phones.