The Hundred-Foot Journey Read online

  “Where the Indian sauces, please?” Papa asked meekly.

  “Down in Pantry, sir, past Spices.”

  Past the Jelly Belly towers in Sweets, down the escalator, through Wines and into Spices. And there, Papa’s hand raised, a brief glimmer of hope in Spices, but quickly dashed at the sight of more such cosmopolitan labels: French Thyme, Italian Marjoram, Dutch Juniper Berries, Egyptian Bay Leaf, English Black Mustard, and even—the ultimate slap—German Chives.

  Papa let out his breath. And the sound, it broke my heart.

  Squashed in the corner, almost hidden behind packages of Japanese seaweed and pink ginger, just token contributions from culinary India. Some bottles of Curry Club. A few baggies of chapatis. Papa’s entire world reduced to next to nothing.

  “Let’s go,” he said listlessly.

  And that was that. The English schemes. Finished.

  Harrods totally undid Papa, and shortly thereafter he succumbed to the depression that must have been lurking just below his manic search for a new occupation. Because from then on, right until we left, Papa spent his time in England sitting like a turnip on the Southall couch, wordlessly watching Urdu videos.

  Chapter Four

  When the low-hanging skies of Southall became too gray and oppressive and we craved the color and life of Mumbai, Umar and I took the tube into Central London, switched trains, and headed out to the Camden Locks of North London. The journey was quite long and uncomfortable, but emerging from the cavernous tunnels of the Northern Line, into the crowded streets of Camden, it was like being reborn.

  Here the buildings were painted tarty pinks and blues, and under the row of saggy awnings were tattoo parlors and body-piercers, Dr. Martens boot dealers and handmade hippie jewelry, and musty little holes from which blared head-banging music from the Clash or the Eurythmics. As we walked down the High Street, a little bounce back in our walk, greasy-haired barkers tried to lure us into shops selling secondhand CDs and aromatherapy oils, vinyl miniskirts, and skateboards and tie-dye T-shirts. And the strange people thronging and jostling on the sidewalks—the ring-studded Goths in black leather and green Mohawks, the posh girls from private Hampstead day schools down for a bit of slumming, the winos lurching from rubbish bin to pub—all this sea of humanity reassured me that as alien as I felt, there were always others in the world far odder than I.

  On this particular day, just over the central canal, Umar and I turned left into the covered markets for lunch, where the former brick warehouses along the locks, the stalls, the cobblestone lanes, were all jammed with inexpensive food stalls from around the globe. Asian girls wearing thick eyeglasses and paper hats called out—“Come here, boys, come”—beckoning us over to their tofu and green beans, to their Thai chicken skewers in satay, to the woks where a cross-looking chef was repeatedly plopping steamy portions of sweet-sour pork onto rice. We would wander in awe, peering, like at the zoo, into stalls selling Iranian barbecue, fish stews from Brazil, Caribbean pots of plantain and goat, and thick wedges of Italian pizza.

  But my older brother, Umar, whom I followed sheeplike on these outings, led us straight to the Mumbai Grill, where laminated copies of Bollywood film posters, 1950s classics such as Awara or Mother India, decorated the booth. And from the vats of lamb Madras or chicken curry on the counter we would get a delicious dollop of rice and okra and chicken vindaloo, all unceremoniously smacked, for £2.80, into a Styrofoam pouch.

  So, plastic forks and vindaloo in our hot hands, shoveling food in our mouths as we walked, we wandered deeper into the bowels of the Camden markets, drifting against our will to the stalls that would have drawn Mummy. There, the necklaces of colored glass beads; the Suzie Wong cocktail dresses in black-and-red satin; and the prayer shawls, pashmina silk, the Jamawars, all hanging like diaphanous vines from pegs, a riot of glittering colors that made us think of Mummy and Mumbai. At a corner stall, under an awning that was saggy and tired, I stopped to study rack upon rack of cheap cotton carryalls from India, each for just ninety-nine pence, that were a lively rust and maroon and aquamarine, embroidered with dainty little flowers or stitched with beads and bits of glass. They drew me in under the awning, under the elaborate cotton chandeliers with silk tassels and tubular insides, from which a low-watt bulb cast a yellow light. And there were the scarves, the dupatta, draped over racks or knotted and hanging like thick rope from pegs, pink and floral, psychedelic and striped. Up on the wall a fantastic quilt of colorful scarves, stitched together and hung across the entire shop, displaying the entire universe of dupatta on offer.

  “Yes. Can I help you?”

  And there she was, Abhidha, a name that literally means “longing,” in tight-fitting jeans and a simple black V-neck wool sweater, offering to help me, with her curious smile.

  I wanted to blurt out, Yes, help me. Help me find my Mummy. Help me find myself.

  But what I said was, “Ummm . . . something for my aunt. Please.”

  I do not recall what all was said exactly, as she had me run my hand along a silk pashmina shawl in deep crimson, talking to me earnestly in that soft voice, my heart pounding. I kept on asking her to show me one more thing, so I could keep on talking to her, until her father in the back finally barked she was needed at the cashier, and she looked at me full of regret, and I followed her to the cash register, where I emptied out my pockets to buy my aunt that crimson shawl, until, at the end, I stuttered that I’d like to see her again, for a meal or a movie, and she answered, yes, she’d like that. And so that was how I found my first love, Abhidha, among the shawls, when I was seventeen.

  Abhidha was by no means a classic beauty. She had, admittedly, quite a round face pocked by a few old acne scars here and there. When we got home that day, Umar told my sister Mehtab that I was in love, and then added unkindly, “Hot body, but face . . . face like an onion bhaji.” But what Umar obviously didn’t see, and I did, was that Abhidha’s face was permanently lit by the most intriguing smile. I did not know where this smile came from, in a woman of twenty-three, but it was as if Allah had once whispered some cosmic joke into her ear, and from then on she walked through life filtering the world through this amusing take on events. Nor did I really care what Umar thought—or anyone else, for that matter—because from then on I was driven to seek out Abhidha, whenever our schedules or families permitted, because something in me knew she was a kindred soul, would bring out that driving ambition buried deep inside me, that part starved to taste the flavors of life far beyond the comfort zone of my heritage.

  Abhidha’s family was originally from Uttar Pradesh, lived in Golder’s Green, and ran their import-export business from Camden. British-born and in her last year at Queen Mary College, University of London, Abhidha was frighteningly bright and ambitious, single-mindedly trying to improve herself. So she would agree to meet me—her purse slung over her shoulder, banging on her hip, always an inky pad and pen in her hand—but only for something educational, like a special exhibit at the British Museum or the Victoria Albert. And if we met in the evening, it was to see Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the National Theatre, or an incomprehensible play—usually by some mad Irishman—in a hot and sticky room above a pub.

  I resisted her at first, of course, all this high culture, which I didn’t think was my thing, until that night we did a coin toss to see who got to decide what we were doing that Saturday. I was adamant we see a Bruce Willis film involving an unusually large number of helicopter chases and exploding office buildings, and she—almost knocked me over—she wanted to see a Soviet-era play, from the then dissident underground, about three homosexuals incarcerated in Siberia.

  This, as Saturday evening entertainment, was as attractive to me as having all my teeth pulled, but she won the coin toss and I wanted to be with her, so we took the tube up to the Almeida Theatre in Islington, and sat for three hours in the dark, on a hard bench behind a pillar, constantly shifting our tingly bottoms.

  Somewhere in the middle of the play tears began streaming down m
y face. I am not exactly sure what happened, but the play wasn’t really about homosexuals, this I realized, but about the human soul when it has a destiny—at odds with the society around it—and how this destiny drove these Russian characters into exile. It was all about homesick men achingly missing their mothers and comforting foods from home and how this exile in Siberia brought them to the very edge of madness. But it was also about the majesty of their destiny to be homos, and that it was a force of its own and could not be denied, and that none of them in the end, no matter how they suffered, none of them would ever have traded in their destiny for the comfortable life they left behind in Moscow. And then they all died. Horribly.

  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 wi
th 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.