That evening the General based on the report from ayah scolds and punishes Rubiya for having burned to ashes his important documents. That’s the limit, he says. You’ve burned my top-secret documents. She cries. She protests. But, Papa, she says, I didn’t do it. Papa doesn’t believe her. Ayah doesn’t believe her either. Sahib, here is the only half-burned page from those files, says the ayah. The page flew out of the fireplace, says the ayah. Papa, I didn’t do it. No, Papa. The girl is losing her faith in the world. I didn’t realize this thing then; now I know better.
I have never been able to pardon myself for having given the girl so many tears, so much anguish. Ever since that moment I have felt a different person. Again and again I go back to that moment. I see myself rushing to the living room with the files and the journal in my hand. Through the window I make sure Rubiya is playing in the garden outside, her dog is panting, going round in circles. I make sure I hear the sound of water in the bathroom, a woman is taking her bath in there. I am in front of the fireplace. Waves of heat hit my face. I shake, I hesitate, I sense the presence of the dead woman in the painting, her ghostly gaze. I change my mind. But my mind is made up. I let the things in my hands go. Little tongues of fire start licking the pages. Then the crackle, the sparks, the roar.
The only item I could not throw into the flames was the journal. Later in my room I opened the journal, not to judge anyone, but to simply find out why Kishen wanted to kill himself. What kind of information, scribbled inside the journal, was sensitive enough to cause its relocation to Sahib’s room?
It is a little thing – seven inches by five inches – no more than two hundred pages. In Delhi, for a long time, I kept it under lock and key, but as I was setting out on this journey I picked it up and brought it with me. It is now with me on this train. The first time I tried to read it (in the General’s kitchen) was extremely difficult. Chef wrote the entries very tightly, in bad handwriting, and in two languages, Hindi and Punjabi.
The first few pages are recipes of simple salads – somewhat exotic, but perfectly suitable for Indian taste buds:
Tomato and Feta Cheese Salad
900g tomatoes
200g feta cheese
120ml olive oil
12 black olives
freshly ground pepper
Serves 4
In bold letters he emphasizes: Black olives are a must, not green, not sun-dried black olives, but juicy black olives.
The next few pages are filled with complaints about the absence of olives in Indian cooking. How hard it is to find this thing in Indian stores, and the troubles he had to go through to acquire olives. He ends a page with an invention of a new olive side dish, the olive raita. He ends the next page with another invention: mirchi (green cayenne pepper) chocolate fondue. Two pages later he comments on his fascination for cheese. He complains about the lack of good cheese in Indian cooking. Paneer is fine, but there are more than 462 types of cheeses, maybe more. He praises Brie and Roquefort in particular. Why do we borrow certain things from foreigners and not the rest? he writes. Why do we adapt to tomatoes and kidney beans and not cheese? Indian cooking seems impossible without tomatoes. But tomatoes moved to our country from Mexico. Only one hundred years ago we started using them in our food. Now it is commonplace.
The French embassy-wallahs told me about a master chef, Batel or Patel his name was, and this man killed himself because he could not deliver the perfect meal. I bow before the master. I can never bring myself to do that.
Right in the middle of the journal, he talks more about his apprenticeship at five-star hotels and foreign embassies in Delhi. Of all the embassies, he received his warmest welcome from the German embassy. He writes about Chef Muller. Chef Muller introduced him not only to German cuisine, but also to music. This music I listen to when I am alone, he writes. In the kitchen I hear this music when cooking. I cannot thank Chef Muller enough for gifting me two tapes of such fine music. But, how uninteresting German cuisine is! Even the curried sausage. It is hard to comprehend how such a culture managed to produce such incredible music!
Chef’s life and work are fused together; it is difficult to separate them at least in the notebook. I had expected to see more sketches. But there are only three dirty pictures. A naked woman is shoving a Cadbury’s chocolate bar inside her sex. A man is balancing an orange on his erect lingam. His penis is coated with ‘kamasutra powder’ – the recipe is scribbled on the margin. Otherwise the pages look surprisingly clean. Only five or six have grease on them.
Flipping through, it seems as if this is my journal. I have never kept a diary, but I might have written more or less the same words. I would have skipped the dirty sex parts, but I might have written about other things in a similar way. When I read these pages I sense a remarkable similarity in voice. He was my second self or perhaps I am what he was becoming. The greatest gift he gave me was not food. Not even the foreign cuisines.
Chef gave me a tongue.
The tone changes the moment he is transferred to the glacier. But again he is talking about his plans to install the first tandoor on Siachen. He plans to use mules as transport to take the component parts to the camp on the Icefields. He proposes a detailed method on how to reassemble the parts. He does not recommend parachuting the fully assembled clay oven down on the Icefields using a helicopter. (This method was used to transfer the Swedish guns.) He uses the words ‘glacier’ and ‘icefields’ interchangeably.
In the beginning of June, he writes, with a heavy heart I quickly collected my things and left the base headquarters. We followed the long and dangerous road to Ladakh. Then a Cheetah helicopter flew us to the Icefields, a camp twenty thousand feet high. In the helicopter I was feeling dizzy. When I looked down I experienced vertigo. This was the first time I saw the Icefields from so close. They are like their name: huge white endless fields, where a hundred thousand people can play cricket and hockey for days on end. But the place is absolutely empty. Empty and desolate. Other than two little army camps there is nothing. Our camp is at a higher elevation than our enemy’s.
Minus 58. God help us all.
A soldier told me that this place is the second coldest on Earth, he writes. The glacier is eighty miles long. The name means ‘wild rose’. Wild roses grow at the base of this beast or organism or whatever it is. The Balti people live there, and in their language Siachen means wild rose.
Not a single day goes by without firing by either side. We never attack on Fridays. A soldier told me that Fridays privilege the enemy because it is the day of their prayer. Saturdays are better. On Saturdays the peaks flash like the inside of a tandoor.
Most of the mountain peaks here do not have names. So we give them names. Because we do not have much to do in the kitchen we find ways to amuse ourselves. Giving the peaks names kills time very well. Sometimes we give names which are abuses in our language: Ma-chod, bahen-chod, bhon-sadi-day. We call our enemies Pakis or sulahs. They call us Hindu cunts. Those ma-chods, behn-chods, bhon-sadi-days. Mother fuckers. Sister fuckers.
Our homes are white arctic tents, each one with space for three sleeping bags. Evening, morning and afternoon I hear the same thing from the men: Arrange my transfer, or I am very unhappy here. Men become extremely religious here. The soldiers read Hanuman Chaleesa and Gita if they are Hindus and Japuji if they are Sikhs, and Koran if they are Muslims, but there are not many Muslims in the army.