Then we were silent.
I don’t know from where the courage came but then I reached out and touched Rubiya’s cheek. She did not turn her face.
‘I feel relieved talking to you, Rubiya,’ I said.
She did not say anything.
‘Why are you so silent?’
‘Chef Kirpal,’ she asked, ‘why is this world such a disappointing place?’
I was at a loss for words.
‘Chef,’ she almost hit me, ‘I am angry at Father. Very angry. I am angry he did this, and I am sad he is dead. But I am also very angry that he is dead.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should not have -’
‘You did nothing wrong. But.’
‘But what?’
‘Now I must leave,’ she said. ‘The bus leaves at five in the afternoon.’
‘Please do not go.’
‘I must.’
‘In that case I must tell you for one last time how much your poems mean to me.’
‘Chef Kirpal, poetry makes not a thing happen.’
‘No. Rubiya. No. Your poems have changed me. I feel like running through the streets, through the narrow trails, I feel like climbing up the mountains to request the people of Kashmir not to lose compassion for us Indians, and I feel like telling my own countrymen not to lose compassion for Kashmiris. Rubiya, your words are helping people like me to say things we want to say.’
‘Chef Kirpal, are you all right?’
Outside it had temporarily stopped snowing. The roofs of houses covered with layers looked beautiful. Black-and-white smoke arose from the chimneys. The boats in the lake were absolutely motionless. The chenar trees, on both sides of the road, were heavy with snow. The sky above them was filled with clouds and absolutely red. The road was white, but the sky was red. Two horsemen passed by.
‘I will accompany you to the bus terminal.’
‘No, please don’t. It is easier this way.’
She removed her jacket from the peg.
‘Chef Kirpal, from this window at exactly five o’clock you will be able to see the bus to Pakistan. Just stay here. This is the perfect place to say farewell to me. I will wave at you from the bus.’
‘OK. I will stay.’
‘Chef Kirpal, I sense you are sick. Your eyes blink as if you are about to collapse.’
‘Please do not worry. Nothing wrong with me.’
‘Before I leave, Chef Kirpal, tell me about yourself. Tell me what you felt towards Irem.’
‘I do not know.’
For some unknown reason at that moment I thought about my mother. The way she used to spend so many hours in the kitchen, never eating with those at the table, always serving. Cooking was her way to say how she felt towards people close to her.
‘I do not know,’ I said to Rubiya, ‘I do not know how I felt towards Irem, but now that I think of it, now that you have asked me, I think that that feeling must have been special.’
In the brazier the embers were dying fast, and Rubiya hugged me, and then she left. She walked out of the door, I heard her steps on the wooden stairs, and I slowly sat down in the chair by the window, and started my second cup of tea, and dunked bakerkhani, the fragile Kashmiri pastry, in tea, and all of a sudden the past started coming back to me, and I felt as if I was soaking up vast expanses of time, and I recalled that long ago day when I had visited Irem in the hospital and the first thing she had said after a long silence, You smell of garlic. What can I do? I had asked. Garlic has entered the pores of my skin. Try a lemon, she had said. It always works.
It has not worked, I almost say to her.
Irem, I almost say.
At five I stood up, and saw the bus to Pakistan pass by the tea house, and slowly, as I waved, the vehicle became a fuzzy vapor, indistinguishable from the road. Somewhere inside my brain I heard a vibration, the Ninth, coming to a close. Several times my hand tried to reach out for her, but her bus kept moving further and further, receding into that forbidden land, until it became a little black dot. I felt it was time to rest for a while, because there was still a lot more work to do, a lot more cooking. Then it began to snow.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers’ Program, le Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and the Banff Centre for the Arts for providing assistance to create this work.
The poem ‘Afterwards’ appeared originally in danDelion (vol. 33, #1). Irem is modeled partially on Shahnaz Kauser, someone I read about in newspaper articles by Mannika Chopra: ‘A Pakistani Mother Speaks of Life in Indian Jail Limbo’ (The Boston Globe, June 2002) and Khalid Hasan: ‘Jailed in India, Unwanted in Pakistan ’ (Friday Times, August 2002). ‘Had Saadat Hasan Manto been alive, he would have written a story about Shahnaz Kauser.’ This one line moved and inspired me throughout the creation of this work. Shahnaz’s story has been best told in Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Harvard University Press, 2005). Thanks to Pankaj Mishra (New York Review of Books) and Basharat Peer (Curfewed Night) for bold reporting on Kashmir that brought attention to ‘interrogation camps’ like Papa-1 and Papa-2. I relied on several publications to understand Siachen or Rose Glacier, starting with the 1912 expedition accounts of Fanny Bullock Workman. No one has written better on Siachen than Amitav Ghosh in Countdown (Ravi Dayal, 1999) and Kevin Fedarko, ‘The Coldest War’ (Outsider, February 2003). I am indebted to both for valuable information. Other books I found useful include: Conflict Without End (Viking, 2002) by Lt. Gen. (Retd.) V. R. Raghavan, War at the Top of the World (Key Porter, 1999) by Eric Margolis, and Behind the Vale (Roli, 2003) by M. J. Akbar. Thanks to the outspoken Indian army soldiers and officers for sharing Kashmir stories. Every flake of snow (and if I may, every glacier) begins with a nucleation site, a tiny particle. That tiny particle (for this book) was my inability to comprehend the early death of the poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). These pages are immensely inspired by his life and work.
I would like to thank everyone at Véhicule Press (Montreal), especially Nancy Marrelli, Bruce Henry and Simon Dardick. To Bloomsbury, and Penguin India. For their generous advice on early drafts thanks to Umarraj Singh Saberwal, Chef Olivier Fuldauer, Renuka Chatterjee, Robert Majzels, Lissa Cowan, and Nidhi Srinivas. Thanks (for many reasons) to Adi, Rosa, Amit Pal, Janice Lee, Dilreen Kaur, Farhat Rehman, Denise Drury, Agatha Schwartz, Aparna Sundar and Taras Grescoe. To Chef Cameron Stauch, whom I interviewed in New Delhi, to Jerome Lowenthal, my ‘Beethoven consultant’, to Lorna Crozier (the line in italics on page 95 is inspired by her poetry collection The Sex Lives of Vegetables), to Maria José de la Macorra for the sketch on page 31, to Negar Akhavi for sharing the Dalai Lama ‘Chinese gulag’ story, to Nadia Kurd, Riaz Mehmood and Wajahat Ahmad for the Kashmiri translation and Perso-Arabic script on page 128.
Special thanks to Andrew Steinmetz, Jackie Kaiser, Natasha Daneman and Alexandra Pringle.
A note on the author
Jaspreet Singh was born in Punjab, and brought up in Kashmir and in several cities in India. He is a former research scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Montreal. His debut short-story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for four awards including the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Region. He lives in the Canadian Rockies.
