To the left of Baba’s Bites is a Slow Boat Chinese takeaway, on the other side a 24-hour Spar complete with bouncers to stop shoplifters escaping. After that is a dive of a pub. The rest of the row of shops on this stretch of the street consists of daytime businesses — dry cleaners, a newsagent’s, and places like that. At the other end is a fish and chip shop which, for some reason, always shuts at around eight o’clock. The shutters are drawn down and padlocked long before I ever show up. Above the chip shop is a massage parlour. You’d miss it from the street, but in the alleyway round the back a discreet sign above the permanently open door leading up the stairs reads “Far Eastern Massage. Open 24 hours.” I only know this because, when I arrive with a delivery for Kaz, I have to carry it up the alleyway to his shop’s rear door.
As you’d probably guess from the swell of my belly, I’m not too fussy about my food. As long as there’s enough of it. But I’m sure plenty of people happily gorging themselves at the front would spit it out in disgust if they could see the state of things round the back. The alleyway is narrow and it stinks. While the food places are open for business, the extractor fans sound like a collection of giant vacuum cleaners left permanently on. The grills pump out warm, grease-laden fumes that mingle with the sickly-sweet aroma of rotting food. The alleyway is littered with trays of all shapes and sizes dumped from the back doors of the shops. Most usually contain the remains of food: broken eggshells, mangled halves of oranges, or overripe tomatoes with skins that are split and weeping. Discarded twenty-five-litre drums of economy cooking oil sit piled next to empty beer barrels and crates of bottles from the pub. Industrial-size wheelie bins seem permanently stuffed to the top, the lids unable ever to close properly. Crowding round them are broods of bulging bin bags, haphazardly piled onto one another. Water pooled in the pitted surface of the alley is either a foul-smelling milky colour or tinged with a surface of glistening oil.
Kaz’s door is like all the others — heavily metal-plated. He’s spray-painted a large red 29 on it and I kick it twice to let whoever’s in the kitchen know I’ve dropped off. I’m always back in the light cast by the lamps on the main road before the bolts go back and the cardboard trays vanish, dragged inside by, I presume, one of the kitchen assistants.
I found the note in about my eighth curry prepared by the new cook. Because I always have lamb rogan josh with extra coriander and freshly sliced tomatoes, she must have worked out it was the same customer asking for it each time. In fact, I was fairly certain that I was Kaz’s only regular customer — the rest just stumble in because it’s the first place they find serving food after coming out of the club. Most of them probably couldn’t even remember what they’d eaten by the next day. I was halfway through my usual, watching with amusement as three lads attempted to cross the road. After about ten o’clock on a weekend, it seems, pedestrians, vehicles, and the watching police silently agree that daytime rules don’t apply. Made impatient by booze, people will lurch out into the path of cars that instantly slow down or stop to allow them to cross. Similarly, cab drivers pull up whenever they like or make U-turns anywhere they fancy. The whole thing is a melee, yet, apart from the occasional slanging match, it seems to work.
The three lads had made it through the door and were debating about whether to go for doner kebabs or quarter-pounders when I bit on the strange object. At first I thought it was gristle — but it was too hard for that. An exploratory poke with my tongue revealed that it was something folded up. With a forefinger and thumb I extracted it from my mouth, sucking the remains of curry sauce from it as I did so. I held it up and saw that it was greaseproof paper, tightly folded. Carefully I opened it out and there, in the middle of the small square, were the words, “Help me. I am prisoner here.”
I stared with puzzlement at the paper. Placing it carefully to one side, I decided to show it to Kaz once he’d finished serving the group at the counter. The first two had taken their burgers and wandered out onto the street. The third one waited at the counter, a twenty-pound note dangling from his hand. But as he was handed his order, the customer whipped the money from Kaz’s reach and spun around to run for the door.
From the corner of my eye, I saw his two mates sprint away up the street. Until then, I’d only ever seen Kaz from the chest up. He was of a thickset build and I didn’t think particularly agile. But he vaulted across that counter in a flash. The lad had bumped against the doorframe and lost a second as a result. Kaz sprang across the shop, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him back to the counter in one movement. With his other hand he reached behind it and produced a baseball bat. He shoved it hard up against the customer’s mouth, the wooden tip audibly catching on his teeth. A smear of blood appeared on his lips.
“Pay me,” Kaz demanded, aggression lowering his voice to a growl. All traces of the amiable kebab-shop owner with a limited understanding of English had vanished and I looked at the muscles bunched in his shoulders and arms, knowing that he meant it. The prospect of imminent violence hung menacingly in the air and I felt a surge of queasiness in my stomach. Thankfully the customer quickly produced the note from the breast pocket of his Ben Sherman shirt. Kaz snatched it, walked him back to the doorway, and said, “’Night, then.”
The lad walked shakily off up the street and Kaz returned to behind the counter. He looked at me and said, “Why do people have to be like that? I work hard all night, give him what he wanted, and he tries to rob me.” He shook his head regretfully. “It’s a bad world, Richard, a bad world out there.” His eyes turned to the street and he gazed with sadness at the procession of people flowing past. Then, with a smile and a shrug of his shoulders, he picked up a ladle and began stirring the curries.
I couldn’t believe how quickly he readopted his previous persona. It was like having a friendly dog snarl at you one moment, then wag its tail the next. Finding it hard to keep the same easy familiarity in my voice, I said, “You’re right there.” I looked at the piece of paper and, having witnessed this new side to him, decided against letting him see it.
Two nights later I was making a delivery at Baba’s Bites again, but this time I had slipped my own note into the tray of naan breads. It read, “Who are you? Why are you a prisoner?”
Not knowing if I would ever get a reply, I banged on the back door and then went round to the front and stepped inside. “Same as usual?” asked Kaz, already spooning rogan josh onto a pile of rice.
“Yeah, cheers,” I replied and sat down on my favourite stool in the corner. He handed the tray through the hatch and a few minutes later it was returned with a garnish of coriander and tomato. Shielding the food from him with one forearm, I sifted through the curry with my fork. A thrill of excitement shot through me when I found the little wedge of paper. Quickly I wrapped it in a serviette and slipped it into my pocket.
And so began a correspondence that would change my outlook on life forever. Over the next two weeks we exchanged a series of notes, mine written on lined sheets, hers scrawled in a microscopic hand on lengths of greaseproof paper. She’d write them at night, sacrificing valuable sleep to describe to me her plight. Her name was Meera and she was a seventeen-year-old Hindu girl from the war-torn region of Kashmir sandwiched uncomfortably between India and Pakistan. Her father and both brothers had died in the crossfire between militants and government troops. That left her as the eldest of four remaining daughters. After a long and tearful talk, she had persuaded her mother that the only way to prevent the family from becoming destitute was for her to leave the war-ravaged region and look for work. So they had paid almost all their savings to a man who promised to find Meera a well-paid job as a cook in an Indian restaurant in London. Abandoning her dream of a university place in Jammu to read law, she had climbed into the back of a lorry with seventeen other people and begun the slow trek overland to Britain. The group was occasionally allowed to emerge at night for a few minutes. Twice they transferred to other lorries — the one taking them on the final leg of the journey was the newest. They sat at its end, crammed in on all sides by crates of tulips. Eventually they were all dropped off at a house, herded inside, and the men and women separated. They were told they were in Britain, but certain arrangements still had to be made. After two days locked in a room with only a bucket for a toilet, some bottles of water, and a few loaves of bread, a different man kicked open the door. Meera was dragged out by her hair and told the cost of her passage to England had gone up. Her passport was taken off her and she was told that, to repay her debt, she could work in a brothel or a kitchen. Of course she opted for the kitchen and was bundled into the back of a van and driven to Baba’s Bites.