Maravan pretended he had not noticed. But Andrea looked at the plates with a disbelieving shake of her head, offered Fink a pitying smile, turned to Maravan and said, ‘Is seven o’clock OK on Monday? Oh, and write your address down for me.’
The following morning Maravan was the first customer in the Batticaloa Bazaar. It was his second visit in a few days. The first time he had given the owner 800 francs for Nangay’s medicine.
The shop was not well stocked, only tinned foods and rice, no fruit, hardly any vegetables. There were, however, posters and flyers for organizations and events in the Tamil community and a few LTTE stickers: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Batticaloa Bazaar was less a grocer’s than a liaison office and contact point for the Tamils in exile, and the first port of call for unofficial money transfers to the north of Sri Lanka.
Maravan went to work in a cheerful mood and kept up his good spirits in spite of all his team’s efforts to ruin them. His rendezvous with Andrea had of course become common knowledge – Monday evening, seven o’clock, at his place! – and it was as if they had all sworn to make his life as difficult as possible before then: Maravan, fetch this. Maravan, fetch that. Maravan, do this. Maravan!
Kandan, the other Tamil kitchen help, was on duty. He was powerfully built, all brawn, slow on the uptake and without the slightest talent for cooking. And like many Tamil men in exile, he had an alcohol problem which he was able to disguise skilfully, although not from Maravan’s sensitive nose. Today he was assigned all the more demanding tasks, while Maravan rinsed, scoured, cleaned, scrubbed and lugged stuff around.
An edgy atmosphere prevailed in the kitchen. There were few customers in the restaurant and a birthday party of twelve had cancelled their booking for the following evening. Huwyler was getting in the way, venting his bad mood on his chefs. And they passed it on to the demis chefs, who gave hell to the commis, who in turn laid into the kitchen helps.
But Maravan was on top form. The moment Andrea started her shift he had discreetly slipped her his address. She had smiled and said – loudly enough so that Bertrand, who happened to be standing nearby, could hear – ‘I’m looking forward to it.’
Maravan knew what he was going to cook, apart from the odd detail which he would attend to the following day. And he also had a cunning plan for his technique of preparing the dinner.
Maravan was sitting in front of the computer with headphones on. Nangay’s voice sounded weak, even though the connection was surprisingly good. He ought to have kept his money and let her die, she said reproachfully. She was tired.
Nangay was over eighty, and ever since Maravan could remember she had wanted to die in peace.
To begin with she was mistrustful and did not want to answer his questions. But when he said that it would allow him to earn more money, she listed ingredients and recipes, and freely explained everything to him in detail.
It was a long conversation. And by the time it had finished Maravan’s notebook was almost full.
4
Happily, there had been a good number of covers at the Huwyler the following Sunday afternoon. The evening was quiet, the last diners left early, as ever on a Sunday.
Maravan was the last member of staff left in the kitchen. He was at the pan-cleaning sink, busy with the more intricate kitchen appliances: thermostats, jet smokers and rotary evaporators.
He waited until the cleaners had come into the kitchen, took the gadgets to the equipment store, then went into the changing room.
He deftly removed the glass elements of the rotary evaporator, rolled them up in two T-shirts, tucked them into a gym bag, making sure that they were well padded against the heavy main unit with its heat-bath holder and electronics.
Maravan undressed, wrapped a Turkish towel around his waist, shoved his underwear into the gym bag, took shampoo and soap out of the side pocket, and went into the shower. Five minutes later he came out again, took the clothes bag out of his locker, and got dressed.
On his way out he glanced again past the wine store. When he left the kitchen via the delivery entrance carrying a heavy gym bag, he was wearing black trousers, a dark-blue roll-neck sweater and his leather jacket. He did not smell of anything.
He got going that same evening. He broke up the panicles of long pepper into their tiny corns, deseeded some dried Kashmir chillies, measured out black peppercorns, cardamom, caraway, fennel, fenugreek, coriander and mustard seeds, peeled turmeric root, broke up cinnamon sticks and roasted all of these in the iron pan to the point at which the full aroma of the ingredients unfurled. He mixed the spices in various, carefully weighed combinations, and ground them into fine powders which he either used that night or kept for the following day, sealed in airtight and labelled containers.
The evaporator rotated well into the early hours with diverse ingredients: white curry paste, sali rice whisked with milk and chickpea flour, and – of course – the inimitable coconut oil with curry leaves and cinnamon.
Some fresh butter was clarifying in a pan to make ghee, while in clay plots warm water and grated coconut were being mixed into a milk.
Dawn was already breaking when Maravan lay down on his mattress on the bedroom floor for a short sleep full of strange erotic dreams. These were always interrupted when they got to the best bits.
Andrea had been on the verge of calling Maravan and finding an excuse to cancel. She cursed herself for her Good Samaritan syndrome. Maravan would have managed without her. Maybe even better. Perhaps her stupid intervention had only made things more difficult for him. No, not perhaps. Definitely.
Maravan was fortunate that these were the thoughts churning around Andrea’s mind. Otherwise she would not now have been sitting on the tram, with her handbag and a plastic bag containing a bottle of wine on her lap.
She had decided to bring him a bottle of wine because she did not know whether Tamils drank. If they did not – and so did not offer any to their guests either – then she would be able to fall back on this bottle of Pinot Noir. Not a great wine, but decent enough. Probably better than anything a kitchen help could afford. If he had any wine in the house at all.
The reason why she had stood up for Maravan was because she could not bear those chefs, especially Fink. Not because she had the hots for Maravan. She would have to let him know this straight away, a diplomatic mission she was well practised in.
Her dislike of chefs grew with each change of job. Maybe it was because of the strict hierarchy that prevailed in kitchens. Because chefs behaved as if they had some sort of entitlement to the female waiting staff. That is how it seemed to her, anyway. In kitchens, even the humblest ones, a star cult prevailed which encouraged chefs to think they were irresistible.
Every day Andrea asked herself why she did not simply change profession. And every day the same answer came back: because she had not learnt how to do anything else. She was a waitress and that was that.
To begin with, she had wanted to manage a hotel or run a pub. She had started a course in hotel management, but got stuck in a traineeship as a waitress. She was soon fed up with college, and the possibility of working in a variety of hotels after a short apprenticeship – in summer by Lake Como or in Ischia, and in winter in the Engadin Valley or the Berner Oberland – seemed to suit her restless personality. If you looked as she did and knew how to get tips, the work was not badly paid. She had good references and experience, and had made it to the rank of demi chef de rang.
She had also tried out other jobs. One of these had been as a tour rep abroad. The job had mainly consisted of holding up a sign at Kos Airport bearing the name of her tour operator, allocating the arriving guests to the various hotel buses and receiving their complaints. Andrea soon found that she would rather deal with underdone or overdone steaks than missing luggage or rooms that had a view of the street instead of the sea.