Chef (14 page)
We are condemned. For us there is no hope. The Pakistanis fire at us from the other side. Are they filled with hope? They are on lower ground than us and yet filled with hope. They believe they will go straight to heaven after they die. When we capture an enemy prisoner I cannot wait to ask him. Tell me, what does your heaven look like? Here, please draw it on this sheet of paper. What food do people eat in heaven?
Everything looks strange, he writes near the end of the journal. The war is over. I am no longer on the Icefields. Back at the base headquarters things make no sense. Men polishing officers’ boots, men playing the brass band, bagpipes, the band master’s baton going up in the air, parade ground, signal center, MT workshop, men playing volleyball, dry canteen and wet canteen, burra-khana and chota-khana, burra-peg and chota-peg, recreation room – nothing makes sense.
The entries from this point are written very very tightly and it is difficult to read them. They are a strange mixture of two-thirds Hindi and one-third Punjabi. His Hindi is superior to his Punjabi.
She cooks me a meal, he writes. The nurse. And while she lays the table I ask – Why do we cling to the Rose Glacier, and why does Rose cling to us?
She does not hear me. While she serves food I begin thinking about the garbage on the glacier. Our shit on the Icefields. Acres of wrecked Bofors guns and American and British weapons. Wrecked vehicles, tanks, jerry cans. What is the name of the wind that blows on the glacier? I would like to know the name of the wind.
Why are you not paying attention to me? she asks. The nurse kisses me. She undoes her blouse. Her breasts fall. I say, I thought you wanted to do it after the meal. She is somewhere behind me now. I see her petticoat string dangling from the empty chair. I turn. My heart is beating fast, fluids are running inside fast. I have not seen a woman’s belly button for an entire six months. I eat her tortellini. I lick her tattoo. But I am not able to get my
thing
up. In the past I would have had her before the blouse and petticoat came off. This time minutes pass and become hours. I am not able to get my thing up. I am not able to get
it
up.
She removes her three bangles and her wristwatch. Places them on the side table. Now she is completely naked and is panting like a dog and this arouses me but my thing does not harden. It does not. It is the tail of a dog. Wags a little. Only a little.
She tells me to talk to the doctor. She is a nurse. She knows these things. The next day I sit outside the doctor’s door. But when my turn comes after a long wait I am unable to tell him my problem. Words remain frozen in my mouth. Instead I tell him I feel weak, very weak. He gives me Vitamin C.
For half a day I run along the river, I do not return to the nurse’s quarters, I bike to the houseboat
Texas Dawn
in the red-light district to do it with a paid woman. The girl I choose is fair and sexy and well-endowed. Her name is Azra or Asma. But. The thing does not work.
The thing is wrecked.
A few pages later the address of Chef’s wife in Delhi is written. There are a couple more blank pages.
The river is brown and muddy and holy. The train roars over the bridge. The waters are sparkling with industrial froth. Naked children jump into the river. India, God’s naked country, is passing by. Mustard fields sway in the wind, they are the braids of air. Waves of tractors and bullock carts. (The fields make me think about yesterday’s news: mass suicides by starving farmers in the South.) Chimney smoke rises from an oil refinery. The smoke will blacken the white marble of the Taj. A pesticide factory flashes by. (The farmers killed themselves by drinking eight liters of agricultural pesticide.) Garbage. Streams of plastic. Hills of bottles, bags, wrappers. Cows chew on the plastic. Cell-phone towers. A cloud of butterflies, a little girl in a wrinkled pink frock is trying to catch them. A uranium mine. A huge banyan tree, the size of a village. Roots and knots everywhere. Nothing grows under a tree so thick. Thin dogs on a street. Fat goats. A butcher shop, condensation on the window. A temple, the gods are dancing. A ruined mosque. A herd of water buffaloes. Diseased mosquitoes hover on them. A mall building under construction. Water tanks. A receding platform, a receding city. A wave of nano cars. Then nothing. Only a profusion of signs. STD. BITS. ISD. HIV. C-h-i-l-d Beer. B-r-a-c-k-f-a-s-t. OK-TATA. 502 Bidi. Gandhi Spinal Hospital. FICCI welcomes the American President. Eat Cricket, Sleep Cricket, Drink only Coke. Veg-Non-Veg.
M-a-c B-u-g-e-r-s. D-o-m-i-n-o-s. L-a-t-i-n (not ‘latrine’).
God help us.
In Kashmir in autumn there are leaves which turn yellow but don’t fall. They cling hard to trees. The plane leaves fall, but there are trees (whose names I do not recall now) with yellow leaves that cling to branches. Last year’s leaves cling to this year’s tree. Even the strongest wind cannot separate them. What force bonds them tight?
When young I used to think if I picked up a terminal disease I would kill myself. But now my ideas on this have changed. I would like to cling to whatever life is left within me.
But.
There is one thing he wrote in the journal that burns me, and no matter how hard I try to forget, the thing still burns me. If someone else had said such things about me, I would not have given it much importance, but Kishen wrote those things with his own hand. That is why I was angry. I was angry at him and angry at myself for not expressing my anger. Despite his words I continued feeding him in the hospital while he was convalescing. I never brought it up.
I am reading the journal again and my hands shake.
Chef’s allegation involves General Sahib.
The other day I was sitting with a soldier in the hospital canteen, he writes, and the soldier uttered something vulgar about the nurse. She is a cockteaser, he said. She has a tattoo on her belly. I grabbed him by the collar. She is mine, I said. Leave her alone. Are you sure she is yours, Major? the soldier asked. She only
does it
with the officers. The soldier’s remark fumed me, increased my anger, he writes. How do you know she has a tattoo on her belly when she only
does it
with the officers? When you were away to the glacier, Major, she went to the border post with General Kumar and they spent the night in the same bunker. Two months later Sahib sent her to the Delhi HQ hospital for a while. The staff in Delhi told us that the rose tattoo had become a grotesque-shaped flower when her belly had swollen, and even more grotesque when it shrank. Things do not shrink back the same way, he said.
The General sent me to Siachen so that he could fuck with her, Chef writes. She says nothing has happened. I don’t believe a word. She is lying. She has never lied to me before, that bitch.
Chef records a long string of dialogue in bad handwriting at the bottom of the page:
She: ‘We slept on separate beds in the bunker. Nothing happened.’
Me: ‘What about the tattoo?’
She: ‘How many times do I have to tell you – tattoos on the belly get distorted with time.’
Me: ‘It was abortion.’
She: ‘Not true.’
Me: ‘What has the General paid you to keep quiet?’
She: ‘You are mad.’
Me: ‘If the General is innocent, then I know who did it.’
She: ‘Who?’
THE GENERAL’S RATION
No questions asked.
AN OFFICER’S RATION
Wheat flour/rice/bread 450g, sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, porridge 20g, custard powder 7g, cornflour 7g, ice cream/jelly 7g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, non-citric fruits 230g, citric fruits 110g, eggs 2, chicken 175g, meat dressed 260g, milk 250g, milk (for those who do not eat eggs) 1250g, cheese 50g.
A SOLDIER’S RATION
Wheat flour/rice/bread 620g; sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, fruits 230g, meat dressed 110g, milk (veg) 750g, milk (non-veg) 250g.
I wish I were young again, he writes. Pretty Kashmiri girls, beautiful army wives, nurses – they all fall so easily for the boy. He doesn’t even have a full beard. Yet. He is fucking around that
lun
, that prick. Kip.
Perhaps the words were written under the influence of rum. But rum is no excuse.
None of it was true. General Kumar had not
done it
. Chef had no proof. Sahib was a man of highest morals. I, on the other hand, had yet to be with a woman. Other than my erotic reveries I had no experience. My body was simply going to waste. Chef was – that bloody bastard was simply writing lies about Sahib and about me.
Despite his lies I continued to cook for him when he was in hospital. I served him my ration of rum. I fed him his own recipes. I would take the tiffin-carrier to the hospital on bike. He never spoke. He did not speak to anyone. He looked so frail on that metal bed I could not hold anything against him. He lay on the white bed, wrapped in a blanket, his tattooed arm jutting out, stitches on his wrist, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking life had ended before it began. The glacier had sucked him dry, that field of snow and ice, that hazaar thousand ton of snow, layers on top of each other, had sat on top of him and demolished his erections. He could no longer get
it
up;
it
had become a bonsai. On his tongue clung the taste of a woman’s body and the smell of its hollows, but the glacier had numbed him, and he and his bonsai had even forgotten what it felt like to drown in a woman’s fluids. No, up there, twenty thousand feet high, his brain, his organs, were drowning in his own blood. He was thinking there was no justice in the world.
Something fell from his hospital bed. His wallet in which he kept his wife’s photo. I picked it up and placed it beside him, and noticed he did not bat his eyes and he kept looking at me with bitterness. His breathing grew heavier, but he did not blink. He was thinking here is a young man, a tall cedar, and he is sleeping around with women twenty-four hours. Kashmiri women were delicate beauties, and the little ‘virile Sikh’ boy was sleeping around with them, and now and then older army wives, the memsahibs, invited him to their residences and made advances. I felt he wanted me to tell him about my sexual experiences. He wanted to listen to it all but he hated to talk to me. What he did not want to hear from me was the truth, I thought. I was twenty and still a virgin. Me, Kirpal, a virgin.
Outside the sun was brightening the plane trees, and fresh wind was blowing in the valley, and I realized it was time to head out to the bazaar. The streets were red, and on the way I saw women sweeping the leaves into huge piles, filling their big sacks with leaves, and I knew why. They made charcoal in their homes, mixing leaves and sawdust. They used the charcoal in braziers in winter to keep warm. On the way to the bazaar I slowed down my bike and watched the women sweep the leaves. Their breasts alive inside beautiful pherans. I felt empty. I felt like a one big nothing. I was not even worth a soldier’s ration.
Forgiveness is a strange animal, I say to myself. Not many people on this earth know how to
ask
for forgiveness, and very few know how to truly forgive. I returned to the hospital to ask for forgiveness. I did not really need a bandage, the cut I had on my finger was minor. Some of the wards were absolutely dark. One or two were lit up with emergency lights. There was no power in the hospital, and the whole place smelled of dead cockroaches and chloroform. I waved at her. She ignored me; the sound of her heels clicking throughout the ward was unbearable.
Finally, I stopped her in the corridor.
‘Nurse, I have been meaning to say “sorry” to you.’
‘Say it quickly.’
‘I was wrong. The way I used to look at you was wrong. It will never happen again.’
She held my arm and I felt she had already forgiven me. I like you a lot, she said, and immediately after saying that she entered the dimly lit ward. The guard saluted her. I lingered until she took a cigarette break and stepped out on the lawn. Only then, when she was gone (and the guard was looking in the other direction), did I step into the ward.
There was a blanket on his face. The only light came from the window in the corner. The blanket heaved up and down. Chef stirred, but did not flap it open. This made my task easier. In a low voice I apologized on two counts. First, for
reading
his journal, and second, for
liking
his woman. Nothing happened between us, Chef. I just told her that I liked her. I did nothing.
I do not recall exactly the words I used, but I apologized and placed the red journal by his pillow and quickly made it to the door. The guard looked at me suspiciously, but didn’t utter a word.
Outside in the corridor a man was tapping the floor with his crutches. A thin boy from the Madras regiment in a wheelchair was playing with his saliva, slowly shaking his head left to right and right to left like a machine. The nurse was standing with two or three other nurses. They eyed me curiously.
‘I was only trying to have a word with Chef,’ I explained.