The Hundred-Foot Journey (4 page)

“Come, Hassan.”

Mummy took my hand and we slipped out the back door, heading to the Number 37 bus.

“Where are we going?”

We both knew, of course, but we pretended. It was always like this.

“Oh, I don’t know. To the shops, maybe. A little break from the routine.”

My mother was shy, quietly clever with numbers, but always there to rein in my father when his exuberances got the better of him. She was, in her quiet way, the family’s real ballast, more so than my father, despite all his noise. She made sure we children were always properly dressed and that we did our homework.

But that did not mean Mummy did not have her own secret hungers.

For scarves. My Mummy did like her
dupatta.

For some reason—I am not exactly sure why—Mummy occasionally took me on her clandestine forages into town, as if I alone might understand her mad shopping moments. They were rather harmless excursions, really. A scarf or two here and there, maybe a pair of shoes, only rarely an expensive sari. And for me, a coloring book, or a comic, our shopping adventure always ending in a bang-up meal.

It was our secret bond, an adventure reserved exclusively for the two of us, a way, I think, she made sure I did not get lost in the shuffle of the restaurant, Papa’s demands, the rest of her clamoring children. (And maybe I wasn’t quite so special as I’d like to think. Mehtab later told me that Mummy used to secretly take her to the cinema, and Umar to the go-cart track.)

And, on occasion, it wasn’t about a boost from shopping at all, but about some other hunger, something far deeper, because she’d hover before the shops, smack her lips in meditation, and then head us off in an entirely different direction, to the Prince of Wales Museum, perhaps, to pore over the Mughal miniatures, or to the Nehru Planetarium, which from the outside always looked to me like a giant filter from an industrial turbine stuck sideways into the ground.

On this particular day, Mummy had just worked very hard for two weeks closing the restaurant’s year-end books, for the tax man, and so, task successfully completed, another profitable year put to rest, she rewarded us with a little foraging trip on the Number 37 bus. But this time we changed buses, journeyed farther into the roar of the city, and we wound up in a stretch of Mumbai where the boulevards were wide as the Ganges, and the streets lined with big glass shop fronts, doormen, and teak shelves polished to a shiny gloss.

The name of the sari shop was Hite of Fashion. My mother looked at the bolts of cloth stacked to the ceiling in a tower of electric blues and moleskin grays, her hands clasped together under her chin, just staring in wonder at the Parsi shopkeeper up on the ladder, as he handed down the most vibrant bundles of silk to the assistant at his feet. Her eyes were teary, as if the sheer beauty of the material were just too much to take in, like looking directly into the sun. And for me that day, we purchased a spanking-smart blue cotton jacket, with, for some reason, the gold seal of the Hong Kong Yacht Club stitched to its breast.

The shelves at the nearby attar shop were filled with amber- and blue-colored glass bottles, long-necked as swans and as elegantly shaped. A woman in a white lab coat dotted our wrists with oils saturated in sandalwood, coffee, ylang-ylang, honey, jasmine, and rose petals, until we were quite intoxicated, sickened really, and had to get some fresh air. And then it was off to look at the shoes, in a pish-posh palace, where we sat on gold couches, the gilt armrests and clawed feet shaped as lions, and where a diamanté-encrusted omega framed the shop’s window, in which glass shelves displayed, as if they were the rarest of jewels, spiky heels, crocodile pumps, and sandals dyed hot purple. And I remember the shoe salesman kneeling at Mummy’s feet, as if she were the Queen of Sheba, and my mother girlishly turning her ankle so I could see the gold sandal in silhouette, saying, “Nah? What d’you think, Hassan?”

But I remember most of all that when we were on our way back to the Number 37 bus, we passed an office high-rise where the ground-floor shops were taken up by a tailor and an office supply store and a strange-looking restaurant called La Fourchette, which was wrapped under a lip of cement, from which protruded a tired French flag.

“Come, Hassan,” said Mummy. “Come. Let us give it a try.”

We ran giggling up the steps with our bags, pushed through the heavy door, but instantly fell silent. The interior of the restaurant was mosque-like dark and gloomy, with a distinctly sour smell of wine-soaked beef and foreign cigarettes, the low-hanging and dim-watted orbs hanging over each table providing the only available light. A couple in shadow occupied a booth, and a few tip-top office workers in white shirts, their sleeves rolled up, were having a business lunch and sipping red wine—still an exotic rarity in India in those days. Neither Mummy nor I had ever been in a French restaurant, so to us the dining room looked terribly smart, and we soberly took a booth in the back, whispering to each other under the low-hanging copper lamp as if we were in a library. A lace curtain, gray with dust, blocked what little light penetrated the building’s brown-tinted windows, so the restaurant’s overall ambience was that of a den with a slightly seedy notoriety. We were thrilled.

An elderly woman, painfully thin, wearing a caftan and an armful of bangles, shuffled over to our table, instantly recognizable as one of those aging European hippies who had visited an ashram and never returned home. But Indian parasites and time had worked her over and she looked to me like a desiccated bug. The woman’s sunken eyes were heavily lined with kohl, I remember, but in the heat the makeup had run into the creases of her face; red lipstick had been applied earlier in the day with a very shaky hand. So the overall affect, in the bad light, was rather frightening, like being served lunch by a cadaver.

But the woman’s gravelly-voiced Hindi was lively, and she handed us some menus before shuffling off to make us mango
lassi. The strangeness of the place overwhelmed me. I didn’t know where to begin with this stiff menu—such exotic-sounding dishes like bouillabaisse and
coq au vin
—
and I looked panic-stricken up at my mother. But Mummy smiled kindly and said, “Never be afraid of trying something new, Hassan. Very important. It is the spice of life.” She pointed at a slip of paper. “Why don’t we take the day’s special? Do you agree? Dessert is included. Very good value. After our shopping, not such a bad thing.”

I remember clearly the
menu complet
started with a
salade frisée
and mustard vinaigrette, followed by
frites
and a minute steak on which sat a dollop of Café de Paris (a delicious pat of herbs-and-garlic butter), and ended, finally, with a wet and wobbly crème brûlée. I’m sure it was a mediocre lunch—the steak as tough as Mummy’s newly acquired footwear—but it was instantly elevated to my pantheon of unforgettable meals because of the overall magic of the day.

For the sweet caramel pudding that dissolved on my tongue is forever fused in my memory with the look on Mummy’s face, a kindness graced by the inner glow of our carefree outing. And I can still see the twinkle in her eye as she leaned forward and whispered, “Let’s tell your father French food is new favorite. Nah? Much better than Indian, we’ll say. That should get him excited! What d’you think, Hassan?”

I was fourteen.

I was walking home from St. Xavier’s, weighted down with my math and French books, picking away at a paper cone of bhelpuri. I lifted my head and saw a black-eyed boy my age staring back at me from the filthy shacks off the road. He was washing himself, from a cracked bucket, and his wet, brown skin was in places turned white by the blinding sun. A cow was collapsed at his feet. His sister squatted in a watery ditch nearby while a mat-haired woman behind them lined a concrete water pipe with ratty belongings.

The boy and I locked eyes, for a second, before he sneered, reached down, and flapped his genitals at me. It was one of those moments of childhood when you realize the world is not as you assumed. There were people, I suddenly understood, people who hated me even though they did not know me.

A silver Toyota suddenly roared past us on its way up to Malabar Hill, breaking the boy’s mean-eyed spell, and I gratefully turned my head to follow the shiny car’s diesel wake. When I turned back, the boy was gone. Only the tail-twitching cow in the mud and the girl poking the wormy feces just squeezed from her bottom.

From inside the water pipe, shadowy rustlings.

Bapaji was a man of respect in the shantytown. He was one of those who had made it, and the poor used to press their palms together when he made his arrogant way through the barracks, tapping the heads of the strongest young men. The chosen tore through the clamoring crowds and jammed onto the back of his three-wheeler put-putting on the roadside. Bapaji always picked his tiffin delivery boys from the shantytown, and he was much revered because of it. “Cheapest workers I can find,” he rasped at me.

When my father refocused the business on the higher-margin restaurants, however, he stopped hiring the young men from the slum. Papa said our middle-class clients wanted clean waiters, not the filthy rabble from the barracks. And that was that. But still they came, begging for work, their gaunt faces pressed against the back door, Papa chasing them away with a roar and a swift kick.

Papa was a complicated man, not easily put in a box. He could hardly be called a devout Muslim, but he was, paradoxically, careful about staying on the right side of Allah. Every Friday, for example, before the call of prayers, Papa and Mummy personally fed fifty of the very same slum dwellers from cauldrons at the restaurant’s back door. But this was insurance for the afterlife. When it came to hiring staff for the business, Papa was ruthless. “Nothing but rubbish,” he’d say. “Human rubbish.”

One day a Hindu nationalist on a red motorbike roared into our world, and before our very eyes the Napean Sea Road–Malabar Hill division between rich and poor widened like a causeway. The Shiv
Sena was actively trying to “reform” itself at that time—the Bharatiya Janata Party was just a few years from power—but not all of the fiery extremists went quietly into the night, and one hot afternoon Papa came back into our compound with a clutch of flyers. He was grim-faced and tight-lipped and went up to his room to talk with Mummy.

My brother Umar and I studied the yellow papers he’d left curling on the rattan chair, the overhead fan making the paper shiver. The flyers singled us out—a Muslim family—as the root cause for the people’s poverty and suffering. A cartoon depicted an immensely fat Papa drinking a bowl of cow’s blood.

The images come now like postcards, such as the time my grandmother and I cracked nuts under the compound’s porch. Behind us we could hear the nationalists shouting slogans into a megaphone. I looked up at Malabar Hill and saw two girls in white tennis outfits sipping juice drinks on a terrace. It was a very strange moment, for somehow I knew how it would end. We were not of the shantytown, or of the upper classes of Malabar Hill, but instead lived on the exposed fault line between these two worlds.

From that last summer of my childhood I can still extract sweet tastes. Late one afternoon Papa took us all out to Juhu Beach. We staggered with our beach bags and balls and blankets through an alleyway ripe with cow dung and frangipani, and out onto the boiling sand, dodging the tinseled horse carriages and their lumpy deposits of hot plop. Papa spread three tartan blankets out across the sand as we children tore down to the platinum blue water and back.

Mummy never looked so beautiful. She wore a pink sari, her gold-sandaled feet curled under the thigh, across her face the soft, sweet smile of ghee. Kites shaped like fish fluttered loudly above us, and the strong wind made Mummy’s kohl-lined eyes run. I snuggled up against the soft heat of her leg as she rummaged in her string sack for a tissue, dabbing at herself in the pocket mirror.

Papa said he was going down to the water’s edge to buy my youngest sister, Zainab, a feather boa from a hawker. Mukhtar and Zainab and Arash, the four of us, we ran after him. Paunchy old men tried to recapture their youth with a game of cricket; my oldest brother, Umar, did backflips across the sand, showing off with his teenage friends. Vendors lugged coolers and smoking trays down the beach, singing out their wares of sweet breads and cashews and Fanta and monkey balloons.

“Why only Zainab get something?” wailed Mukhtar. “Why, Papa?”

“One ting,” Papa yelled. “One ting each. And then no more. You hear?”

The taut kite strings moaned in the wind.

Mummy sat on the blanket, curled into herself like a pink pomegranate. Something my auntie said must have made her laugh, for Mummy turned gaily, her teeth white, her hands stretched out to help my sister Mehtab thread a garland of white flowers through her hair. That is how I like to remember Mummy.

It was a hot and humid afternoon in August. I was playing backgammon with Bapaji in the compound courtyard. A chili-red sun had just dipped behind the backyard banyan and the mosquitoes whined furiously. I was about to tell him we should move indoors, when Bapaji suddenly jerked his head up—“Don’t let me die,” he rasped—and then violently pitched forward onto the spindly-legged table. He shuddered; he twitched. The table collapsed.

When Bapaji died, so, too, did the last scrap of respect we had in the shantytown, and two weeks after he was buried they came at night, their distorted, rubbery faces pressed up against Bollywood Nights’ window. All I remember was the screaming, the terrible screaming. The torchlit mob pulled my mother from her cage while my father hustled us children and a stampede of restaurant guests out the back door and up to the Hanging Gardens and Malabar Hill. Papa rushed back to get Mummy, but by then flames and acrid smoke leaped from the windows.

Mother was bloodied and unconscious under a table in the downstairs restaurant, flames closing in all around her. Papa tried to enter, but his kurta caught fire and he had to retreat, slapping his blackened hands. We heard his terrible screams for help as he raced back and forth in front of the restaurant, helplessly watching Mummy’s braid of hair, like a candlewick, catch fire. I never told anyone, because there is a chance it was my overactive imagination at work, but I swear I smelled her burning flesh, from our safe perch up on the hill.