The Hundred-Foot Journey (6 page)

Mehtab came in from the bedroom and sat dutifully on the rim of the bath as Papa leaned forward and looked over his shoulder. “The left,” he said. “Under the shoulder blade. No. No. Yaar. That one.”

Papa was cursed, ever since he was a teenager, with an unattractive rash of blackheads, pimples, and boils across the broad expanse of his hairy back, and while Mummy was alive, the duty of popping the worst offenders fell on her.

“Squeeze,” he yelled at Mehtab. “Squeeze.”

Papa scrunched up his face, Mehtab pinching the boil hard between her painted nails, the two of them yelping with surprise when the offending item suddenly exploded.

Papa craned his head around to get a look at the proffered tissue.

“Lots come out, yaar?”

“But what business, Papa?”

“I am thinking sauces. Hot sauces.”

From that moment on, the talk was of Madras sauces and nothing else. “Watch how I do this, Hassan,” Papa exclaimed over the Broadway High Street’s traffic. “Before you start business, always find out about competition. Nah? Market research.”

The Shahee Supermarket was the prince of all Southall’s shops. Owned by a wealthy Hindu family from East Africa, it took up the entire ground floor of a 1970s office tower at the end of the Broadway High Street. Sometimes the store dropped a half floor down into the basement, to frozen mint peas and chapatis, and sometimes it rose three steps to a reinforced platform that displayed nothing but five-kilo bags of broken basmati. Every inch of the shop was taken with floor-to-ceiling shelves of tins and sacks and boxes of what have you, and it was here displaced Indians like us bought aromatic reminiscences of home. Bags of butter beans and bottles of Thums Up; tins of coconut cream and pomegranate syrup; and colorful packets of sandalwood incense for our “pleasure and prayer.”

“And what’s this?” Papa demanded, pointing at a jar.

“Patak’s Madras Curry Paste, sir.”

“And this?”

“Rajah’s Lime and Chili Pickle, sir.”

And Papa went down the entire stock of shelves, blowing his stuffed nose, giving the poor shop assistant hell.

“And this is Shardee’s, yaar?”

“No, sir, this is Sherwood’s. And it isn’t a pickle. It is a Balti curry paste.”

“Is that so? Open a jar. I want to taste.”

The shop assistant looked around for the manager, but the Sikh was out front on Broadway High Street, standing guard over shrink-wrapped stacks of pink toilet paper. With no help on hand, the young boy maneuvered himself safely behind cases of dented chickpea cans before he spoke again. “I am sorry, sir,” he said politely. “We don’t give tastes like that. You must buy the jar.”

*   *   *

“We want proper service,” Papa told Uncle Sami.

Aziza looked at me, signaled we should sneak out the back for a cigarette.

“Not these simple fellows from East Africa,” continued Papa, tapping Uncle Sami’s elbow so the poor fellow had to look up from his newspaper.

“My God. That stupid boy at Shahee’s, like he had a bone through his nose.”

“Yes, yes. Very good,” said Uncle Sami. “Liverpool is up, two-to-one.”

But Papa, he was like a dog after a rat, and “proper service” became our excuse for voyaging to that mysterious place Papa had heard so much about: Harrods Food Hall. It was a memorable event that day the entire family descended on the West End, the hustle and bustle of Knightsbridge momentarily warming us, reminding us of the car-tooting excitement of Bombay. For a few minutes we stood awestruck before the red-stone department store, gaping up at the Royal Warrants bolted to the side of the building. “Very important tings,” Papa told us reverentially. “Means English Royal Family buy chutney here.”

And then we plunged through Harrods’ doors, through the leather handbags and china and past papier-mâché sphinxes, our heads bent all the way back as we stared up with awe at the mock-gold ceiling encrusted with stars.

The Food Hall smelled of roasting guinea fowl and sour pickles. Under a ceiling suitable for a mosque, we found a football pitch devoted entirely to food and engaged in a din of worldly commerce. Around us: Victorian nymphs in clamshells, ceramic boars, a purple-tiled peacock. An oyster bar stood beside hanging slabs of plastic meat, while the grounds were covered in a seemingly endless line of marble-and-glass counters. One entire counter, I recall, was filled with nothing but bacon—“Smoked Streaky,” “Oyster-Back,” and “Suffolk Sweet Cure.”

“Look,” Papa yelled, with a mixture of delight and disgust, at the trays of pig meat under glass. “Pork bellies. Haar. And here, look.”

Papa roared with laughter at the silliness of the English, at the glistening carrots artfully displayed with a yard of their furiously green bush. “Look. Four carrots, £1.39 a bunch. Haahaa. Pay for the bush. Eat the whole ting. Like rabbits.”

We passed from one room to another, under Victorian chandeliers, surveying produce from corners of the globe we had never even heard of, Papa’s guffaws ever less frequent. And it’s the confused expression on his face that I recall, while he tapped the glass, counting thirty-seven different types of goats’ cheese, each with its own exotic name like Pouligny-Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Maure de Touraine.

The world was an awfully big place, we suddenly realized, and here was the evidence before us: gently smoked ostrich from Australia and Italian gnocchi and black potatoes from the Andes and Finnish herring and Cajun sausages. And perhaps, most shocking, but clear as can be, England’s own rich vein of culinary deposits, wonderful-sounding creations like “Duckling, Apple & Calvados Pie” or “Beer-Marinated Rabbit Loins” or “Venison Sausage with Mushroom & Cranberry.”

It was utterly overwhelming. A Harrods security officer, flak-jacketed and with wires in his ears, walked around us.

“Where the Indian sauces, please?” Papa asked meekly.

“Down in Pantry, sir, past Spices.”

Past the Jelly Belly towers in Sweets, down the escalator, through Wines and into Spices. And there, Papa’s hand raised, a brief glimmer of hope in Spices, but quickly dashed at the sight of more such cosmopolitan labels: French Thyme, Italian Marjoram, Dutch Juniper Berries, Egyptian Bay Leaf, English Black Mustard, and even—the ultimate slap—German Chives.

Papa let out his breath. And the sound, it broke my heart.

Squashed in the corner, almost hidden behind packages of Japanese seaweed and pink ginger, just token contributions from culinary India. Some bottles of Curry Club. A few baggies of chapatis. Papa’s entire world reduced to next to nothing.

“Let’s go,” he said listlessly.

And that was that. The English schemes. Finished.

Harrods totally undid Papa, and shortly thereafter he succumbed to the depression that must have been lurking just below his manic search for a new occupation. Because from then on, right until we left, Papa spent his time in England sitting like a turnip on the Southall couch, wordlessly watching Urdu videos.

When the low-hanging skies of Southall became too gray and oppressive and we craved the color and life of Mumbai, Umar and I took the tube into Central London, switched trains, and headed out to the Camden Locks of North London. The journey was quite long and uncomfortable, but emerging from the cavernous tunnels of the Northern Line, into the crowded streets of Camden, it was like being reborn.

Here the buildings were painted tarty pinks and blues, and under the row of saggy awnings were tattoo parlors and body-piercers, Dr. Martens boot dealers and handmade hippie jewelry, and musty little holes from which blared head-banging music from the Clash or the Eurythmics. As we walked down the High Street, a little bounce back in our walk, greasy-haired barkers tried to lure us into shops selling secondhand CDs and aromatherapy oils, vinyl miniskirts, and skateboards and tie-dye T-shirts. And the strange people thronging and jostling on the sidewalks—the ring-studded Goths in black leather and green Mohawks, the posh girls from private Hampstead day schools down for a bit of slumming, the winos lurching from rubbish bin to pub—all this sea of humanity reassured me that as alien as I felt, there were always others in the world far odder than I.

On this particular day, just over the central canal, Umar and I turned left into the covered markets for lunch, where the former brick warehouses along the locks, the stalls, the cobblestone lanes, were all jammed with inexpensive food stalls from around the globe. Asian girls wearing thick eyeglasses and paper hats called out—“Come here, boys, come”—beckoning us over to their tofu and green beans, to their Thai chicken skewers in satay, to the woks where a cross-looking chef was repeatedly plopping steamy portions of sweet-sour pork onto rice. We would wander in awe, peering, like at the zoo, into stalls selling Iranian barbecue, fish stews from Brazil, Caribbean pots of plantain and goat, and thick wedges of Italian pizza.

But my older brother, Umar, whom I followed sheeplike on these outings, led us straight to the Mumbai Grill, where laminated copies of Bollywood film posters, 1950s classics such as
Awara
or
Mother India,
decorated the booth. And from the vats of lamb Madras or chicken curry on the counter we would get a delicious dollop of rice and okra and chicken vindaloo, all unceremoniously smacked, for £2.80, into a Styrofoam pouch.

So, plastic forks and vindaloo in our hot hands, shoveling food in our mouths as we walked, we wandered deeper into the bowels of the Camden markets, drifting against our will to the stalls that would have drawn Mummy. There, the necklaces of colored glass beads; the Suzie Wong cocktail dresses in black-and-red satin; and the prayer shawls, pashmina silk, the Jamawars, all hanging like diaphanous vines from pegs, a riot of glittering colors that made us think of Mummy and Mumbai. At a corner stall, under an awning that was saggy and tired, I stopped to study rack upon rack of cheap cotton carryalls from India, each for just ninety-nine pence, that were a lively rust and maroon and aquamarine, embroidered with dainty little flowers or stitched with beads and bits of glass. They drew me in under the awning, under the elaborate cotton chandeliers with silk tassels and tubular insides, from which a low-watt bulb cast a yellow light. And there were the scarves, the
dupatta,
draped over racks or knotted and hanging like thick rope from pegs, pink and floral, psychedelic and striped. Up on the wall a fantastic quilt of colorful scarves, stitched together and hung across the entire shop, displaying the entire universe of
dupatta
on offer.

“Yes. Can I help you?”

And there she was, Abhidha, a name that literally means “longing,” in tight-fitting jeans and a simple black V-neck wool sweater, offering to help me, with her curious smile.

I wanted to blurt out,
Yes, help me. Help me find my Mummy. Help me find myself.

But what I said was, “Ummm . . . something for my aunt. Please.”

I do not recall what all was said exactly, as she had me run my hand along a silk pashmina shawl in deep crimson, talking to me earnestly in that soft voice, my heart pounding. I kept on asking her to show me one more thing, so I could keep on talking to her, until her father in the back finally barked she was needed at the cashier, and she looked at me full of regret, and I followed her to the cash register, where I emptied out my pockets to buy my aunt that crimson shawl, until, at the end, I stuttered that I’d like to see her again, for a meal or a movie, and she answered, yes, she’d like that. And so that was how I found my first love, Abhidha, among the shawls, when I was seventeen.

Abhidha was by no means a classic beauty. She had, admittedly, quite a round face pocked by a few old acne scars here and there. When we got home that day, Umar told my sister Mehtab that I was in love, and then added unkindly, “Hot body, but face . . . face like an onion bhaji.” But what Umar obviously didn’t see, and I did, was that Abhidha’s face was permanently lit by the most intriguing smile. I did not know where this smile came from, in a woman of twenty-three, but it was as if Allah had once whispered some cosmic joke into her ear, and from then on she walked through life filtering the world through this amusing take on events. Nor did I really care what Umar thought—or anyone else, for that matter—because from then on I was driven to seek out Abhidha, whenever our schedules or families permitted, because something in me knew she was a kindred soul, would bring out that driving ambition buried deep inside me, that part starved to taste the flavors of life far beyond the comfort zone of my heritage.

Abhidha’s family was originally from Uttar Pradesh, lived in Golder’s Green, and ran their import-export business from Camden. British-born and in her last year at Queen Mary College, University of London, Abhidha was frighteningly bright and ambitious, single-mindedly trying to improve herself. So she would agree to meet me—her purse slung over her shoulder, banging on her hip, always an inky pad and pen in her hand—but only for something educational, like a special exhibit at the British Museum or the Victoria Albert. And if we met in the evening, it was to see Aeschylus’s
Oresteia
at the National Theatre, or an incomprehensible play—usually by some mad Irishman—in a hot and sticky room above a pub.

I resisted her at first, of course, all this high culture, which I didn’t think was my thing, until that night we did a coin toss to see who got to decide what we were doing that Saturday. I was adamant we see a Bruce Willis film involving an unusually large number of helicopter chases and exploding office buildings, and she—almost knocked me over—she wanted to see a Soviet-era play, from the then dissident underground, about three homosexuals incarcerated in Siberia.

This, as Saturday evening entertainment, was as attractive to me as having all my teeth pulled, but she won the coin toss and I wanted to be with her, so we took the tube up to the Almeida Theatre in Islington, and sat for three hours in the dark, on a hard bench behind a pillar, constantly shifting our tingly bottoms.

Somewhere in the middle of the play tears began streaming down my face. I am not exactly sure what happened, but the play wasn’t really about homosexuals, this I realized, but about the human soul when it has a destiny—at odds with the society around it—and how this destiny drove these Russian characters into exile. It was all about homesick men achingly missing their mothers and comforting foods from home and how this exile in Siberia brought them to the very edge of madness. But it was also about the majesty of their destiny to be homos, and that it was a force of its own and could not be denied, and that none of them in the end, no matter how they suffered, none of them would ever have traded in their destiny for the comfortable life they left behind in Moscow. And then they all died. Horribly.