The Hundred-Foot Journey (8 page)

“Come on,” he said. “Time to go.”

Mukhtar celebrated our exit from England by promptly throwing up creamy prawns and pasta all over the ferry bound for Calais. But then the trip began in earnest: our Mercedes caravan ran through Belgium and Holland, into Germany, then, in rapid succession, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, before winding mountain roads led us back into France.

Harrods Food Hall had profoundly affected Papa. Now acutely aware of his limitations, he decided to expand his knowledge of the world, and in his book that simply meant systematically eating his way across Europe, tasting any local dish that was new and possibly tasty. So, we ate mussels and beer in Belgium bars; roast goose with red cabbage in a dark German
stube
. There was a sweaty dinner of venison in Austria; polenta in the Dolomites; white wine and
Felchen,
a bony lake fish, in Switzerland.

After the bitterness of Southall the early weeks of that trip through Europe were like the first taste of a crème brûlée. In particular I recall our whirlwind trip through Tuscany, in the golden light of late August, when our cars rolled into Cortona and to a mustard-colored
pensione
built into the side of the brushy mountain.

Shortly after we arrived in the medieval hillside town we discovered, much by chance, the locals were in the midst of their annual porcini mushroom festival. As the sun set over the valley and Lake Trasimeno, Papa had us in line at the gates of Cortona’s terraced park, the promenade under the cypress trees festively decorated with fairy lights and wooden tables and jam jars of wildflowers.

The fête was in full swing, with a clarinet and snare drum pickety-picketing the tarantella and a couple of aged couples kicking up their heels on a wooden platform. It appeared as if the entire town was out in force, the throngs of children clamoring for cotton candy and roasted almonds, but we still managed to claim an unoccupied wooden table under a chestnut tree. Around us the locals carried on, a swirl of grandparents and baby carriages and laughter and the gesticulations of local chatter.

“
Menu completo trifolato,
” Papa ordered.

“Nah?” said Auntie.

“Quiet.”

“What do you mean quiet? Don’t tell me to be quiet! Why everyone shushing me all the time? I want to know what you have ordered.”

“Must you know everything?” Papa fumed at his sister. “It’s mushroom, yaar. Local mushroom.”

It certainly was. What came was plate after plate of Pasta ai Porcini and Scaloppine ai Porcini and Contorno di Porcini. One porcini after another porcini, plastic plates streaming out of the tent from across the park, where local women in aprons and dusted with flour dressed mushrooms that looked alarmingly like soggy slivers of liver. And to the tent’s side, a giant vat of sizzling oil, the size of a California hot tub, but rather endearingly shaped like a giant frying pan, the handle artfully piping out the fryer’s gassy fumes. And around the vat stood three men, fat, in massive toques, dunking the flour-dusted porcini
into the sizzling oil while they roared instructions at one another and sipped from paper cups of red wine.

For three days we soaked up the Tuscan heat and swam, gathering every night for dinner on the
pensione
roof terrace as the sun set over the mountains.

“Cane,
” Papa informed the waiter.
“Cane rosto
.”

“Papa! You just ordered a roast dog.”

“No. No. I didn’t. He understood.”

“You mean
carne
.
Carne
.”

“Oh, yes. Yes
. Carne rosto
. And
un piatto di Mussolini
.”

The perplexed waiter finally retired once we explained Papa wanted a plate of mussels, not the dictator on a dish. Waves of Tuscan food soon broke over the table as a nighttime musk of lavender and sage and citrus wafted over us from a border of terra-cotta pots. We ate wild asparagus served with
fagiole,
fat slabs of beef perfectly charbroiled on wood fires, walnut biscotti dunked in the patron’s own Vin Santo. And laughter, once again laughter.

Heaven on earth, no?

Ten weeks after we started our trip across Europe we were back in our funk. The family had become dead tired of all the driving and Papa’s restless rushing to nowhere, these arbitrary scratches in his dog-eared copy of
Le Bottin Gourmand
. And the eating in restaurants, week in, week out, it had become sickening. We would have killed for our own kitchen and a simple potato-and-cauliflower fry-up. But for us, yet another day packed in the cars like in tiffin tins, elbow to elbow, the windows all steamed up.

And on that October day in the lesser mountains of France when it all came to an end, things were particularly bad. Ammi wept silently in the backseat as the rest of us bickered and Father roared at us to be quiet. After a series of sickening turns up a mountainside, we came upon a pass covered in frosty boulders. The place was eerily shrouded in cold fog. The ski lift was closed, as was a shuttered café in cement, and we passed through without comment into another mountainside descent.

Over that ridge, however, on the other side of the mountain, the fog abruptly lifted, a blue sky opened up, and we were suddenly surrounded by sun-dappled pines and clean streams running through the woods and shooting under the road.

Twenty minutes later we came out of the forest into a sloped pasture, the silky grass dotted with white and blue wildflowers. And as we turned at a hairpin in the road, we spied the valley and village below us, a vista of glacier blue trout streams sparkling under a cloudless autumn day in the French Jura.

Our cars, as if intoxicated by the beauty, swayed drunkenly down the meandering road into the valley. Church bells tolled out across the plowed fields; a wild woodcock darted across the sky, disappearing in the russet and gold leaves of a birch-tree clump. Up on the gentler slopes, men carrying baskets on their backs harvested the last grape bunches between rows of vines, and behind them rose the crisp white tops of the granite mountains.

And the air, oh, that air. Crisp and clean. Even Ammi stopped her wailing. Our cars sailed past wooden farmhouses with antlers nailed over barn doors, bell-clanking cowherds, a yellow postal van bobbing across the fields. And in the flat-bottomed valley we crossed a wooden bridge, entering the town of stone.

The Mercedes lurched through the village’s narrow eighteenth-century lanes—past cobblestone alleys, past the shoe shop, past watch boutiques. Two chatting mothers pushed baby carriages across the crosswalk to a pâtisserie and tearoom; a portly businessman mounted steps to a corner bank. There was something elegant about the town, as if it had some proud past, and it left a pleasant impression of guild houses and leaded windows, of old church spires and green shutters and World War I memorials carved in stone.

But finally we had circled the town’s square—boxes of yellow carnations and a fountain of water-spitting fish at its center—and headed back out of town on the N7, over a roaring river that came down from the Alps. And I distinctly remember looking out the window of the car and seeing a man fishing the river’s fast waters with grasshoppers, the entire bank behind him a stunning carpet of bluebells.

“Papa, can’t we stop here?” asked Mehtab.

“No. I want to reach Auxonne for lunch. Guidebook says they have very good tongue. With a Madeira sauce.”

Not for the first time in my life the outside world seemed to respond to my inner needs.

“Wah dis? Wah dis?”

The car belched black smoke and shuddered. Papa smacked the wheel, but the car wouldn’t respond, and he guided us to the side of the road. The younger children screamed with delight as we all piled out of the backseats into the crisp country air.

Our car died on a leafy street of bourgeois limestone houses and potted chimneys and window boxes bursting with geraniums. Behind the houses, apple orchards sloped up hills, and I could just see the tops of headstones jutting up from the local cemetery and church.

My younger brothers and sisters played tag in the street—a terrier yapping at them from behind an old stone wall—as delicious smells of burning wood and hot bread wafted over us from a nearby house.

Father cursed and banged the car hood with his fist. Uncle got out of the second car and gratefully stretched his back before joining Papa over the stalled engine. Auntie and Ammi gathered the hems of their saris and went in search of a bathroom. My oldest brother, alone in the last car, which was overloaded with our valises and bundled luggage, morosely lit a cigarette.

Papa wiped his oily hands on a rag and looked up. I could see he was exhausted, his immense energy finally drained of its reserves. He took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes, and a gust of oxygen-rich air suddenly ruffled his hair. He must have felt the breeze’s invigorating presence, for that was when he really looked at the pristine alpine beauty around him for the first time. And as he looked about, breathing effortlessly through his nose for the first time in almost two years, he leaned against a gate, the wooden board next to him wobbling.

The mansion we’d broken down in front of was stately, and even from the road we could see it was beautifully carved from fine stone. On the other side of the self-contained estate, a stable and gatekeeper’s lodge stood below linden trees, and a tangle of thick ivy grew along the top of the stone wall encircling the property. “The sign says it’s for sale,” I said.

A powerful thing, destiny.

You can’t run from it. Not in the end.

Lumière, we later discovered, had been a vibrant watchmaking center during the eighteenth century, but the town had shrunk to twenty-five thousand and was now mostly known for a few award-winning wines. The main industries were an aluminum siding factory, located in a modest industrial zone twenty kilometers down toward the mouth of the valley, and three family-run sawmills dotting the foothills. In dairy circles the town had built a minor reputation on a soft cheese, aged with a layer of charcoal in its middle. And the name itself, Lumière, came from the way the early morning light bounced off the Jura granite, suffusing one side of the valley with a pink luminescence.

Papa and Uncle Mayur, unable to revive the car, walked back into the center of town, returning an hour later, not with a garage mechanic, but with a provincial real estate agent sprouting a foulard from his blazer pocket. The three men disappeared inside the house, and we children ran after them, from room to room, our feet clattering over the wooden floors.

The estate agent talked very fast in a sort of Franglais, but we managed to understand a Monsieur Jacques Dufour, a minor eighteenth-century inventor of watch wheels, had built the mansion. We all marveled at the old kitchen, big and airy, with hand-painted pantries and a stone fireplace. Papa broached the idea of a restaurant and the agent thought that most assuredly an Indian restaurant would do well in the area. “You have field to yourself,” he said, waving his hands with enthusiasm. “There is no Indian restaurant in this entire section of France.”

Besides, the man said gravely, the house was a very good investment. Demand for housing should pick up shortly and push prices up. He had personally heard in the Town Hall that the Printemps Department Store was on the threshold of announcing a 750,000-square meter warehouse in Lumière’s industrial zone.

We came out again into the courtyard, the air pink and the top of the Jura Alps sharply white over the mansion’s slate roof.

“Wah you say, Mayur?”

Uncle scratched his crotch and mysteriously looked off to the mountains in a noncommittal way. But that’s what he always did when asked to make a decision.

“Good, yaar?” continued Papa. “Certainly clear to me. We have new home.”

Our Period of Mourning was officially over. It was time for the Haji family to get on with life, to start a new chapter, to finally put behind us our lost years. And at long last we were back where we belonged, back in the restaurant business. For good or for worse, Lumière was the spot of earth where we would dig in our heels.

But of course no family is an island unto itself. It is always part of a larger culture, a community, and we had traded in our familiar Napean Sea Road, even the Asian familiarity of Southall, for a world we knew absolutely nothing about. I suppose that was the point. Papa always wanted to start again fresh, to take us as far away as possible from Mumbai and the tragedy. Well, Lumière certainly was that place. This was, after all,
la France profonde
—deepest France.

It was then—as I stood on the second-floor landing and all around me my shrill brothers and sisters banged doors—I first noticed the building across the street from the Dufour estate.

The building was an equally elegant mansion in the same silver gray stone. A mature willow tree commanded almost the entire front garden, and, like some curtsying Louis XIV courtier, its fluid limbs bowed elegantly over the wooden fence and the town’s flagstone sidewalk. Crisp goose-down duvets hung out for airing from the two top windows, and over their white humps I spotted a green-velvet bedside lampshade, a brass candelabra, dried sprigs of lilac in a translucent vase. A battered-black Citroën was parked on the gravel drive below, before the old stable that served as a garage, and weather-beaten stone steps ran up along the rock garden on the side of the house, up to the polished oak door. And there, swinging ever so slightly in the breeze, a discreet shingle overhead. Le Saule Pleureur
—
The Weeping Willow—a several-crowned inn.

I can still recall that wondrous first glimpse of Le Saule Pleureur. It was, to me, more stunning than the Taj in Bombay. It wasn’t its size, but its perfection: the lichen-covered rock garden, the fluffy white duvets, the old stables with the leaded windows. Everything fit perfectly, the very essence of understated European elegance that was so completely foreign to my own upbringing.

But the more I try and recall that moment when I first set eyes on Le Saule Pleureur, the more certain I am I also saw a white face looking darkly down at me from an attic window.