Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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Chapter Two

Let me think happy thoughts. If I close my eyes I can picture our old kitchen now, smell the clove and bay leaf, hear the spitting of the kadai. Bappu’s gas rings and tawa grills were off to the left as you entered, and you’d often see him sipping his milky tea, the four basic masalas of Indian cooking bubbling away under his watchful eye. On his head, the toque, the towering chef’s hat of which he was so proud. Energetic cockroaches, antennae waving, scampered across the trays of raw shellfish and sea bream to his elbow, and at his fingertips were the little bowls of his trade—garlic water, green peas, a creamy coconut and cashew gruel, chili and ginger purees.

Bappu, seeing me at the door, signaled for me to come over to watch a platter of lamb brains slide into the kadai, the pink mass landing among prattling onions and furiously spitting lemongrass. Next to Bappu stood a fifty-gallon steel vat of cottage cheese and fenugreek, simmering, two boys evenly stirring the milky soup with wooden trowels, and to the far right huddled our cooks from Uttar Pradesh. Only these northerners—my grandmother decided—had the right feel for tandoori, the deep coal pots from which emerged toasted skewers of marinated eggplant and chicken and green peppers with prawns. And upstairs, the apprentices only slightly older than myself working under a yellow garland of flowers and smoking incense.

It was their job to strip leftover tandoori chicken from the bones, snap beans over a barrel, shave ginger until it liquified. These teenagers, when off-duty, smoked cigarettes in the alleys and hooted after girls, and they were my idols. I spent a good deal of my childhood sitting with them, on a footstool in the upstairs cold kitchen, chatting away as an apprentice neatly split okra with a knife, using his finger to smear a lurid red chili paste on the vegetable’s white inner thighs. There are few things more elegant in this world than a coal black teenager from Kerala dicing coriander: a flurry of knife, a chopping roll, and the riot of awkward leaves and stems instantly reduced to a fine green mist. Such incomparable grace.

One of my favorite vacation pastimes, however, was accompanying Bappu on his morning trips to Bombay’s Crawford Market. I went because he would buy me jalebi, a twist of fermented daal and flour that is deep-fried and then drenched in sugary syrup. But I wound up, without trying, picking up a most valuable skill for a chef, the art of selecting fresh produce.

We started at Crawford’s fruit and vegetable stalls, baskets stacked high in between narrow walkways. Fruiterers delicately built pomegranate towers, a bed of purple tissue fanning out below them in the shape of lotus flowers. Baskets were filled with coconuts and star fruit and waxy beans, and they rose vertically, several floors up, creating a sweet-smelling tomb. And the corridors, always neat and tidy, the floor swept, the expensive fruit hand polished to a waxy gloss.

A boy my age squatted on his haunches high up on the shelves, and when Bappu stopped to try a new breed of seedless grape, the boy scuttled over to a brass water jug, washed three or four grapes quickly, and handed them down to us for a taste. “No seeds, you know,” the stall boss yelled from his three-legged stool in the shade. “Brand-new ting. For you, Bappu, we make kilo cheap.”

Sometimes Bappu would buy, and sometimes he would not, always playing the vendors off one another. We took a shortcut to the meat market, through the pet stalls and the cages filled with panting rabbits and shrieking parrots. The smell of chickens and turkeys hit you like a village latrine, the throbbing, clucking cages and the glimpse of bald rumps where feathers had fallen out in patches. The poultry butcher sang out from behind a red valley of slashes on the chopping block, a basket of bloodied heads and wattles at his feet.

This was where Bappu taught me how to look at the skin of a chicken to make sure it was smooth, and how to bend the wings and beak for flexibility to judge the chicken’s age. And the clearest sign of a tasty chicken: plump knees.

Entering the meat market’s cool hall, I erupted in goose bumps, my eyes adjusting slowly to the gloomy light. The first vision to emerge from the fetid air was a butcher mincing stringy meat with a massive knife. We passed rhythmic hacking, the air sickly sweet with death, the gutter-river red.

Sheep with their throats freshly cut hung from a chain of hooks at Akbar’s halal meat shop, and Bappu threaded his way between these strange trees, slapping the meaty hides. He’d find one he liked and butcher Akbar and Bappu would haggle, roar, and spit until their fingertips touched. When Akbar lifted his hand an assistant dropped an ax into the animal we had purchased, and our sandals were suddenly awash in a crimson tide and the gray blue tubes of intestines shuddering to the floor.

I remember—as the butcher expertly cut and trimmed the mutton, wrapping the legs in wax paper—lifting my head to the blue black ravens that intensely stared down at us from the rafters directly overhead. They raucously cawed and ruffled wings, their white trails of shit splattering down the columns and onto the meat. And I hear them now, to this day, whenever I attempt something ludicrously “artistic” in my Paris kitchen, this raucous cry of Crawford ravens warning me to stay close to the earth.

My favorite stop at Crawford, however, was in the fish market. Bappu and I always made the fish market our last stop, hopping the fish-gut-clogged drains that had backed up into oily-gray seas, and laden down as we were with our purchases of the morning. Our goal was fishmonger Anwar and his stall in the back of the covered quarter.

Hindus hung yellow garlands and burned incense under pictures of Shirdi Sai Baba on the concrete columns that supported the fish market. Bins of fish came clattering in, a silvery blur of wide-eyed pomfrets and pearlspots and sea bream, and here and there stood sulfuric heaps of Bombay duck, the salted shiners that are a staple of Indian cooking. By nine in the morning the early shift of workers had finished their day, and they undressed modestly under a robe, washing in a rusted bucket and scrubbing their scale-flecked lungi with Rin soap. Black recesses of the market flickered with the glow of coal fires, delicately fanned alive for a simple meal of rice and lentils. And after the meal the rows of men, impervious to the noise, settled down one by one for a nap on burlap bags and cardboard flaps.

What glorious fish. We’d pass oily bonito, the silver bodies with the squashed, yellow-glazed heads. I loved the trays of squid, the skin purple and glistening like the tip of a penis, and the wicker baskets of sea urchins that were snipped open for the succulent orange eggs inside. And everywhere on the market’s concrete floor, fish heads and fins sticking out at odd angles from man-high ice heaps. And the roar of Crawford was deafening, a crash of rattling chains and ice grinders and cawing ravens in the roof and the singsong of an auctioneer’s voice. How could this world not enter me?

There, finally, in the back of Crawford, stood the world of Anwar. The fishmonger sat cross-legged, all in white, high up on an elevated metal desk amid a dozen chest-high heaps of ice and fish. Three phones stood beside him on the desk—one white, one red, and one black. I squinted the first time I saw him, for he was stroking something in his lap, and it took me a few moments to realize it was a cat. Then something else moved, and I suddenly realized his entire metal desktop was covered with a half dozen contented cats, lazily flipping their tails, licking paws, haughtily lifting their heads at our arrival.

But let me tell you. Anwar and his cats, they knew fish, and together they kept alert eyes on the crate-skidding work going on at their feet. Just a little wobble of Anwar’s head or a soft click of his tongue sent workers scuttling over to a pink order slip or to a Koli fisherman’s arriving catch. Anwar’s workers were from the Muhammad Ali Road, fiercely loyal, and all day they remained bent at his feet, sorting lobsters and crabs, carving the beefy tuna, violently scaling carp.

Anwar said his prayers five times a day on a prayer rug furled out behind a column, but otherwise he could always be found cross-legged atop his battered metal desk in the back of the market. His feet ended in long, curly yellow toenails, and he had a habit of massaging his bare feet all day long.

“Hassan,” he’d say, tugging at his big toe. “You still too small. Tell Big Abbas to feed you more fish. Got nice tuna here from Goa, man.”

“That no decent fish, man. That cat food.”

And from him would come the rasping cough and hiss that meant he was laughing at my cheek. On days when the phones were ringing—Bombay hotels and restaurants placing their orders—Anwar courteously offered Bappu and me milky tea, but otherwise filled out pink slips and watched stern-faced with concentration as his workers filled crates. On slow days, however, he’d take me aside to an arriving basket of fish and show me how to judge its quality.

“You want a clear eye, man, not like this,” he’d say, a blackened nail tapping a pomfret’s clouded eye. “See here. This one fresh. See the difference. Eyes bright and full open.”

He’d turn to another basket. “Look here. It’s an old trick. Top layer of fish very fresh. Nah? But look.” He dug to the bottom of the basket and hauled a mashed fish out by its gills. “Look. Feel dat. Meat soft. And the gills, look, not red like this fresh one, but faded. Turning gray. And when you turn back the fin, should be stiff, not like this.” Anwar flicked his hand and the young fisherman withdrew his basket. “And look at this. See here? See this tuna? Bad, man. Very bad.

“Bruised, like heavy battered, yaar? Some no-good wallah give him a big drop off the back of truck.

“Haar,” he’d say, wobbling his head, delighted I had learned my lessons.

One monsoon afternoon I found myself with Papa and Ammi around a table in the back of the restaurant. They pored over the wad of chits on spikes that stood between them, determining in these scratched orders which dishes had moved more in the last week and which not. Bappu sat opposite us in a stiff-backed chair, like in a court of law, nervously stroking his colonel’s mustache. This was a weekly ritual at the restaurant, a constant pushing of Bappu to improve the old recipes. It was like that. Do better. You can always do better.

The offending item stood between them, a copper bowl of chicken. I reached over and dipped my fingers into the bowl, sucking in a piece of the crimson meat. The masala trickled down my throat, an oily paste of fine red chili, but softened by pinches of cardamom and cinnamon.

“Only three order dish last week,” said Papa, glancing back and forth between Bappu and grandmother. He took a sip of his favorite beverage, tea spiked with a spoonful of garam masala. “We fix it now or I drop from menu.”

Ammi picked up the ladle and poured a slop of the sauce on her palm, thoughtfully licking the slick and smacking her lips. She shook her finger at Bappu, the gold bracelets jangling menacingly.

“What’s this? This not like I taught you.”

“Wah?” said Bappu. “Last time you tell me to change. Add more star seed. Add more vanilla pod. Do this, do dat. And now you say it not like you teach me? How can I cook here with you changing mind all the time? Make me mad, all this knockabout. Maybe I go work for Joshi—”

“Aiieee,” screamed my furious grandmother. “Threaten me? I make you what you are today and you tell me you go work for that man? I throw everyone of your family to the street—”

“Calm down, Ammi,” Papa yelled. “And Bappu. Stop. Don’t talk crazy. No one fault here. Just wan’ to prove the dish. Could be better. You agree?”

Bappu straightened his chef’s hat, as if repositioning his dignity, and took a sip of tea. “Yaar,” he said.

“Haar,” added grandmother.

They all stared at the offending dish and its failings.

“Make it drier,” I said.

“Wah? Wah? Now I take order from boy?”

“Let him speak.”

“Too oily, Papa. Bappu skims butter and oil off top. But much better he dry-fries. Make a little crunchy.”

“No like my skimming now. That right? Boy know better—”

“Be quiet, Bappu,” Papa yelled. “You always going on with your palaver. Why you always talk like that? You an old woman?”

Well, Bappu did follow my suggestion after Papa had finished his verbal battering, and it was the only hint of what would become of me, because the chicken dish established itself as one of our bestsellers, renamed, by my father, Hassan’s Dry Chicken.

“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.

The only thing I remember feeling afterward was a ravenous hunger. Normally, I am a moderate eater, but after Mummy’s murder I spent days gorging on mutton masala and dumplings of fresh milk and egg biryani.

I refused to part with her shawl. I was in a torpor for days, Mummy’s favorite silk shawl wrapped tightly around my shoulders, my head lowering again and again over lamb trotters soup. It was, of course, just a boy’s desperate attempt to hold on to his mother’s last presence, that fast-fading odor of rose water and fried bread wafting up from the diaphanous cloth around my head.

Mummy was buried, as is the Muslim tradition, within hours of her death. There was dust, a choking red-earth dust that got into the sinuses and made me wheeze, and I recall staring at the red poppies and ragweed next to the earth hole that swallowed her up. No feeling. Nothing. Papa beat his chest until his skin was red, his kurta soaked with sweat and tears, the air filling with his dramatic cries.

The night my mother was buried, my brother and I stared into the dark from our cots, listening to Papa as he paced back and forth behind the bedroom wall, bitterly cursing everyone and everything. The fans creaked; poisonous centipedes scurried across the cracked ceiling. We waited, on edge, then . . . wallop—the horrible clap that came each time he brought his bandaged hands violently together. And that night, through the door of his room, we heard Papa whisper, a kind of half moan, half chant, repeated over and over again, as he rocked back and forth on the edge of his bed: “Tahira, on your grave I promise, I will take our children from this cursed country that has killed you.”

And during the day the fiery emotions in the compound were intolerable, like a vat boiling and boiling and boiling but never running dry. My little sister Zainab and I hid behind the upstairs steel Storwel closet, curled into balls and pressed against each other for comfort. There was a horrible wail from downstairs and the two of us, desperate to get away from the sound, climbed into the closet and buried ourselves in the hundred scarves that were Mother’s simple vanity.

Mourners came, like vultures, to pick over us. Rooms filled with the deathly fug of sour body odor, cheap cigarettes, burning mosquito coils. The chatter was constant and high-pitched, and the mourners ate marzipan-filled dates while clucking over our misfortune.

Mummy’s snooty Delhi relatives stood in silken finery in the corner, their backs to the room as they nibbled on crackling papad and grilled eggplant. Papa’s Pakistani relatives loudly roved around the room, looking for trouble. A religious uncle wrapped his bony fingers around my arm and pulled me aside. “Allah’s punishment,” he hissed, his white head shaking with palsy. “Allah’s punishing your family for staying behind during Partition.”