'Come in then.'

We pa.s.sed through the living room. On the sofa a familiar man was sitting, the General's ADC. Seeing him my heart froze with terror, but I saluted anyway. He was wearing a French-cuff shirt and his shoes looked expensive and gleamed with confidence.

'Kip has come to inspect our kitchen,' she told him.

'I see,' he said, staring at me.

I followed her. There was n.o.body in the kitchen.

She stood next to the fridge and I next to the sink.

'We don't have much time,' she said. 'Now tell me '

'Yes, Memsahib.'

'What have you heard about me?'

'Nothing,' I said.

'Tell me.'

'Nothing.'

'Liar,' she said. 'Your father was different.'

'So far nothing, Memsahib.'

'In that case soon you will start hearing things.'

'Yes, Memsahib.'

'I am like your Aunty,' she said.

'Yes, Memsahib.'

'Understand?'

'I do.'

'What did you hear?'

'If I hear things about you I will shut my ears.'

'You will shut your ears?'

'Yes, yes, Memsahib.'

'Show me how.'

I put fingers in my ears. I felt like a child.

'Shut your eyes as well,' she said.

I did exactly as I was told. I closed my eyes.

I heard her steps approaching me. Yet I felt uncertain. Then I felt her sari touch my shirt, and for a brief second she stabbed me with her pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Then she stepped back and started slapping my face with the back of her hand. Left cheek. Right. Left again.

'Aunty!' I opened my eyes.

'Don't return,' she said. 'You are like a son to me.'

She rushed to the next room and said something inane to the ADC and they resumed the dance lessons.

I took the long way home to General Sahib's residence. Wet inside my pants, I felt like running. Instead, I slowed down. The chants and slogans of the Kashmiris demonstrating in the city kept insulting my ears, and I could not shut them out.

Two days later in the kitchen. I watched from behind the curtain, General Sahib was alone in the dining room with the colonel's wife. She was looking beautiful, her voice carried on waves of laughter. The colonel was supposed to be there, too, both had been invited, but Sahib dispatched him for an emergency law-and-order meeting with the Police Chief and the Governor.

The English they were speaking was fluent, with good idiom. Lunch was ready. Kebabs and rumali rotis. They were about to start when the red phone rang. Chef, he was standing close to the phone, answered.

'General k.u.mar's residence.'

Sahib: 'Who is it?'

Chef: 'Sir, the Prime Minister's secretary is on the line . . . the PM would like to talk to you . . . Matter is urgent, sir.'

Sahib: 'Is he on the line?'

Chef: 'Sir, the secretary will now tell the PM you are available. She has asked me, sir, to tell you not to move away from the phone, sir.'

For ten minutes there was absolute silence in the residence. It was hard for the colonel's wife to remain silent, but she too was silent.

Chef walked to the dining table on the tips of his toes to cover the dishes. That was the loudest sound during those ten minutes.

The secretary called again.

Chef: 'PM is on the line, sir.'

He stood glued to the dining table during the phone coversation. Later Chef shared with us in the kitchen the key details. The PM had basically told the General to locate and restore the holy relic to its proper place within forty-eight hours, no questions asked. The police failed to deliver so I am asking the army to take over, the PM had said.

Never before had the General looked so worried and anxious, Chef told us back in the kitchen. Sahib's face acquired the look of a man who had just been ordered (for the first time in his life) to slaughter a little goat. He scratched his head, plucked his hair while talking on the phone.

'Sir,' said the General to the PM. 'We will do our best, sir. Yes, sir . . . No, sir . . . It will be done, sir.' Right after the call ended he picked up the kebab on the table and for a long time kept moving the thing from left to right in his mouth without swallowing it.

'What now?' asked the colonel's wife.

Sahib kept working on the kebab.

No one to this day knows how and where the vial containing the relic was found. But after forty-eight hours calm was restored. The army faced one more hurdle. Before the relic could be installed in the mosque, it had to be validated.

The mosque named five holy imams to validate the holy relic. They were flown to Srinagar on DC-3 Dakota planes. Their job was to determine if the hair in the vial was authentic.

The General's ADC asked us in the kitchen to prepare a proper meal for the clerics. It is important to make them appreciate the high quality of our dishes. The ADC stared right through me during the conversation. Chef told me after: this is your real real test, kid. The recruitment test was a fake. At this critical moment in my career and your career and General Sahib's career, and at this critical juncture of Kashmir's relationship with India, what food would you prepare? test, kid. The recruitment test was a fake. At this critical moment in my career and your career and General Sahib's career, and at this critical juncture of Kashmir's relationship with India, what food would you prepare?

'Authentic Kashmiri,' I suggested.

'In that case,' he said, 'we will have to become Muslims.'

'Convert to Islam?'

'Of course. Yes.'

'Chef is not serious.'

'Chef is serious.'

'If cooking Muslim food in the kitchen is going to establish peace in the country then I am willing to convert for a day,' I said.

'Bewakuf,' he said. 'Idiot.'

Chef cooked Muslim Kashmiri delicacies with his own hands pa.s.sionately and with great care, like a wazwan wazwan. Who taught him? I asked. Later, he said, I will tell you later, you Sikh you Sikh. But he never did. For me it was a G.o.d-sent opportunity to learn the exotic cuisine, the names of Kashmiri Muslim dishes (thirty-six to be exact) unfamiliar to me, some right out of a fairy tale. I knew the Hindu Kashmiri dishes, but they were different. Certain Muslim dishes involved pounding the meat for seven or eight hours until it separated into fibres as thin as silk. We cooked in a tent pitched in the garden behind the mosque. I am still able to recall the copper vessels and slow fire. I remember setting up the long dining table under the plane tree. Tarami plates. White linens fluttering in the wind.

Food was served. Fenugreek gosht. Nadir kebab. Aloobukhara korma. Goat tails. Haakh saag. Tabak maaz. Dum aloo. Rista-63. Gushtaba. Saffron pilaf in the middle. Shirmal. Rumali roti, yellow and thin like a two-day-old newspaper. No part of the tablecloth was uncovered.

They were about to start.

But.

The chief cleric asked the General to beckon the 'cook'. The cleric said: I want to have a word with the 'cook'.

Chef put on his military (jungle) hat and asked me to accompany him. I adjusted my black turban and b.u.t.toned up my white jacket. We walked together to the tree and stood before the table, silently, waiting. The colonel of the regiment, sitting on the left of General Sahib, said, 'Kishen, Pir Sahib would like to ask you a question.' The imam was sitting on the right of the General.

Chef stood confidently, just a bit ahead of me, his hands clasped behind his back.

The imam opened his mouth. I only want to double-check if the meat used in Rogan Josh is halal? he inquired.

I sighed in relief. Chef rea.s.sured the imam and the other clerics that the meat used was pure halal, but he didn't stop there. He uttered a few things, a few extra things, which I think ruined him.

This is what he said, I hear those words even now: One hundred percent halal was used, sir, we procured the meat from a genuine Muslim shop in Lal Chowk. Many interesting dishes can be prepared with pork, sir whether it is halal or not. But we did not use pork. Only lamb was used, sir. Personally I am not for slaughtering pigs.

The situation around the table grew tense. The imam looked as if he was about to vomit.

General: Pork has not been used?

Chef: Lamb meat was used, sir.

General Sahib looked at the imams, then at the colonel of the regiment.

Colonel: No pork has been used, sir.

Chef: Only lamb was used, sir. Hundred percent halal, sir.

The imams did not touch the meat dishes. They ate very little, and hurried to the inspection tent in their dark cloaks. Some of us from the kitchen followed as well.

Our army had set up a huge shamiana tent on the uppermost terrace of the garden. The imams were seated on the carpet, and I saw the General and the police chief standing close by with burning anxiety on their faces. The vial pa.s.sed from one hand to other, and eventually it ended in the hands of the holiest man, the head imam, and he sat there gazing with wonder, and it took him twenty minutes to pa.s.s his verdict, and I did not see him nod, but I saw the tense expression on the police chief's face change into a smile, and I heard the General's sigh of relief.

The vial was returned to the mosque, put in the high-security room, and the protests stopped on the streets. I did not know then that those hours were the last few hours of my apprenticeship.

The next day Chef got a written order from the colonel's office. He had been demoted, and was being transferred (with immediate effect) to the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram mountains.

So I was now Chef.

Before he left I cooked Italian tortellini and poured him a tall gla.s.s of Kingfisher beer. During that dinner he played the slow movement of the German music on the tape recorder and told me many personal things, which to me at that moment sounded a bit comical. But with time the same things have become less and less comical. He talked about his family.

He began by telling me that the Kashmiri Hindus had no problems eating meat.

'Brahmins do not eat meat,' I protested.

'They do, Kirpal. In Kashmir the Hindus eat goat and mutton. In olden days they used to eat cows, peac.o.c.ks . . . Don't give me that look.'

He poured another gla.s.s of Kingfisher.

'In this country, Kip, we have too many taboos, and sometimes I get sick of them, really sick of them.'

'But, Chef, in college the teacher told us that because of these taboos we Indians, Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims, were able to rise up against the British in 1857. The colonial officers introduced the Enfield rifle. It was bad technology, the soldiers were told to bite the cartridges in order to load the rifles. The cartridges were greased with offensive pig fat or cow fat . . . We refused. Mutiny! Our first war of independence!'

'Yes, yes,' he said. 'But that was then.'

'But it is true, Chef,' I said.

'In 1857 you Sikhs sided with the British.'

'Chef, you are trying to lump all Sikhs into one,' I said. 'As if there is only one kind of curry powder? One kind of mango? One kind of Rogan Josh?'

'One kind of woman!'

'But, Chef, I am serious.'

'So am I,' he said. 'So am I. You see, Kirpal, the foods I don't eat, the things I find disgusting, have more to do with my memories and less with religion. Take chocolate. I run away from rooms in which I sense its presence.'

'Why so?'

'Because of my father,' he said.

'Father?' I said.

'In the hospital on his deathbed my old man had desired chocolate,' said Chef Kishen. 'I hurried to the shop in the bazaar. By the time I returned he was dead. Since that moment I find the smell of chocolate repulsive. Sometimes I hear my father saying to me, Son, eat a chocolate, for my sake eat it. But the moment I see or smell it the desire gets crushed.

'But the story I really want to tell involves my grandfather,' said Chef Kishen. 'Despite being a Brahmin my grandfather didn't believe in caste. He did not believe in taboos, Kip. Grandfather rarely entered the kitchen. He was not a cook, yet he knew his food well. He didn't care who cooked in the kitchen as long as the veg veg or or non-veg non-veg or whatever it was was good. Grandfather was married to an old woman who was a bad cook and she believed in caste. She made it very clear that she would die if a or whatever it was was good. Grandfather was married to an old woman who was a bad cook and she believed in caste. She made it very clear that she would die if a low caste low caste ever cooked for her. One day the old woman was unwell and a low-caste woman took over the kitchen, and the moment grandfather revealed the ident.i.ty of the cook, the old woman died. Her head fell on the bowl of curry on the table. The whole table became yellow with stains. The low-caste woman, the cook, became my grandmother. ever cooked for her. One day the old woman was unwell and a low-caste woman took over the kitchen, and the moment grandfather revealed the ident.i.ty of the cook, the old woman died. Her head fell on the bowl of curry on the table. The whole table became yellow with stains. The low-caste woman, the cook, became my grandmother.