The Hundred-Foot Journey Read Free Page B

Bollywood Nights opened, Papa added a Chinese restaurant to our compound, and a real disco with smoke machines that—much to my annoyance—only my oldest brother, Umar, was allowed to operate. We occupied our entire four acres, the Chinese and Bollywood Nights restaurants seating 568, vibrant businesses catering to Bombay’s upwardly mobile.
    The restaurants reverberated with laughter and the thump of the disco, the smell of chilies and roast fish in the air wet and fecund with spilled Kingfisher beer. Papa—known to everyone as Big Abbas—was born for this work, and he waddled around his studio lot all day like some Bollywood producer, yelling orders, slapping up the head slovenly busboys, greeting guests. His foot always on the gas. “Come on, come on,” was his constant cry. “Why so slow, like an old woman?”
    My mother, by contrast, was the much-needed brake, always ready to bring Papa down to earth with a smack of common sense, and I recall her sitting coolly in a cage just upstairs from Bollywood Nights’ main door, penciling in the accounts from her lofty perch.
    But above us all, the vultures that fed off the bodies in the Tower of Silence, the Parsi burial grounds up on Malabar Hill.
    The vultures I remember, too.
    Always circling and circling and circling.

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