The Hundred-Foot

Journey
Richard C. Morais
__________

A dva n c e R e a d i n g C o p y

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Copyright ©

Richard C. Morais asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of

this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
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Bombay
 Chapter One

I, Hassan Haji, was born, the second of six children,

above my grandfather’s restaurant on the Napean
Sea Road in what was then called West Bombay, two
decades before the great city was renamed Mumbai. I
suspect my destiny was written from the very start, for
my first experience of life was the smell of machli ka
salan, a spicy fish curry, rising through the floorboards
to the cot in my parents’ room above the restaurant.
To this day I can recall the sensation of those cot bars
pressed up coldly against my toddler’s face, my nose
poked out as far as possible and searching the air for
that aromatic packet of cardamom, fish heads and palm
oil, which, even at that young age, somehow suggested
there were unfathomable riches to be discovered and
savoured in the free world beyond.
But let me start at the beginning. In 1934, my
grandfather arrived in Bombay from Gujarat, a


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young man riding to the great city on the roof of a To understand the Bombay from where I come, you
steam engine. These days in India many up-and- must go to Victoria Terminus at rush hour. It is the
coming families have miraculously discovered noble very essence of Indian life. Coaches are split between
backgrounds – famous relatives who worked with men and women, and commuters literally hang from
Mahatma Gandhi in the early days in South Africa the windows and doors as the trains ratchet down
– but I have no such genteel heritage. We were poor the rails into the Victoria and Churchgate stations.
Muslims, subsistence farmers from dusty Bhavnagar, The trains are so crowded there isn’t even room for
and a severe blight among the cotton fields in the the commuters’ lunch boxes, which arrive in separate
1930s left my starving seventeen-year-old grandfather trains after rush hour. These tiffin boxes – over two
no choice but to migrate to Bombay, that bustling million battered tin cans with a lid – smelling of daal
metropolis where little people have long gone to make and gingery cabbage and black-pepper rice and sent on
their mark. by loyal wives – are sorted, stacked into trundle carts,
My life in the kitchen, in short, starts way back with and delivered with utmost precision to each insurance
my grandfather’s great hunger. And that three-day clerk and bank teller throughout Bombay.
ride atop the train, baking in the fierce sun, clinging That was what my grandfather did. He delivered
for dear life as the hot iron chugged across the plains lunch boxes.
of India, was the unpromising start of my family’s A dabba-wallah. Nothing more. Nothing less.
journey. Grandfather never liked to talk about those Grandfather was quite a dour fellow. We called him
early days in Bombay, but I know from Ammi, my Bapaji, and I remember him squatting on his haunches
grandmother, that he slept rough in the streets for in the street near sunset during Ramadan, his face
many years, earning his living delivering tiffin boxes white with hunger and rage as he puffed on a beedi. I
to the Indian clerks running the back rooms of the can still see the thin nose and iron-wire eyebrows, the
British Empire. soiled skullcap and kurta, his white scraggly beard.

 
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Dour he was, but a good provider, too. By the age around the world were passing through its gates. For
of twenty-three he was delivering nearly a thousand many soldiers it was their last moments of peace
tiffin boxes a day. Fourteen runners worked for him, before the torrid fighting of Burma and the Philippines,
their pumping legs wrapped in lungi – the poor Indian and the young men cavorted about Bombay’s coastal
man’s skirt – trundling the carts through the congested roads, cigarettes hanging from their lips, ogling the
streets of Bombay as they offloaded tinned lunches at prostitutes working Chowpatty Beach.
the Scottish Amicable and Eagle Star buildings. It was my grandmother’s idea to sell them snacks,
It was 1938, I believe, when he finally summoned and my grandfather eventually agreed, adding to the
Ammi. The two had been married since they were tiffin business a string of food stalls on bicycles, mobile
fourteen and she arrived with her cheap bangles on snack bars that rushed from the bathing soldiers at
the train from Gujarat, a tiny peasant with oiled black Juhu Beach to the Friday evening rush-hour crush
skin. The train station filled with steam, the urchins outside the Churchgate train station. They sold sweets
made toilet on the tracks, and the water boys cried made of nuts and honey, milky tea, but mostly they sold
out, a current of tired passengers and porters flowing bhelpuri, a newspaper cone of puffed rice, chutney,
down the platform. In the back, third-class with her potatoes, onions, tomatoes, mint and coriander, all
bundles, my Ammi. mixed together and slathered with spices.
Grandfather barked something at her and they were Delicious, I tell you, and not surprisingly the snack
off, the loyal village wife trailing several respectful bicycles became a commercial success. And so,
steps behind her Bombay man. encouraged by their good fortune, my grandparents
It was on the eve of World War II that my grandparents cleared an abandoned lot on the far side of the
set up a clapboard house in the slums off the Napean Napean Sea Road. It was there that they erected a
Sea Road. Bombay was the back room of the Allies’ primitive roadside restaurant. They built a kitchen of
Asian war effort, and soon a million soldiers from three tandoori ovens – and a bank of charcoal fires on

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which rested iron kadais of mutton masala – all under first plunged into the crust and revealed the pie’s
a US Army tent. In the shade of the banyan tree, they lumpy viscera. Each soldier tried to outdo the other,
also set up some rough tables and slung hammocks. and soon the tent filled with oohing and “cors” and
Grandmother employed Bappu, a cook from a village excited palaver. And the Americans, not wishing to be
in Kerala, and to her northern repertoire she now added outdone by the British, joined in, earnestly searching
dishes like onion theal and spicy grilled prawns. for the words that could describe a grilled steak coming
Soldiers and sailors and airmen washed their hands from cattle fed on Florida swamp grass.
with English soap in an oil drum, dried themselves And so, armed with this intelligence she picked up
on the proffered towel, and then clambered up on the in her walkabouts, Ammi retreated to the kitchen,
hammocks strung under the shady tree. By then some recreating in her tandoori oven interpretations of
relatives from Gujarat had joined my grandparents, and what she had heard. There was, for example, a kind of
these young men were our waiters. They slapped wooden Indian bread-and-butter pudding, dusted with fresh
boards, makeshift tables, across the hammocks and nutmeg, that became a hit with the British soldiers;
quickly covered them with bowls of skewered chicken the Americans, she found, were partial to peanut
and basmati and sweets made from butter and honey. sauce and mango chutney folded in between a piece
During slow moments Grandmother wandered out of naan. And so it wasn’t long before news of our
in the long shirt and trousers we call a salwar kameez, kitchen spread from Gurkha to British soldier, from
threading her way between the sagging hammocks and barracks to warship, and all day long jeeps stopped
chatting with the homesick soldiers missing the dishes outside our Napean Sea Road tent.
of their own countries. “What you like to eat?” she’d Ammi was quite remarkable and I cannot give her
ask. “What you eat at home?” enough credit for what became of me. There is no
And the British soldiers told her about steak-and- dish finer than her pearl spot, a fish she dusted in a
kidney pies, of the steam that arose when the knife sweet-chilli masala, wrapped in a banana leaf and

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tawa-grilled with a spot of coconut oil. It is for me, tins, and every Sunday he travelled to a secret spot in
well, the very height of Indian culture and civilization, the country where he buried his precious lucre in the
both robust and refined, and everything that I have ground.
ever cooked since is held up against this benchmark, My grandparents’ break came in the fall of 1942
my grandmother’s favourite dish. And she had that when the British administration, needing cash for the
amazing capacity of the professional chef to perform war effort, auctioned off tracts of Bombay real estate.
several tasks at once. I grew up watching her tiny figure Most of the property was in Salsette, the largest island
darting barefoot across the earthen kitchen floor, on which Bombay was built, but awkward strips of
quickly dipping aubergine slices in chickpea flour and land and vacant lots on Colaba were also disposed of.
frying them in the kadai, cuffing a cook, passing me an Among the land to be sold: the abandoned Napean Sea
almond wafer, screeching her disapproval at my aunt. Road property on which my family was squatting.
The point of all this, however, is Ammi’s roadside Bapaji was essentially a peasant and like all peasants
tent quickly established itself as a cash cow and he respected land more than paper money. So one day
suddenly my grandparents were doing extremely well, he dug up all his hidden tins and went, with a literate
the small fortune they amassed, the hard-currency neighbour at his side, to the Standard Chartered
residue of a million soldiers and sailors and airmen Bank. With the bank’s help, Bapaji bought the four-
moving in and out of Bombay. acre plot on the Napean Sea Road, paying at auction
And with this came the problems of success. Bapaji 1,016 British pounds, 10 shillings and 8 pence for land
was notoriously tight-fisted. He was always yelling at at the foot of Malabar Hill.
us for the smallest thing, such as dabbing too much Then, and only then, my grandparents were blessed
oil on the tawa grill. Really a bit mad for money. with children. Midwives delivered my father, Abbas
So, suspicious of the neighbours and our Gujarati Haji, the night of the famous wartime ammunition
relatives, Bapaji began hiding his savings in coffee explosion at the Bombay Docks. The evening sky

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exploded with balls of fire, great eruptions shattering The point is Papa grew up in an India very different
windows far across the city, and it was at that precise from the one his father knew. Grandfather was
moment my grandmother let out a blood-curdling illiterate; Papa attended a local school, not very good,
scream and Papa popped out, yelling louder even than admittedly, but he still made it to the Institute of
the explosions and his mother. We all laughed at this Catering Technology, a polytechnic in Ahmedabad.
story, the way Ammi told it, for anyone who knew my Education makes the old tribal ways quite impossible,
father would agree it was a most appropriate backdrop of course, and it was in Ahmedabad that Papa met
to his arrival. Auntie, born two years later, arrived under Tahira, a light-skinned accounting student who would
much calmer circumstances. become my mother. Papa says he first fell in love with
Independence and Partition came and went. What her smell. His head was down in a library book when
precisely happened to the family during that infamous he caught the most intoxicating whiff of chapatis and
time remains a mystery; none of the questions we rose water.
asked Papa were ever given a straight answer. “Oh, you That, he said, that was my mother.
know, it was bad,” he would say, when pressed. “But
we managed. Now stop with the police interrogation. One of my earliest memories is of Papa tightly
Go get me my newspaper.” squeezing my hand as we stood on the Mahatma
We do know that my father’s family, like many others, Gandhi Road, staring in the direction of the fashionable
was split in two. Most of our relatives fled to Pakistan, Hyderabad Restaurant. Bombay’s immensely wealthy
but Bapaji stayed in Mumbai and hid his family in a Banaji family and their friends were unloading at kerb
Hindi business associate’s warehouse basement. Ammi edge from a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The women
once told me they slept by day, because at night they squealed and kissed and remarked on one another’s
were kept awake by the screams and throat-slitting weight; behind them a Sikh doorman snapped open
taking place just outside the basement’s door. the glass door of the restaurant.

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Hyderabad and its proprietor, a sort of Indian Right then Uday Joshi emerged from the glass doors
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, called Uday Joshi, were and stood among the elegant peach saris and silk Nehru
frequently in the society pages of the Times of India, suits as if he were their equal. Four or five newspaper
and each mention of Joshi made my father curse and photographers instantly called at him to turn this way
rustle the paper. While our own restaurant was not and that. Joshi was famously smitten with all things
in the same league as Hyderabad – we served good European, and he stood perkily before the clicking
food at fair prices – Papa thought Uday Joshi was cameras in a shiny black Pierre Cardin lounge suit, his
his great rival. And here now was this high-society capped white teeth flashing in the light.
crowd descending on the famous restaurant for a The famous restaurateur commanded my attention,
mehndi, a prenuptial tradition in which the bride even at that tender age, like a Bollywood screen legend.
and her women friends sit plumped on cushions and Joshi’s throat, I remember, was lusciously wrapped
have their hands, palms, and feet intricately painted in a yellow silk ascot, and his hair was airily combed
with henna. It meant fine food, lively music, spicy back in a silver pompadour, mightily secured with
gossip. And it most certainly meant more press for cans of hair spray. I don’t think I had ever seen anyone
Joshi. so elegant.
“Look,” Papa said suddenly. “Gopan Kalam.” “Look at him,” Papa hissed. “Look at that little
Papa bit the corner of his moustache as he wetly rooster.”
clapped my hand in his paw. I will never forget his Papa could not stand watching Joshi a moment
face. It was as if the clouds had suddenly parted and longer, and he turned abruptly, yanking me towards
Allah himself stood before us. “He a billionaire,” the Suryodaya Supermarket and its special on ten-
Papa whispered. “Make his money in petrochemicals gallon vats of vegetable oil. I was just eight and had
and telecommunications. Look, look at that woman’s to run to keep up with his long strides and flapping
emeralds. Aiiee. Size of plums.” kurta.

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“Listen to me, Hassan,” he roared over the traffic. I loved him but even I must agree it was a frightful
“One day the Haji name will be known far and wide, sight. After dinner Papa hobbled over to the couch,
and no one will remember that rooster. Just you wait collapsed, and for the next half-hour fanned himself
and see. Ask the people then, ask them who Uday Joshi and let everyone else in on his general satisfaction
is. ‘Who he?’ they say. ‘But Haji? Haji,’ they say, ‘Haji with loud belches and thunderous farts. My mother,
are very distinguished, very important family.’” coming from her respectable civil servant family in
Delhi, closed her eyes with disgust at this after-dinner
In short, Papa was a man of large appetites. He was ritual. And she was always on him while he was eating.
fat but tall for an Indian, just six feet. Chubby-faced, “Abbas,” she’d say. “Slow down. You’ll choke. Good
with curly iron hair and a thick waxed moustache. heavens. Like eating with a donkey.”
And he was always dressed the old way, a kurta, over But you had to admire Papa, the charisma and
trousers. determination behind his immense drive. By the
But he was not what you would call refined. Papa time I came along in 1975, he was firmly in control
ate, like all Muslim men, with his hands – his right of the family restaurant, my grandfather ailing from
hand, that is, the left resting on his lap. But instead emphysema and largely confined, on his good days,
of the decorous lifting of food to his lips, Papa stuck to overseeing the tiffin-delivery business from a stiff-
his head down in the plate and shovelled fatty mutton backed chair in the courtyard.
and rice into his face as if he’d never get another meal. Ammi’s tent was retired for a grey concrete-and-brick
And he sweated buckets while he ate, wet spots the size compound. My family lived on the second floor of the
of dinner plates appearing under his arms. When he main house, above our restaurant. My grandparents
finally lifted his face from the food, he had the glassy- and childless aunt and uncle lived in the house one
eyed look of a drunk, his chin and cheeks slicked with over, and down from them our family enclave was
orange grease. sealed off with a cube of wooden two-storey shacks

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where our Kerala cook, Bappu, and the other servants a crate for a hot-faced sniff of her spicy fish soup,
slept on the floor. and we’d chat a bit about my day at school before she
It was the courtyard that was the heart and soul of the passed over to me the stirring of the cauldron. And I
old family business. Tiffin carts and bicycle snack bars remember her gracefully gathering up the hem of her
were stacked against the far wall, and under the shade sari, retreating to the wall where she kept an eye on me
of the saggy tarp were cauldrons of carp-head soup, as she smoked her iron pipe, a habit she kept from her
stacks of banana leaves, and freshly made samosas on village days in Gujarat.
wax paper. The great iron vats of flecked rice, perfumed I remember this as if it were yesterday: stirring and
with bay leaf and cardamom, stood against the stirring to the city’s beat, passing for the very first time
courtyard’s opposite wall, and around these delicacies into the magic trance that has ever since taken me when
was a constant thrum of flies. A male servant usually I cook. The balmy wind warbled across the courtyard,
sat on a canvas sack at the kitchen’s back door, carefully bringing the faraway yap of Bombay dogs and traffic
picking out the black specks of dirt among the basmati and the smell of raw sewage into the family compound.
kernels; and an oily-headed female, bent at the waist Ammi squatted in the shady corner, her tiny wrinkled
with her sari gathered between her legs, was brushing face disappearing behind contented claps of smoke;
with a short broom the courtyard dirt, back and forth, and, floating down from above, the girlish voices of my
back and forth. And I recall our yard as always full of mother and aunt as they folded chickpea and chilli into
life, filled with constant comings and goings that made skirts of pastry on the first-floor veranda overhead. But
the roosters and chickens jerk about, nervously clucking most of all I recall the sound of my iron hoe grating
in the shadows of my childhood. rhythmically across the vessel’s floor, bringing jewels up
It was here, in the heat of the afternoon after school, from the soup-deep: the bony fish heads and the white
that I would find Ammi working under the porch eaves eyes rising to the surface on ruby-red eddies.
overhanging the interior courtyard. I’d scramble atop

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I still dream of the place. If you stepped out of the the hand up the hill so we could “pay our respects” to
immediate safety of our family compound you stood the powerful politicians. We gingerly made our way to
at the edge of the notorious Napean Sea Road shanty the back doors of vanilla-coloured villas, the white-
town. It was a sea of roof scraps atop rickety clapboard gloved butler wordlessly pointing at a terracotta pot
shacks, all criss-crossed by putrid streams. From the just inside the door. Papa dropped his brown-paper
shanty town rose the pungent smells of charcoal fires bag among the heap of other paper bags, the door
and rotting garbage, and the hazy air itself was thick unceremoniously slammed shut in our face, and we
with the roar of roosters and bleating goats and the were off with our rupee-stuffed paper bags to the
slap-thud of washing beaten on cement slabs. Here, next Bombay Regional Congress Committee official.
children and adults shat in the streets. But there were rules. Never to the front of the house.
But on the other side of us, a different India. As I Always at the back.
grew up, so too did my country. Malabar Hill, towering And then, business done, humming a ghazal
above us, quickly filled with cranes as between the under his breath, Papa bought us, on the trip I am
old gated villas white high-rises called Miramar and remembering, a mango juice and some grilled corn and
Palm Beach arose. I know not where they came from, we sat on a bench in the Hanging Gardens, the public
but the affluent seemed to suddenly spring like gods park up on Malabar Hill. From our spot under palm
from the very ground. Everywhere, the talk was of trees and bougainvilleas we could see the comings
nothing but mint-fresh software engineers and scrap- and goings at Broadway, a spanking-new apartment
metal dealers and pashmina exporters and umbrella building across the torrid green: the businessmen
manufacturers and I know not what else. Millionaires, climbing into their Mercedes; the children emerging
by the hundreds first, then by the thousands. in school uniforms; the wives off for tennis and tea.
Once a month Papa paid Malabar Hill a visit. He A steady stream of wealthy Jains – silky robes, hairy
would put on a fresh-washed kurta and take me by chests, gold-rimmed glasses – headed past us to the

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Jain Mandir, a temple where they washed their idols The doorman held open the door as the caterer, in
in sandalwood paste. white jacket, bolted from the back of the van with
Papa sank his teeth into the corn and violently mowed tin trays and lids and foil. And I remember the deep
his way down the cob, bits of kernel sticking to his rumble of Papa’s voice.
moustache and cheeks and hair. “Lots of money,” he “What Joshi up to now?”
said, smacking his lips and gesturing across the street
with the savaged cob. “Rich people.” Father had long ago done away with the old US Army
A girl and her nanny, on their way to a birthday party, tent, replacing it with a brick house and plastic tables.
emerged from the apartment building and flagged It was a cavernous hall, simple, boisterous with noise.
down a taxi. When I was twelve, however, Papa decided to move
“That girl is in my school. See her in the play­ground.” upmarket, closer to Joshi’s Hyderabad Restaurant,
Papa flung his finished corncob into the bushes and and he turned our old restaurant compound into the
wiped his face with a handkerchief. 365-seat Bollywood Nights.
“Is that so?” he said. “She nice?” In went a stone fountain. Over the centre of the
“No. She think she spicy hot.” dining room, Papa hung a disco glitter-ball made of
At that moment, I recall, a van pulled up to mirrors, which revolved over a tiny dance floor. He
the apartment building’s doors. It was the fabled had the walls painted gold before covering them, just
restaurateur Uday Joshi, delivering his latest business, like he had seen in pictures of a Hollywood restaurant,
home catering, for those distressing times when with the signed photographs of Bollywood stars.
servants had the day off. An enormous picture of a Then he bribed starlets and their husbands to drop
winking Joshi stared at us from the side of the van, a by the restaurant a couple of times a month, and,
bubble erupting from his mouth. no mess. no fuss. we miraculously, the glossy magazine Hello Bombay!
do it for you, it said. always had a photographer there precisely at the right

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moment. And on weekends Papa hired singers who cage just upstairs from Bollywood Nights’ main door,
were the spitting image of the hugely popular Alka pencilling in the accounts from her lofty perch.
Yagnik and Udit Narayan. But above us all, the vultures that fed off the bodies
So successful was the whole venture that, a few in the Tower of Silence, the Parsi burial grounds up on
years after Bollywood Nights opened, Papa added a Malabar Hill.
Chinese restaurant to our compound, and a real disco The vultures I remember, too.
with smoke machines that – much to my annoyance – Always circling and circling and circling.
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 chillies and roast fish
in the air wet and fecund with spilt 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

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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, chilli and ginger purées.
Bappu, seeing me at the door, signalled 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

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to Bappu stood a fifty-gallon steel vat of cottage leaves and stems instantly reduced to a fine green
cheese and fenugreek, simmering, two boys evenly mist. Such incomparable grace.
stirring the milky soup with wooden trowels, and to One of my favourite vacation pastimes, however,
the far right huddled our cooks from Uttar Pradesh. was accompanying Bappu on his morning trips
Only these northerners – my grandmother decided to Bombay’s Crawford Market. I went because he
– had the right feel for tandoori, the deep coal pots would buy me jalebi, a twist of fermented daal and
from which emerged toasted skewers of marinated flour that is deep-fried and then drenched in sugary
aubergine and chicken and green peppers with prawns. syrup. But I wound up, without trying, picking up
And upstairs, the apprentices only slightly older than a most valuable skill for a chef, the art of selecting
myself working under a yellow garland of flowers and fresh produce.
smoking incense. We started at Crawford’s fruit and vegetable stalls,
It was their job to strip leftover tandoori chicken from baskets stacked high in between narrow walkways.
the bones, snap beans over a barrel, shave ginger until Fruiterers delicately built pomegranate towers, a bed
it liquified. These teenagers, when off-duty, smoked of purple tissue fanning out below them in the shape
cigarettes in the alleys and hooted after girls, and they of lotus flowers. Baskets were filled with coconuts and
were my idols. I spent a good deal of my childhood star fruit and waxy beans, and they rose vertically,
sitting with them, on a footstool in the upstairs cold several floors up, creating a sweet-smelling tomb. And
kitchen, chatting away as an apprentice neatly split the corridors, always neat and tidy, the floor swept, the
okra with a knife, using his finger to smear a lurid red expensive fruit hand polished to a waxy gloss.
chilli paste on the vegetable’s white inner thighs. There A boy my age squatted on his haunches high up on
are few things more elegant in this world than a coal the shelves, and when Bappu stopped to try a new
black teenager from Kerala dicing coriander: a flurry breed of seedless grape, the boy scuttled over to a
of knife, a chopping roll, and the riot of awkward brass water jug, washed three or four grapes quickly,

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and handed them down to us for a taste. “No seeds, a butcher mincing stringy meat with a massive knife.
you know,” the stall boss yelled from his three-legged We passed rhythmic hacking, the air sickly sweet with
stool in the shade. “Brand-new ting. For you, Bappu, death, the gutter-river red.
we make kilo cheap.” Sheep with their throats freshly cut hung from a
Sometimes Bappu would buy, and sometimes he chain of hooks at Akbar’s halal meat shop, and Bappu
would not, always playing the vendors against one threaded his way between these strange trees, slapping
another. We took a short cut to the meat market, the meaty hides. He’d find one he liked and butcher
through the pet stalls and the cages filled with panting Akbar and Bappu would haggle, roar, and spit until
rabbits and shrieking parrots. The smell of chickens their fingertips touched. When Akbar lifted his hand
and turkeys hit you like a village latrine, the throbbing, an assistant dropped an axe into the animal we had
clucking cages and the glimpse of bald rumps where purchased, and our sandals were suddenly awash in
feathers had fallen out in patches. The poultry butcher a crimson tide and the grey-blue tubes of intestines
sang out from behind a red valley of slashes on the shuddering to the floor.
chopping block, a basket of bloodied heads and I remember – as the butcher expertly cut and trimmed
wattles at his feet. the mutton, wrapping the legs in wax paper – lifting
This was where Bappu taught me how to look at the my head to the blue-black ravens that intensely stared
skin of a chicken to make sure it was smooth, and how down at us from the rafters directly overhead. They
to bend the wings and beak for flexibility to judge the raucously cawed and ruffled wings, their white trails
chicken’s age. And the clearest sign of a tasty chicken: of shit splattering down the columns and onto the
plump knees. meat. And I hear them now, to this day, whenever I
Entering the meat market’s cool hall, I erupted in attempt something ludicrously “artistic” in my Paris
goose­bumps, my eyes adjusting slowly to the gloomy kitchen, this raucous cry of Crawford ravens warning
light. The first vision to emerge from the fetid air was me to stay close to the earth.

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 My favourite stop at Crawford, however, was in the What glorious fish. We’d pass oily bonito, the silver
fish market. Bappu and I always made the fish market bodies with the squashed, yellow-glazed heads. I loved
our last stop, hopping the fish-gut-clogged drains that the trays of squid, the skin purple and glistening like
had backed up into oily-grey seas, and laden down as the tip of a penis, and the wicker baskets of sea urchins
we were with our purchases of the morning. Our goal that were snipped open for the succulent orange eggs
was fishmonger Anwar and his stall in the back of the inside. And everywhere on the market’s concrete floor,
covered quarter. fish heads and fins sticking out at odd angles from man-
Hindus hung yellow garlands and burned incense high ice heaps. And the roar of Crawford was deafening,
under pictures of Shirdi Sai Baba on the concrete a crash of rattling chains and ice grinders and cawing
columns that supported the fish market. Bins of ravens in the roof and the singsong of an auctioneer’s
fish came clattering in, a silvery blur of wide-eyed voice. How could this world not enter me?
pomfrets and pearl spots and sea bream, and here There, finally, in the back of Crawford, stood the
and there stood sulphuric heaps of Bombay duck, world of Anwar. The fishmonger sat cross-legged, all
the salted shiners that are a staple of Indian cooking. in white, high up on an elevated metal desk amid a
By nine in the morning the early shift of workers had dozen chest-high heaps of ice and fish. Three phones
finished their day, and they undressed modestly under stood beside him on the desk – one white, one red,
a robe, washing in a rusted bucket and scrubbing their and one black. I squinted the first time I saw him, for
scale-flecked lungi with Rin soap. Black recesses of the he was stroking something in his lap, and it took me a
market flickered with the glow of coal fires, delicately few moments to realize it was a cat. Then something
fanned alive for a simple meal of rice and lentils. And else moved, and I suddenly realized his entire metal
after the meal the rows of men, impervious to the desktop was covered with half a dozen contented cats,
noise, settled down one by one for a nap on burlap lazily flipping their tails, licking paws, haughtily lifting
bags and cardboard flaps. their heads at our arrival.
 But let me tell you, Anwar and his cats, they knew offered Bappu and me milky tea, but otherwise
fish, and together they kept alert eyes on the crate- filled out pink slips and watched stern-faced with
skidding work going on at their feet. Just a little concentration as his workers filled crates. On slow
wobble of Anwar’s head or a soft click of his tongue days, however, he’d take me aside to an arriving basket
sent workers scuttling over to a pink order slip or to a of fish and show me how to judge its quality.
Koli fisherman’s arriving catch. Anwar’s workers were “You want a clear eye, man, not like this,” he’d say,
from the Muhammad Ali Road, fiercely loyal, and all a blackened nail tapping a pomfret’s clouded eye. “See
day they remained bent at his feet, sorting lobsters and here. This one fresh. See the difference. Eyes bright
crabs, carving the beefy tuna, violently scaling carp. and full open.”
Anwar said his prayers five times a day on a prayer He’d turn to another basket. “Look here. It’s an old
rug furled out behind a column, but otherwise he trick. Top layer of fish very fresh. Nah? But look.” He
could always be found cross-legged atop his battered dug to the bottom of the basket and hauled a mashed
metal desk in the back of the market. His feet ended fish out by its gills. “Look. Feel dat. Meat soft. And
in long, curly yellow toenails, and he had a habit of the gills, look, not red like this fresh one, but faded.
massaging his bare feet all day long. Turning grey. And when you turn back the fin, should
“Hassan,” he’d say, tugging at his big toe. “You still be stiff, not like this.” Anwar flicked his hand and the
too small. Tell Big Abbas to feed you more fish. Got young fisherman would withdraw his basket. “And look
nice tuna here from Goa, man.” at this. See here? See this tuna? Bad, man. Very bad.”
“That no decent fish, man. That cat food.” “Bruised, like heavy battered, yaar? Some no-good
And from him would come the rasping cough and wallah give him a big drop off the back of truck.”
hiss that meant he was laughing at my cheek. On days “Haar,” he’d say, wobbling his head, delighted I had
when the phones were ringing – Bombay hotels and learnt my lessons.
restaurants placing their orders – Anwar courteously

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One monsoon afternoon I found myself with Papa and smacking her lips. She shook her finger at Bappu, the
Ammi around a table in the back of the restaurant. gold bracelets jangling menacingly.
They pored over the wad of chits on spikes that stood “What’s this? This not like I taught you.”
between them, determining in these scratched orders “Wah?” said Bappu. “Last time you tell me to change.
which dishes had moved more in the last week and Add more star seed. Add more vanilla pod. Do this, do
which not. Bappu sat opposite us in a stiff-backed chair, dat. And now you say it not like you teach me? How
like in a court of law, nervously stroking his colonel’s can I cook here with you changing mind all the time?
moustache. This was a weekly ritual at the restaurant, Make me mad, all this knockabout. Maybe I go work
a constant pushing of Bappu to improve the old recipes. for Joshi—”
It was like that. Do better. You can always do better. “Aiieee,” screamed my furious grandmother. “Threat­
The offending item stood between them, a copper en me? I make you what you are today and you tell me
bowl of chicken. I reached over and dipped my fingers you go work for that man? I throw everyone of your
into the bowl, sucking in a piece of the crimson meat. family to the street—”
The masala trickled down my throat, an oily paste of “Calm down, Ammi,” Papa yelled. “And Bappu.
fine red chilli, but softened by pinches of cardamom Stop. Don’t talk crazy. No one fault here. Just wan’ to
and cinnamon. ’prove the dish. Could be better. You agree?”
“Only three order dish last week,” said Papa, glancing Bappu straightened his chef’s hat, as if repositioning
back and forth between Bappu and grandmother. He his dignity, and took a sip of tea. “Yaar,” he said.
took a sip of his favourite beverage, tea spiked with a “Haar,” added Grandmother.
spoonful of garam masala. “We fix it now or I drop They all stared at the offending dish and its failings.
from menu.” “Make it drier,” I said.
Ammi picked up the ladle and poured a slop of the “Wah? Wah? Now I take order from boy?”
sauce on her palm, thoughtfully licking the slick and “Let him speak.”

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“Too oily, Papa. Bappu skims butter and oil off top. got the better of him. She was, in her quiet way, the
But much better he dry-fries. Make a little crunchy.” family’s real ballast, more so than my father, despite
“No like my skimming now. That right? Boy know all his noise. She made sure we children were always
better—” properly dressed and that we did our homework.
“Be quiet, Bappu,” Papa yelled. “You always going But that did not mean Mummy did not have her own
on with your palaver. Why you always talk like that? secret hungers.
You an old woman?” For scarves. My Mummy did like her dupatta.
Well, Bappu did follow my suggestion after Papa had For some reason – I am not exactly sure why
finished his verbal battering, and it was the only hint – Mummy occasionally took me on her clandestine
of what would become of me, because the chicken dish forages into town, as if I alone might understand her
established itself as one of our bestsellers, renamed, by mad shopping moments. They were rather harmless
my father, Hassan’s Dry Chicken. excursions, really. A scarf or two here and there, maybe
a pair of shoes, only rarely an expensive sari. And
“Come, Hassan.” for me, a colouring book, or a comic, our shopping
Mummy took my hand and we slipped out the back adventure always ending in a bang-up meal.
door, heading to the Number 37 bus. It was our secret bond, an adventure reserved
“Where are we going?” exclusively for the two of us, a way, I think, she made
We both knew, of course, but we pretended. It was sure I did not get lost in the shuffle of the restaurant,
always like this. Papa’s demands, the rest of her clamouring children.
“Oh, I don’t know. To the shops, maybe. A little (And maybe I wasn’t quite so special as I’d like to
break from the routine.” think. Mehtab later told me that Mummy used to
My mother was shy, quietly clever with numbers, but secretly take her to the cinema, and Umar to the go-
always there to rein in my father when his exuberances cart track.)

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And, on occasion, it wasn’t about a boost from her hands clasped together under her chin, just staring
shopping at all, but about some other hunger, in wonder at the Parsi shopkeeper up on the ladder,
something far deeper, because she’d hover before the as he handed down the most vibrant bundles of silk
shops, smack her lips in meditation, and then head to the assistant at his feet. Her eyes were teary, as if
us off in an entirely different direction, to the Prince the sheer beauty of the material were just too much to
of Wales Museum, perhaps, to pore over the Mughal take in, like looking directly into the sun. And for me
miniatures, or to the Nehru Planetarium, which from that day, we purchased a spanking-smart blue cotton
the outside always looked to me like a giant filter from jacket, with, for some reason, the gold seal of the
an industrial turbine stuck sideways into the ground. Hong Kong Yacht Club stitched to its breast.
On this particular day, Mummy had just worked The shelves at the nearby attar shop were filled with
very hard for two weeks closing the restaurant’s year- amber- and blue-coloured glass bottles, long-necked
end books, for the tax man, and so, task successfully as swans and as elegantly shaped. A woman in a
completed, another profitable year put to rest, she white lab coat dotted our wrists with oils saturated in
rewarded us with a little foraging trip on the Number sandalwood, coffee, ylang-ylang, honey, jasmine and
37 bus. But this time we changed buses, journeyed rose petals, until we were quite intoxicated, sickened
further into the roar of the city, and we wound up in really, and had to get some fresh air. And then it was
a stretch of Mumbai where the boulevards were wide off to look at the shoes, in a pish-posh palace, where
as the Ganges, and the streets lined with big glass we sat on gold couches, the gilt armrests and clawed
shopfronts, doormen, and teak shelves polished to a feet shaped as lions, and where a diamanté-encrusted
shiny gloss. omega framed the shop’s window, in which glass
The name of the sari shop was Hite of Fashion. shelves displayed, as if they were the rarest of jewels,
My mother looked at the bolts of cloth stacked to the spiky heels, crocodile pumps, and sandals dyed hot
ceiling in a tower of electric blues and moleskin greys, purple. And I remember the shoe salesman kneeling

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at Mummy’s feet, as if she were the Queen of Sheba, in those days. Neither Mummy nor I had ever been in
and my mother girlishly turning her ankle so I could a French restaurant, so to us the dining room looked
see the gold sandal in silhouette, saying, “Nah? What terribly smart, and we soberly took a booth in the
d’you think, Hassan?” back, whispering to each other under the low-hanging
But I remember most of all that when we were on our copper lamp as if we were in a library. A lace curtain,
way back to the Number 37 bus, we passed an office grey with dust, blocked what little light penetrated the
high-rise where the ground-floor shops were taken up building’s brown-tinted windows, so the restaurant’s
by a tailor and an office-supply store and a strange- overall ambience was that of a den with a slightly
looking restaurant called La Fourchette, which was seedy notoriety. We were thrilled.
wrapped under a lip of cement, from which protruded An elderly woman, painfully thin, wearing a caftan
a tired French flag. and an armful of bangles, shuffled over to our table,
“Come, Hassan,” said Mummy. “Come. Let us give instantly recognizable as one of those ageing European
it a try.” hippies who had visited an ashram and never returned
We ran giggling up the steps with our bags, pushed home. But Indian parasites and time had worked her
through the heavy door, but instantly fell silent. The over and she looked to me like a desiccated bug. The
interior of the restaurant was mosque-like, dark and woman’s sunken eyes were heavily lined with kohl, I
gloomy, with a distinctly sour smell of wine-soaked remember, but in the heat the make-up had run into
beef and foreign cigarettes, the low-hanging and dim- the creases of her face; red lipstick had been applied
watted orbs hanging over each table providing the earlier in the day with a very shaky hand. So the
only available light. A couple in shadow occupied a overall effect, in the bad light, was rather frightening,
booth, and a few tip-top office workers in white shirts, like being served lunch by a cadaver.
their sleeves rolled up, were having a business lunch But the woman’s gravelly-voiced Hindi was lively,
and sipping red wine – still an exotic rarity in India and she handed us some menus before shuffling off

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to make us mango lassi. The strangeness of the place of our carefree outing. And I can still see the twinkle
overwhelmed me. I didn’t know where to begin with in her eye as she leant forwards and whispered, “Let’s
this stiff menu – such exotic-sounding dishes like tell your father French food is new favourite. Nah?
bouillabaisse and coq au vin – and I looked, panic- Much better than Indian, we’ll say. That should get
stricken, up at my mother. But Mummy smiled kindly him excited! What d’you think, Hassan?”
and said, “Never be afraid of trying something new,
Hassan. Very important. It is the spice of life.” She I was fourteen.
pointed at a slip of paper. “Why don’t we take the I was walking home from St Xavier’s, weighed down
day’s special? Do you agree? Dessert is included. with my maths and French books, picking away at a
Very good value. After our shopping, not such a bad paper cone of bhelpuri. I lifted my head and saw a
thing.” black-eyed boy my age staring back at me from the
I remember clearly the menu complet started with a filthy shacks off the road. He was washing himself
salade frisée and mustard vinaigrette, followed by frites from a cracked bucket, and his wet, brown skin was
and a minute steak on which sat a dollop of Café de in places turned white by the blinding sun. A cow was
Paris (a delicious pat of herbs-and-garlic butter), and collapsed at his feet. His sister squatted in a watery
ended, finally, with a wet and wobbly crème brûlée. ditch nearby while a matt-haired woman behind them
I’m sure it was a mediocre lunch – the steak as tough lined a concrete water pipe with ratty belongings.
as Mummy’s newly acquired footwear – but it was The boy and I locked eyes, for a second, before he
instantly elevated to my pantheon of unforgettable sneered, reached down, and flapped his genitals at me.
meals because of the overall magic of the day. It was one of those moments of childhood when you
For the sweet caramel pudding that dissolved on my realize the world is not as you assumed. There were
tongue is for ever fused in my memory with the look people, I suddenly understood, who hated me even
on Mummy’s face, a kindness graced by the inner glow though they did not know me.

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A silver Toyota suddenly roared past us on its way up to begging for work, their gaunt faces pressed against the
Malabar Hill, breaking the boy’s mean-eyed spell, and I back door, Papa chasing them away with a roar and a
gratefully turned my head to follow the shiny car’s diesel swift kick.
wake. When I turned back, the boy was gone. Only the Papa was a complicated man, not easily put in a box.
tail-twitching cow in the mud and the girl poking the He could hardly be called a devout Muslim, but he
wormy faeces just squeezed from her bottom. was, paradoxically, careful about staying on the right
From inside the water pipe, shadowy rustlings. side of Allah. Every Friday, for example, before the
call of prayers, Papa and Mummy personally fed fifty
Bapaji was a man of respect in the shanty town. He of the very same slum dwellers from cauldrons at the
was one of those who had made it, and the poor restaurant’s back door. But this was insurance for the
used to press their palms together when he made his afterlife. When it came to hiring staff for the business,
arrogant way through the barracks, tapping the heads Papa was ruthless. “Nothing but rubbish,” he’d say.
of the strongest young men. The chosen tore through “Human rubbish.”
the clamouring crowds and jammed onto the back of One day a Hindu nationalist on a red motorbike roared
his three-wheeler put-putting on the roadside. Bapaji into our world, and before our very eyes the Napean
always picked his tiffin delivery boys from the shanty Sea Road-Malabar Hill division between rich and poor
town, and he was much revered because of it. “Cheapest widened like a causeway. The Shiv Sena was actively
workers I can find,” he rasped at me. trying to “reform” itself at that time – the Bharatiya
When my father refocused the business on the higher- Janata Party was just a few years from power – but not
margin restaurants, however, he stopped hiring the all of the fiery extremists went quietly into the night, and
young men from the slum. Papa said our middle-class one hot afternoon Papa came back into our compound
clients wanted clean waiters, not the filthy rabble from with a clutch of flyers. He was grim-faced and tight-
the barracks. And that was that. But still they came, lipped and went up to his room to talk with Mummy.

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My brother Umar and I studied the yellow papers spread three tartan blankets out across the sand as we
he’d left curling on the rattan chair, the overhead children tore down to the platinum blue water and
fan making the paper shiver. The flyers singled us back.
out – a Muslim family – as the root cause for the Mummy never looked so beautiful. She wore a
people’s poverty and suffering. A cartoon depicted an pink sari, her gold-sandalled feet curled under the
immensely fat Papa drinking a bowl of cow’s blood. thigh, across her face the soft, sweet smile of ghee.
The images come now like postcards, such as the Kites shaped like fish fluttered loudly above us, and
time my grandmother and I cracked nuts under the the strong wind made Mummy’s kohl-lined eyes run.
compound’s porch. Behind us we could hear the I snuggled up against the soft heat of her leg as she
nationalists shouting slogans into a megaphone. I rummaged in her string sack for a tissue, dabbing at
looked up at Malabar Hill and saw two girls in white herself in the pocket mirror.
tennis outfits sipping juice drinks on a terrace. It was Papa said he was going down to the water’s edge
a very strange moment, for somehow I knew how it to buy my youngest sister, Zainab, a feather boa
would end. We were not of the shanty town, or of the from a hawker. Mukhtar and Zainab and Arash, the
upper classes of Malabar Hill, but instead lived on four of us, we ran after him. Paunchy old men tried
the exposed fault line between these two worlds. to recapture their youth with a game of cricket; my
From that last summer of my childhood I can oldest brother, Umar, did backflips across the sand,
still extract sweet tastes. Late one afternoon Papa showing off with his teenage friends. Vendors lugged
took us all out to Juhu Beach. We staggered with coolers and smoking trays down the beach, singing
our beach bags and balls and blankets through an out their wares of sweetbreads and cashews and Fanta
alleyway ripe with cow dung and frangipani, and out and monkey balloons.
onto the boiling sand, dodging the tinselled horse “Why only Zainab get something?” wailed Mukhtar.
carriages and their lumpy deposits of hot plop. Papa “Why, Papa?”

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“One ting,” Papa yelled. “One ting each. And then rubbery faces pressed up against Bollywood Nights’s
no more. You hear?” window. All I remember was the screaming, the terrible
The taut kite strings moaned in the wind. screaming. The torchlit mob pulled my mother from
Mummy sat on the blanket, curled into herself like a her cage while my father hustled us children and a
pink pomegranate. stampede of restaurant guests out the back door and
Something my auntie said must have made her up to the Hanging Gardens and Malabar Hill. Papa
laugh, for Mummy turned gaily, her teeth white, her rushed back to get Mummy, but by then flames and
hands stretched out to help my sister Mehtab thread a acrid smoke leapt from the windows.
garland of white flowers through her hair. That is how Mother was bloodied and unconscious under a table
I like to remember Mummy. in the downstairs restaurant, flames closing in all
around her. Papa tried to enter, but his kurta caught
It was a hot and humid afternoon in August. I was fire and he had to retreat, slapping his blackened hands.
playing backgammon with Bapaji in the compound We heard his terrible screams for help as he raced back
courtyard. A chilli-red sun had just dipped behind the and forth in front of the restaurant, helplessly watching
backyard banyan and the mosquitoes whined furiously. Mummy’s braid of hair, like a candlewick, catch fire. I
I was about to tell him we should move indoors, when never told anyone, because there is a chance it was my
Bapaji suddenly jerked his head up – “Don’t let me overactive imagination at work, but I swear I smelt her
die,” he rasped – and then violently pitched forwards burning flesh from our safe perch up on the hill.
onto the spindly-legged table. He shuddered; he The only thing I remember feeling afterwards is a
twitched. The table collapsed. ravenous hunger. Normally, I am a moderate eater,
When Bapaji died, so, too, did the last scrap of but after Mummy’s murder I spent days gorging on
respect we had in the shanty town, and two weeks mutton masala and dumplings of fresh milk and egg
after he was buried they came at night, their distorted, biryani.

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I refused to part with her shawl. I was in a torpor for – the horrible clap that came each time he brought his
days, Mummy’s favourite silk shawl wrapped tightly bandaged hands violently together. And that night,
around my shoulder, my head lowering again and through the door of his room, we heard Papa whisper,
again over lamb-trotter soup. It was, of course, just a kind of half moan, half chant, repeated over and over
a boy’s desperate attempt to hold on to his mother’s again, as he rocked back and forth on the edge of his
last presence, that fast-fading odour of rose water bed: “Tahira, on your grave I promise, I will take our
and fried bread wafting up from the diaphanous cloth children from this cursed country that has killed you.”
around my head. And during the day the fiery emotions in the
Mummy was buried, as is the Muslim tradition, compound were intolerable, like a vat boiling and
within hours of her death. There was dust, a choking boiling and boiling but never running dry. My little
red-earth dust that got into the sinuses and made me sister Zainab and I hid behind the upstairs steel
wheeze, and I recall staring at the red poppies and Storwell closet, curled into balls and pressed against
ragweed next to the earth hole that swallowed her up. each other for comfort. There was a horrible wail from
No feeling. Nothing. Papa beat his chest until his skin downstairs and the two of us, desperate to get away
was red, his kurta soaked with sweat and tears, the air from the sound, climbed into the closet and buried
filling with his dramatic cries. ourselves in the hundred scarves that were Mother’s
simple vanity.
The night my mother was buried, my brother and I Mourners came, like vultures, to pick over us.
stared into the dark from our cots, listening to Papa Rooms filled with the deathly fug of sour body odour,
as he paced back and forth behind the bedroom wall, cheap cigarettes, burning mosquito coils. The chatter
bitterly cursing everyone and everything. The fans was constant and high-pitched, and the mourners
creaked; poisonous centipedes scurried across the ate marzipan-filled dates while clucking over our
cracked ceiling. We waited, on edge, then… wallop misfortune.

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Mummy’s snooty Delhi relatives stood in silken finery Think because you old you can say what you like?”
in the corner, their backs to the room as they nibbled He spat at her feet. “Low-class peasant. Get out of
on crackling papad and grilled aubergine. Papa’s my house. Go home. I don’t want to look at your
Pakistani relatives loudly roved around the room, donkey face any more.”
looking for trouble. A religious uncle wrapped his bony Ammi’s scream suddenly hurtled through the air
fingers around my arm and pulled me aside. “Allah’s like an axe. In her hands she clutched clumps of her
punishment,” he hissed, his white head shaking with own white hair, like hairy-root onion grass, and she
palsy. “Allah’s punishing your family for staying behind was bloodily raking her face with her nails. There
during Partition.” was more roaring and confusion as Auntie and Uncle
Papa finally reached his limit with my great-aunt, and Mayur jumped on her, pinning down her arms so she
he dragged the shrieking woman out through the banging wouldn’t do more damage to herself. A blur of salwar
screen door, roughly shoving her into the courtyard. The kameez, a gasping scuffle, followed by a stunned
dogs pricked up their ears and howled. Then he went silence as they dragged shrieking Ammi from the
back inside to kick her sack of belongings out after her. room. Papa, unable to take it any more, stormed from
“Come back in here you old vulture, and I’ll kick you the compound, leaving flapping chickens in his wake.
back to Karachi,” he yelled from the porch. I was sitting on the couch next to Bappu the cook
“Aaaiiee,” screamed the old woman. She pressed her during all this, and he protectively put his arm
palms against her temples and strutted back and forth around me as I pressed myself into his fleshy folds.
in front of the charred remains of the restaurant. The And I remember the human crush in the living room
sun was still hard. “Wah I do?” she wailed. “Wah I stiffening momentarily during Papa’s and Ammi’s
do?” outbursts, samosas frozen halfway to open mouths. It
“Wah you do? You come into my house, eat my food looked like they were playing some parlour game. For
and drink, and then whisper insults about my wife? as soon as Papa left, our guests looked furtively about

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from the corners of their eyes, reassuring themselves The less he said, the more frantic became the table-
no other unhinged Haji was about to jump out at slapping and the red-juiced squirts of betel spit hitting
them, and then happily resumed their gold-toothed the wall. Finally, however, exhaustion set in among the
masticating and palaver and tea-slurping as if nothing bidders, and Papa stood, nodded at the man with the
had happened. I thought I might go mad. hair doused in lilac water, and went indoors.
From one day to another, Mother was gone, for ever,
A few days later a pudgy man with slicked-back and we were millionaires.
hair and black-framed glasses appeared at our door, Life is funny. No?
smelling of lilac water. He was a real-estate developer.
Others came after him, like betel-spitting bugs, often We boarded the Air India flight in the night, the sultry
at the same time, outbidding one another on our front Bombay air pressing against our backs, the smell of
porch, each desperately trying to snatch Grandfather’s humid gasoline and sewage in our hair. Bappu the cook
four acres for another apartment high-rise. and his cousins openly wept with their palms pressed
It was destiny that our losses coincided with a brief against the airport glass, reminding me of geckos.
period when Bombay real estate suddenly became the Little did I know that was the last we would ever hear
highest in the world, more expensive than New York, or see of Bappu. And the plane ride is largely a blur,
Tokyo, or Hong Kong. And we had four unencumbered although I do recall Mukhtar’s head was in the airsick
acres of it. bag all through the night, our row of seats filled with
Father turned icy. All afternoon, for several days, his retching.
he sat pudgy on the damp couch under the porch, The shock of my mother’s death lasted for some
occasionally leaning forwards to order the half- time, so my recollections of the period that followed
dozen developers shot glasses of tea. Papa said very are odd: I am left with weird, vivid sensations but no
little, just looked grave and clicked his worry beads. overall picture. But one thing is without doubt – my

60 61
 richard c. morais

father stuck to the promise he made Mummy at her

graveside, and at a stroke we wound up losing not only
our beloved mother but also all that was home.
We – the six children ranging from ages five to
nineteen; my widowed grandmother; Auntie and her
husband, Uncle Mayur – we sat for hours on harshly
lit plastic seats at Heathrow Airport as Papa bellowed
and waved his bank statements at the pinched-faced
immigration official deciding our fate. And it was
on these seats that I had my first taste of England: a
chilled and soggy egg-salad sandwich wrapped in a
triangle of plastic. It is the bread, in particular, that I
remember, the way it dissolved on my tongue.
Never before had I experienced anything so
determinedly tasteless, wet, and white.

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born in lisbon and raised in switzerland,
Morais has lived most of his life overseas. He
started his writing career in New York for Forbes
in 1984, where he lived for seventeen years. His
first book, an unauthorized biography of Pierre
Cardin, was published to critical acclaim in 1991.
His short story, ‘Confessions of an Aerophobe’,
was shortlisted for the Ian St James Award
and published in the magazine Acclaim. The
Hundred-Foot Journey is his first novel. He is a
Senior Editor at Forbes.

www.almabooks.com