Salt and Saffron (9 page)

That I hadn't told him what time I'd be leaving in the morning did not prevent me from looking for him as I exited Palmer House and moved towards the waiting cab. Samia, her tongue thick with sleep, told me not to be a fool, and no, I didn't have a few more minutes before I had to leave and, please, did I really expect her to believe I wanted those extra minutes because I hated saying goodbye to her.

‘Well, I do,' I said.

‘Are you getting misty-eyed?' She blinked and stared at me. ‘You are! My God, Aliya, I haven't made you cry since that time you had mumps and I told you the only cure was surrounding yourself with dirty undergarments. What did I say MUMPS stood for? Malodorous Underwear Might Provide Succour.'

It's a family tradition. When you leave, you leave laughing.

But airports and aeroplanes kill all laughter. Things I find funny anywhere else seem like signs of the coming Apocalypse in an airport. This time was no different. While I was still queuing up to get my boarding pass an airline official walked past, checking that everyone had passports and
tickets ready, and told me my suitcase was ‘not appropriately proportioned'. Was it too large? Too wide? Too high? He sniffed and conceded, no. And walked on. At the ticket counter I was told that the computer ‘doesn't seem to want to recognize you'. ‘Well, force it,' I said. The man behind me whispered, ‘Farah' and started humming the
Charlie's Angels
theme. It's what every airport experience needs: a touch of seventies magic. But at least the airline person took me seriously and thumped on the computer until it yielded up my name. In return for this affront, the computer gave me a seat in the smoking section.

Aboard the flight, I waited patiently for take-off and the subsequent extinguishing of the no-smoking sign, at which point a small group of men – blatantly ignoring the earlier breathy instructions of the flight attendant – got up from their seats in the no-smoking section and walked back to light up, scant feet from my face.

‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘Would someone mind swapping seats with me? I don't want to be in the smoking section.'

‘Who does?' said a man with beautifully manicured hands, puffing away at his Marlboro.

But by now I had spotted my targets. There were three Pakistanis grouped together, labourers by the look of it, and for their benefit I repeated the question in Urdu.

‘Give the lady your seat,' one said, gesturing at a wiry, bearded man.

‘Yes. Do you want her to travel in discomfort all the way to Karachi?' another said. ‘Didn't anyone ever teach you any manners?'

The wiry man turned to me. ‘Our seats are 8D, E and F. Go and sit in any one. We'll decide who should stay here.'

I took the aisle seat. Sat down and closed my eyes,
pretending to be asleep by the time two of them came back, having left the wiry man amidst the swirl of smoke.

The man in the seat next to me said to his companion, ‘Why is it that the desire for a cigarette is even stronger on a flight during take-off than it is just before Iftari, even when Ramzan falls in summer and you're without a smoke for over fourteen hours?'

There are only two things I can do to while away time on a plane: talk, or remember.

I remembered Ramzan.

Officially the month of fasting, Ramzan has always seemed to me synonymous with feasting. Through the first eighteen years of my life, abstaining from food and drink from sunrise to sunset had less to do with religious devotion than it did with culinary devotion. For in order to truly appreciate the Iftari meal that Mariam Apa ordered – yes, since her arrival she had been the one responsible for ordering meals and everyone swears that, though Masood had been a fine cook to begin with, he only became a magician when she started telling him what to cook. (I might be inclined to view this comment with suspicion if it wasn't for the fact that I've seen people attempting to replicate Masood's recipes in their kitchens, even going to the extent of borrowing his pots and pans and chopping board and knife, but never, not once, has anyone succeeded in producing a meal that could be mistaken as Masoodian.
‘Haath mein maza hai,'
Dadi always said – the delight is in his hand – but perhaps the delight was really in Mariam's voice.) Regardless of cause and effect, what I was saying was that to appreciate the Mariam–Masood Iftaris we had to build ourselves up to a pitch of hunger that enabled us to sit and eat and eat for an hour and a half without pause.

In drawing rooms across the country frazzled Begums complained that all this fasting, combined with the heat, made their cooks so horribly bad-tempered. Of course, one felt guilty asking them to stand over a stove and cook under these circumstances. Masood, however, loved it. He liked nothing so much as to shoo us out of the kitchen with the warning, ‘If you smell my food you will be so overcome with temptation that you'll break your fast on the spot. Leave, leave, before you make me into an instrument of Shaitan and I send you to hell.' The only person he allowed in was Mariam Apa, who would chop and stir and watch, as she never did during any other time of the year.

And oh! the meals that resulted. We started with the requisite date, of course, to symbolize fidelity to the first Muslims in the deserts of Arabia, but then … on to gluttony! Curly shaped
jalaibees,
hot and gooey, that trickled thick sweet syrup down your chin when you bit into them; diced potatoes drowned in yogurt, sprinkled in spices; triangles of fried
sarnosas,
the smaller ones filled with mince-meat, the larger ones filled with potatoes and green chillies;
shami
kebabs with sweet-sour
imli
sauce; spinach leaves fried in chick-pea batter;
nihari
with large gobs of marrow floating in the thick gravy, and meat so tender it dissolved instantly in your mouth;
lassi
that quenched a day-long thirst as nothing else did and left us wondering why we ever drank Coke when a combination of milk, yogurt and sugar could be this satisfying; an assortment of sweetmeats –
gulab jamoons, ladoos, burfi.

There were always at least ten people gathered at our house by sunset for Iftari and, at some point, someone would look up from his or her third helping and say, ‘Mariam, have you finished eating? That's an insult to
the food. It's divine!' And Mariam Apa, who always ate just enough to show she appreciated the food, would make a gesture as though plucking the words from the air and swallowing them, to indicate, ‘I am eating your praise.' Then she would look across at Masood, who had walked in with hot
naans
to go with the
nihari,
and smile her smile of congratulations. Masood would incline his head in a gesture that was not so much a salaam of deference as an acceptance of well-deserved praise.

(When I start to talk about Masood's cooking to people who've never tasted it, I'm often greeted with looks of scepticism. All I'll say is this: the Dard-e-Dil relatives of Dadi's generation swear the finest meals they've eaten have all come from Masood's kitchen. Such a compliment is not to be slighted when it comes from people who've eaten food from the fabled kitchens of the Dard-e-Dil palace where legions of cooks plied their trade, each one specializing in a different kind of food. So, for instance, there was one cook for the rice dishes and one for the
parathas,
one for the sweetmeats and one for the kebabs.)

In our house, the only meal that ever surpassed those Ramzan meals was the one Masood and Mariam Apa conjured up for me the day I was accepted at a college in America. Halfway through the meal I burst into tears to say, ‘But who will cook for me when I'm there?'

Masood almost touched my shoulder, said, ‘Don't worry, Aliya Bibi.' It was the first time he'd ever called me
‘Bibi'
and the deference it implied made me feel even more miserable. ‘When you come home for the holidays I'll feed you so much they'll have to roll you back on to the plane.'

‘Promise?' I said.

‘Promise.' He smiled back.

Two weeks later he was gone.

I pulled the airline blanket over my face and tried to regulate my breathing, which had become ragged just thinking about Masood's departure and what followed.

When I told Samia that I never told Mariam Apa's story, I wasn't entirely honest. Admittedly, I'd never said it aloud in one go, but in dribs and drabs I'd hinted at, implied and blurted out every fragment of it at college to my roommate, Celeste. Brilliant, artistic, revolutionary, multi-multi-ethnic and entirely unpindownable Celeste, who moved into our room at the start of freshman year while I was still in transit and decided to make me feel at home in Massachusetts by customizing her reproduction of Che Guevara. Imagine me, walking into the airy, brightly coloured dorm-room and seeing a six-foot-by-three-foot painting of a long-haired man with beautiful eyes, a mango in one hand and a cricket bat in the other, his teeth red with blood.

Betel-nut juice, Celeste explained weeks later, when I felt I could query her artistic judgement.

The first thing Celeste asked me when I'd unpacked was, ‘Who is she?' She was Mariam Apa, captured in black and white, framed and displayed on my desk. I evaded answering in any detail until the end of that semester, when Celeste announced, ‘I'm going to make a painting of your cousin, Mariam. You got any input on that?'

‘Yes. Can you paint her older? So I'll have some way of knowing how age might change her face.'

Celeste turned her attention away from the picture of Mariam Apa and towards me. ‘It's more common for people to want a painting to remove a few years from the sitter.'

I laughed. ‘The thought of Mariam Apa older … older
and happy. Can you, who never knew her, imagine that? I so wish that I could.'

‘So she died?' Celeste was never one for cloaking brutality in euphemism.

‘My grandmother would doubtless say it would be better if she had.'

‘Okay, spill.'

How Celeste made sense of the garble that followed, I'll never know. But I'm clearer now. So, deep breath, forget about Massachusetts, forget about the flight, and let me take you to the day of Masood's disappearance, two weeks after he called me Bibi.

I knew something was wrong the moment I returned from school and the only smell to assail my nostrils as I walked up the driveway was that of the manure recently delivered to my neighbour's garden. Ami was standing in the kitchen as I ran in, staring in mystification at Masood's rack of spices.

‘What's happened? Where is he? Is he ill?'

‘No, no, he's not ill. He had to leave. His father has died. Masood's the head of the family now. So he's gone.'

‘For how long?' I didn't stop for a moment to think about Masood's loss; I just wondered how long I'd have to do without his cooking.

‘Jaan,
he's gone. They need him there. It's feudal land, you know. It seems his father was the cook at the home of the
zamindar,
and Masood will be taking over that position. He said to tell you he's sorry he didn't have time to say goodbye, but he had to catch the morning train.'

‘But how will we …' I looked around the kitchen, cavernous and strange. ‘What about Mariam Apa?'

Ami shook her head. ‘I don't know. We've already found
a new cook – the one who worked for your dadi when Mohommed was on leave – and he's starting tomorrow, but I don't know if Mariam … I don't know what. I don't know.'

All I was thinking was, I'll never hear her voice again. But when I saw the flutter of Ami's hands across the spice jars and her refusal to meet my eye, I thought, Oh dear God.

It's not just that she only spoke to speak to him of food; she also only ate when it was his food she was eating. When Masood had taken his father on haj, two years earlier, he'd frozen a week's supply of food for Mariam Apa so that she wouldn't starve.

‘Where is she?' I said.

‘In her room. When Masood was leaving he told her to keep eating, otherwise she'll fall ill and cause him much pain. And she smiled and … hugged him. Briefly. She hugged him goodbye.'

I stared. A hug – across class and gender. And he wasn't even much older than her. Before this had their fingers even touched as they passed a tomato from one to the other? I doubted it. A hug! I wouldn't have, and Masood had carried me piggy-back style when I was a child.

But when I entered Mariam Apa's room she was reclining in bed, reading the afternoon papers, as though it were just another day. I stood in the doorway, watching for the throbbing vein in her neck, for the inward curl of her fingers, for the awkwardly angled shoulders or the tooth biting down on her lip. But all I got, instead, was the tiniest alteration in the curve of her mouth to tell me she knew she was being watched.

‘Will you eat?' I burst out, and flung myself across the bed. Without looking at me she shook her head. I touched
her wrist and, still not turning her eyes towards me, she reached out and pushed my hair off my face with fingers so stiff I jerked my head back in fright. Rigor mortis, is what I absurdly thought when I should have been thinking of how hard she was trying not to tremble. But right then I could only see the hollows of her form. Hollow between clavicle and neck, hollow of cupped palm which held itself just short of supplication, hollow of her mouth.

I backed away and stood up. ‘You can't do this to me.'

Her eyes closed and opened. And closed again.

Three days later she still hadn't touched a morsel of food, and Aba was raging through the house, railing against the stubbornness of women. He was looking for a fight, of course, but Ami and I were too despondent to rise to the challenge.

In the silence that followed a protracted outburst we heard the door swing open. Auntie Tano, an old family friend, walked in.