33 West Page 5

  Silvija shook her head almost involuntarily.

  ‘I like it. There. The job was stressful. My colleagues were like animals. They were backstabbing and false. I like doing up the house and cooking and searching for beautiful pieces of furniture and art. I like taking care of my husband.’

  ‘He makes you nervous.’

  ‘He doesn’t make me nervous!’

  ‘He comes in, you tense up. I have never seen you that anxious about somebody’s opinion.’

  ‘Really? You mean a lifetime of being anxious about your opinion doesn’t count?’

  Even at fifty-nine Silvija still couldn’t crack that riddle. How does one raise a child and not get ambushed by resentment at some unforeseen turn?

  ***

  Silence descended on the Poggenpohl. The granite seemed to Silvija as silent as a grave. She had a pointy nose, her daughter, the same pointy nose she had from the day she was born. Somehow, the pointy nose of her little girl and her small frame didn’t make sense in this massive, shiny kitchen that was the best in the world. She looked at Helena’s hands submerged in the bowl of sarma stuffing and her eyebrows knitted in tight frustration. She was probably wishing she had never invited her in the first place.

  A long minute of regret and stubbornness passed. ‘I… I should go to bed,’ Silvija said, though, ‘Honey, I love you so much,’ and ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to judge you,’ were also in the mix.

  Helena nodded with her eyes firmly on the stuffing.

  Silvija got up and slowly went for the door. ‘I was frustrated because I was unhappy with your dad and saw no way out. I doubt very much that a functional dishwasher would have made that much difference.’

  A couple hours later when Helena came to bed, Andrew was asleep. People generally didn’t look nearly as attractive asleep as they did in films, she thought. Of course, in films they weren’t actually asleep.

  This man with his funny wheeze who always sleeps in the corpse position did in fact make her nervous. She didn’t know why that was. She suspected there were layers of complicated explanations, but she knew she somehow, for reasons unknown, blamed her mother for it. She climbed into bed and tried to fall asleep. ‘Unhappy’. Her mother had been unhappy. She always remembered her childhood as happy and her parents’ marriage as a fairly peaceful one. For hours she couldn’t fall asleep. A nagging image taking shape for the first time in her mind would not leave her alone. Her mother, a woman.

  ***

  Silvija looked out the window to inspect the morning sky. What strange weather they have here. It looked like it wasn’t going to rain although it desperately wanted to.

  After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, smoked salmon and wheat-free toast, Silvija suggested that it might be a better idea if she didn’t attend the dinner party. It wasn’t any sort of a protest, she assured Helena. It was simply to make things easier. Her English wasn’t great and she would be the thirteenth person and so on, it might prove altogether simpler if she went for a walk or to the theatre.

  A wave of not entirely unfamiliar but almost forgotten and definitely stronger-than-ever emotion came over Helena when she heard her mother’s suggestion. Her chest tightened. A cartoonish landscape opened in her head. Two cliffs separated by a canyon. She imagined a group of snooty, babbling businessmen and their wives squashed together on one edge. She imagined them clanking their glasses and adjusting their spectacles and her husband in the middle, handsome and a little tired, topping up their drinks. The cliff was dangerously close to giving. And on the other side was her mother, the only blood relative she had. She stood alone, smiling reassuringly, wanting to make things easy for her.

  Helena hugged her mother, she embraced her tightly and her eyes filled with tears. She was immediately cross with herself for being so overly dramatic. After all there was no cliff and no canyon and it was all so annoyingly overstated in her head, as if her strongest Croatian gene had fought its way up to the surface and was now gasping for air. ‘I really need more excitement in my life than swanky kitchen appliances can provide,’ she thought for a fleeting second.

  Silvija didn’t understand quite what came over her daughter but accepted the hug almost instantly. The moment she heard a sniffing sound coming from the pointy nasal area, her eyes welled up as well, but she managed to control herself.

  ‘Mum, would you make pancakes for desert? With cream and cottage cheese? We might as well go all the way!’

  Towards the end of the evening it was safe to say that the party was going to be remembered as a great success. In the history of the dish, no sarma had even been served on such fancy plates and with such haute cuisine flare. It was initially met with reservation but eventually went down a treat. After pancakes, a couple of guests had discretely loosened their belts. Silvija and Helena shared a conspiratorial smile.

  Fairly early on in the evening, just as Andrew was starting to fret about the ice still remaining unbroken between him and Sir Phillip, it transpired that Sir Phillip was a passionate German speaker. As was Silvija.

  The two of them chatted away for most of the night, ending up on the balcony with a cognac and a cigarette. He was the last to leave the party sporting a funny glow that comes from a mix of alcohol and unexpected joy of human bonding.

  Silvija went to bed curiously happy. However suspect this world seemed to her, her daughter pulling off a dinner party like that with such grace or at least apparent grace did make her feel immensely proud. The fact that the two of them had bonded over cooking made her feel slightly too much like a poster for conservative values but she thought she’d take whatever she could get for the moment. And she had to admit it – apart from a touch of nervousness around Sir Phillip, Andrew was a seductively confident and generous host.

  At the beginning of the evening Silvija had hoped just to pull through without making everyone feel self-conscious or locking them in simplistic conversations in basic English. She never expected to have a good time. What’s more, she had showed someone a good time. She had a smile on her face as she took her makeup off. Had she just flirted a little with a Sir?

  ***

  ‘Sir Phillip is taking your mother for a day trip to Oxford on Tuesday,’ Andrew said taking his shirt off in the bedroom.

  ‘Is he now?’

  ‘It was a tremendous dinner, sweetie,’ he kissed Helena on the cheek, ‘but I fear our future now depends on your mother’s chastity. Or lack of it, as it were.’ He went to bed and turned the light off straight away. They were both exhausted.

  ‘Andy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Hel-é-na.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Not Helena, Helena’, she said stressing the second syllable, ‘I would appreciate it if you tried to call me that. Helena.’

  ‘Where is this coming from?’

  ‘Nowhere. Just something I would like. Would you do that?’

  Andrew looked at her intensely for a second or two and then shrugged.

  ‘Sure.’

  BRENT

  The Samosa Whisperer

  Nikesh Shukla

  It’s the fourth restaurant along the Ealing Road that welcomes Prakash’s strange request. They’re having a slow day. The chef is going through an existential crisis, having had all his cooking outsourced to a local catering company that delivers every menu item in plastic containers every morning, and all his extensive years of training under Chef Rajput Ali Lal of the Veeraswami in London’s fashionable West End is now wasted on reheating other people’s food. The manager is off work, sick with food poisoning. He ate at home last night for the first time in two years. The prawns were out of date.

  Prakash is wearing jeans, a T-shirt with Spiderman on it, black trainers and a light coat and hasn’t shaved in four days. He hasn’t got a man bag with him. The only thing he carries is the book. The chef, Ram saab, is sitting at the back of the restaurant listening to the new Arctic Monkeys album loudly, glad to be out from under the strict Bollywood reg
ime that rules with an iron melody when the manager is on the premises. The waiters are smoking in the kitchen, at the back near the extractor fan. It’s warm enough for them to smoke outside but tiny rebellions alleviate the repetitiveness of their normal working day.

  Ealing Road is blocked as usual. It’s Sunday and the cash and carries are full of masis and kakis and faibas stocking up on the week’s aubergines, okras and potatoes. Fresh coriander is smelt and picked at, noses and fingers unshy to the merchandise. The men are sat outside cafes, chewing betelnut juice and spitting it out on the poor pavement, blotches of Pollock-esque dirt lining the pavement like a gauntlet. Bhangra throbs from passing cars, houseproud with sub-woofers that betray loud thuds into the streets. Inside, one can only assume, it sounds amazing. Children run around, unafraid of broken Britain. Boys smile at clusters of girls dressed in black. Clusters of girls deconstruct the failings of all the local potential husbands. When Prakash gets home he will notice a reddish tint to the soles of his trainers, where they have trod on fresh betelnut splurts. He will be annoyed.

  Ram saab listens to Prakash’s odd request with a smile, bemused at first, charmed at the end. He categorically decides that he will help this man. The waiters can handle the reheating. He barely needs to be here; he is but a token nod to past culinary glories – what a decadent idea, an actual chef who can cook things instead of pressing START on a microwave. What a novelty. This is broken Brent, he snorts to himself. The Gujaratis have really taken over every possible business. There’s even a Gujarati family business dedicated to recycling the plastic containers all the pre-prepared food arrives in. He will help this man, yes. It’s a slow day and the manager has missed a trick. This is the only restaurant that doesn’t offer a vegetarian Gujarati buffet. It’s the only empty restaurant on Ealing Road. Sunday lunch in Brent is observed with all you can eat buffets. They are a cash cow. Even Hindus like cash cows, he snorts to himself. In his head, he constantly tells himself, he is hilarious. Ram saab thinks about stand-up comedy being a possible out for him. It’s a shame he works nights anyway.

  Prakash shows Ram saab the book, and the page in question. Ram saab looks down the page, oscillating his head from side to side in agreement with the recipe and the instructions. Prakash smiles at Ram saab’s nods of enthusiasm. He may well have found his chef.

  ‘When did your grandmother die?’ Ram saab asks Prakash.

  ‘Three months ago. To this day.’

  ‘Three months to the day. Fresh, like fish from the sea. Let me see, let me think, let me do. I will help you.’ Ram saab sometimes talks in rhyme when he’s excited.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Prakash says. His mask slips for a second and he looks glum. ‘I miss her so much.’

  ‘When did she write this recipe for you?’

  ‘Six months ago. For a wedding present, my faiba collected all the family recipes in this book so I could make them. I’ve been working through them.’

  ‘How often have you attempted this particular recipe?’

  ‘Once a week since my grandmother died. I cannot get it right. Neither can my wife. It doesn’t ever taste like grandmother’s samosas. Never.’

  Ram saab ponders this. It is indeed a sad situation for Prakash to be in. This is a challenge. He has to make a samosa like Prakash’s grandmother made it. This impersonation will be his greatest feat: to cook something with a taste so ingrained in a man’s DNA because of family history that only a chef like him can accomplish the mimicry. This is the challenge he has been waiting for.

  ‘I accept the challenge.’

  ‘It’s not a challenge. I just wanted you to help me decipher some of the writing.’

  ‘No. You will come into my kitchen and we will prepare the samosas. They will be just like your grandmother’s. You will cry when you taste the first bite and you will want to see her again because it will taste like she is in the room. We will not rest until we have achieved that. Or until the restaurant closes. Whichever comes first.’

  Ram saab asks Prakash if these are Punjabi or Gujarati samosas. Prakash isn’t aware there’s a difference. Ram saab is horrified. There is a massive difference, he explains. The first major difference is the shape. The Punjabi samosa is more pasty-shaped, more 3-D than its Gujarati counterpart, which is a triangular. He makes a dirty joke comparing the shape to female private parts. He laughs, much like someone who has never seen any female private parts, Prakash thinks, but then dismisses the thought. He only wants to think good things. This could be what he needs to taste his grandmother’s food again. He’s moved at Ram saab’s enthusiasm for the project.

  He follows him into the kitchen. Ram saab takes out a sharp knife that has hitherto only been used to pierce the film on top of the cartons of food he has to reheat. He takes out the chopping board that he last used to make a papier-mache moon for a fancy dress outfit. He takes out the garlic press, the grater and some frozen peas. He finds some pastry. Lastly, he fills a big wok with a litre or so of sunflower oil and puts it on to simmer, to slowly heat up, as per the instructions. Ram saab notes that not only could Prakash’s grandmother not write legibly, but she couldn’t spell either. Her written Gujarati is worse than my written Russian, he thinks. He knows this is an exaggeration. He looks at the first step. It’s the hard bit, preparing the pastry and he starts to do what he needs to. Prakash is watching intently, and filming the process on his mobile phone. Ram saab instructs the camera as he goes, imagining himself on a cooking show. The camera represents his loving and adoring audience. Prakash is some celebrity brought into the studio to promote their new film or CD and is being shown how to make an authentic Gujarati dish. Ram saab imagines the story he will tell, how this was his grandmother’s recipe and he learnt to perfect it so he would be reminded of her whenever he ate the samosas, a perfect memory of her through her food.

  Ram saab stops his narration and video fantasy and stares at the recipe, bringing it up to his face for confirmation. She has suggested three tablespoons of garam masala instead of the usual four. She is a maverick he thinks. Should he follow her recipe or should he do as his great teacher did? If he chooses option a, he is preserving the family recipe, written down for the first time ever. If he chooses option b, he is mutating it and evolving it.

  Prakash spots his hesitation and asks what’s wrong.

  ‘Well, your grandmother has asked for three tablespoons of garam masala. Personally, I would put in four. And I’m the best samosa maker in the whole of Brent.’ He points up to a photograph where he’s holding a three-foot samosa in his hands, a red sash round him declaring ‘MR SAMOSA, BRENT 1998.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Prakash says, anxious. ‘But I would really prefer if you followed my grandmother’s recipe. I’m not trying to make the best samosa. I want to make her samosa.’

  ‘I understand,’ Ram saab says. This is turning out to be quite a challenge, especially now he has to go against everything he believes in. He should have asked for payment. Damn this rut. Damn Ealing Road. Damn Wembley. Damn Gujarati samosas. He puts in three tablespoons of garam masala. The third spoon is heavy with the ground spice and he tips it in quickly so Prakash won’t spot his subversive act.

  Prakash notes the heft of the spoon and assumes that the recipe calls for generous portions. His grandmother always used to try and teach him how to make things and would insist that, with Indian foods, you had to learn by doing. He looks towards the restaurant. From the kitchen vantage point, it’s still empty while the foot traffic outside ebbs and flows like a forceful tide. He looks at Ram saab, who is in his element. He stares intently at the page, tracing each word with his index finger, his nail yellow from years of turmeric use. Prakash remembers sitting on his grandmother’s footstool in the kitchen and watching her make the samosas. The moment the oil had heated up to the point of bubbling was when he would start salivating expectantly. She would always let him drop one or two samosas into the wok before shielding him from any oil spatter. He would wait patiently. She would nev
er let him have the first one. She insisted that the virgin oil hadn’t soaked up the spices enough. The second and third were his. The first would form the base of a large pile. Prakash blinks and notices his hand has slipped, causing the camera to not catch all of the action. He asks Ram saab where he’s from and how long he’s lived in the UK but Ram saab waves him off. He is concentrating.

  Ram saab cannot believe this woman’s methods. They are insane. The first samosa is the freshest, he insists in his head. But, as he steals a look at Prakash, he realises that this isn’t so much about what the perfect samosa is, it’s about the perfect one for him. He feels sorry for this guy.

  The mixture is fried in oil and placed in a bowl next to him as he extracts shapes from filo pastry, slowly dolloping an exact tablespoon of innards on to them, folding in the right creases and leaving to one side. Prakash’s phone has run out of memory so he’s watching intently. The kitchen is silent except for the hum of microwaves around them. Two couples have arrived for food, and the waiters are heating up their order for them. This is the busiest it’s been since opening at 9am. The trade secret, the food being prepared off-site, it’s all an elaborate disappointment once the veil of curry houses is pulled back from its purdah. Prakash realises. Maybe he will never eat in an Indian restaurant again. Where’s the love and tenderness that goes into the cooking? He can see Ram saab lifting up the first samosa. Ram saab is ready.

  ‘I will only make five samosas from this mixture. If it is the right one, we will make more.’ Prakash nods. Ram saab looks at the simmering wok and cranks the heat up a bit. The wok takes about fives minutes of awkward silence before it starts to boil. When the first bubble plops at the top, Prakash licks his lips in anticipation. That smell has hit his nose. He is Pavlov’s dog. He has to sit down and watch, his hands clasped. He has a specific memory of one samosa he ate. It was the week after his grandfather had died and his grandmother had stopped wearing the white mourning saree. She was back on her feet keeping busy. He hadn’t even been hungry, instead being 10 years old and clingy, followed her around the house, checking up on her to shield him from his own hurt. She eventually found the best way to get rid of him. She heated up the wok of oil and pulled out some pre-prepared frozen ones.