It was in this idyllic garden, as we sat and ate our lunch, that Abhidha dropped her bomb. She asked me to come next Saturday to a poetry reading and dinner party in Whitechapel so I could meet her friends from the university. I immediately understood what she was saying, that this was no small thing she was asking me to do, trying me out with her college peers, and so I stammered in response, “Of course. With pleasure. I will be there.”
But this you must know: the violent murder of a mother—when a boy is at that tender age, when he is just discovering girls—it is a terrible thing. Confusingly mixed up with all things feminine, it leaves a charred residue on the soul, like the black marks found at the bottom of a burned pot. No matter how much you scrub and scrub the pot bottom with steel wool and cleansers, the scars, they are permanent.
At the same time I was getting to know Abhidha, I was regularly dropping by the basement lair of Deepak, a boy from the neighborhood in Southall. Deepak was one of the Anglo Peacocks and his parents, wishing he would just go away, turned over their entire basement to their son, who promptly filled it with state-of-the-art hi-fi and TV, the floor covered in fat beanbags. And in the corner—a foosball table.
Foosball, I tell you, it is a devilish invention of the West. Makes you forget everything in the world. Nothing but twirling that handle and smacking that little ball, just so you can hear the marvelous sound of that white sphere whizzing through the air and smacking the back of the goal with a satisfying wooden thwock. Increasingly I was down in Deepak’s basement, the two of us first smoking a couple of spleefs of hashish, and then, my God, four hours gone, just like that, and we were still twirling handles and sending those little wooden men into deadly head spins.
On the Friday before I was supposed to meet Abhidha’s university friends in an East End flat, I went down to Deepak’s basement, and there were two giggly English girls sunk like plump little peaches among the beanbags. Deepak introduced me to Angie, a chubby little thing with an upturned nose, her blond hair swirled up in a kind of rat’s nest and fastened atop her head with hairpins. She wore a shiny black miniskirt, and the way she was reclined in that beanbag, I kept on getting a peek of her blue cotton panties. And those chubby white legs, I tell you, swinging open and shut, banging up against my knee.
We chatted for I’m not sure how long, and then, when I passed Angie the joint, she put her hand on my leg, ran her chipped nail polish down the seam of my jeans, and I got all pokey down there. In no time, heavy snogging. Well, I won’t go into all the details, but she and I, we eventually went over to her house—her parents were gone for the weekend—and spent two days in bed.
I never went to Abhidha’s party. I never even called to say I wouldn’t be there, just didn’t show up. A few days later, full of remorse, I did call, again and again. And when Abhidha finally came to the phone, to listen to my groveling apologies, she was as lovely as she always was.
“It’s all right, Hassan,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world. I’m a big girl. But I do think it’s time you found someone your own age to be with. Don’t you agree?”
This, then, became my lifelong pattern with women: as soon as things between us were on the verge of becoming close, I withdrew. Difficult to admit, but my sister Mehtab—who oversees the restaurant’s accounts and maintains my flat—is really the only woman I have ever maintained a relationship with over time. And she insists my emotional clock stopped, that part to do with women, when Mummy died.
Perhaps. But remember this, too: freed from the emotional demands of wife and children, I was able to spend my life in the warm embrace of the kitchen.
But back to the rest of the Haji family, none of whom were faring much better. We didn’t think anything wrong, at first, when Ammi sang the old Gujarati songs and forgot our names. But then she became obsessed with her teeth, pulling her lips wide as she forced us children to examine her diseased gums, the rotten and bleeding stumps that made us gag. And I’ll always remember that horrible night when I came home, opened the front door, only to see Ammi becoming incontinent on her way up the staircase, a river of urine running down her leg.
It was, however, my irritating London-born cousin who first made us aware Ammi was suffering from dementia. Every time the university boy strutted through the General’s Hole—lecturing us on macroeconomic this and money-supply that—tiny Ammi could be seen quietly maneuvering herself to his side of the room. He would go on so, and then, midsentence, he would yelp in pain, furiously turning on the tiny crouching figure behind him. The sight of his Indian bum squeezed into a pair of Ralph Lauren slacks simply set her off, and our roars commanding her to stop pinching his bottom only incited her to chase the poor boy through the halls. My cousin got even, however. It was he who spelled out to us in clinical detail how Ammi’s mental health was deteriorating.
But she was not alone. A kind of madness was in the air.
Mehtab became unduly preoccupied with her hair, ceaselessly primping for men who never came to take her out. And I myself retreated into the basement haze of hashish and foosball.
* * *
But even in hell there are moments when the light reaches you. One day, plodding to the Southall branch of the Bank of Baroda on an errand for Auntie, a shiny object caught my eye. It was what the English call a “chippie”—a food cart—standing between Ramesh “Tax Free!” Jewelry and a cash-and-carry selling bolts of faux-silk. The chippie had been modified: a silhouette of a train cut from sheet metal was oddly bolted to the front of it. JALEBI JUNCTION, read the sign overhead.
The odd stall, I suddenly realized, was designed to sell the delicious deep-fried dessert that Bappu the cook used to buy for me at Crawford Market. A pang of homesickness and a craving for the old taste suddenly hit with great force, but the unmanned cart was cold and chained to a lamppost. I shuffled forward and read the pink sheet of paper taped to the carriage, fluttering forlornly in the wind: PART TIME HELP WANTED. ENQUIRIES: BATICA CHIPS.
That night I dreamed I was driving a train, joyously blowing its whistle. The caboose rolled through stunning, snow-peaked mountains, taking me through a world rich beyond my wildest imagination, and I was exhilarated at never knowing what new sight lay in store for me through the next alpine tunnel.
I did not know what the dream meant, but the movement of the train spoke to me somehow, and the next morning, like a shot, I was down on the High Street. Batica Chips was one of Southall’s two “quality sweet manufacturers,” its windows filled with honey and pistachio and coconut shreds. The door tinkled when I entered and the shop itself smelled of dried banana chips. A large woman ahead of me was preordering pounds of galum jamun, fried curd in syrup. When she left I handed in the pink note torn from the Jalebi Junction and timorously announced I’d like the job.
“Not strong enough,” said the unshaven baker in his white coat, not even looking at me as he filled a carton with almond crescents.
“I’ll work hard. Look. Strong legs.”
The sweets merchant shook his head, and I realized my job application was already over, case dismissed. But I stood my ground. Refused to budge. And eventually the man’s wife came over and squeezed my skinny arm. She smelled of flour and curry.
“Ahmed, he’ll do,” she said. “But pay him the minimum.”
And so, not long afterward, I was wheeling the Jalebi Junction down Broadway High Street, in my Batica Chips uniform, selling sticky twists of jalebi to children and their grandparents.
The Jalebi Junction job paid £3.10 an hour, and it consisted of making the house-style runny paste of condensed milk and flour in a cheesecloth, and then squeezing a continuous looping string of the mixture into the boiling oil. Squiggly loops, like pretzels. When done, I scooped the golden dollops of jalebi from the vat of boiling oil, dipped them in syrup, then carefully wrapped the sticky things in wax paper for the outstretched hands, collecting eighty pence.