I can still feel the joy that was triggered by the sound of the simmering oil and my manly voice crying out in the street. By the smell of syrup and the cool feel of wax paper against my hands splattered and scarred by hot fat. Sometimes I’d roll the Junction to a spot in front of the Kwik Fit, or, if the spirit took me, sometimes outside the Harmony Hair Salon. Such a sense of freedom. And I will always be grateful to England for this, for helping me realize my place in the world was nowhere else but standing before a vat of boiling oil, my feet wide apart.
Our departure was as abrupt as our arrival two years earlier.
And I, consciously or unconsciously, was the architect of our hasty exit from Britain.
It was women. Again.
I missed the Napean Sea Road and the restaurant and I missed Mummy. It was in this feverish state of longing, alone sneaking a cigarette in our backyard one evening, that I felt a cool hand on the back of my head.
“What’s up, Hassan?”
It was dark and I could not see her face.
But I could smell the patchouli oil.
Cousin Aziza’s voice was soft and—I don’t know why—but her sweet tone touched me.
I couldn’t help it. Tears rolled down my face.
“I miss my old life.”
I sniffled and rubbed my nose on my shirtsleeve.
Aziza’s fingers softly twisted my hair.
“Poor boy,” she whispered, lips against my ear. “Poor thing.”
And then we were kissing, hot tongues down each other’s throats, groping through the clothes, while all the time I was thinking: Bloody marvelous. Another girl you really feel something for—and this time she is your bloody cousin.
“Aaaaiieee.”
We looked up.
Auntie was banging at us from the other side of the glass doors, and her downturned mouth had that famous bitter-lemon look.
“Abbas,” Auntie screeched behind the glass.
“Come quick! It’s Hassan. And the Toilet Seat.”
“Shit,” Aziza said.
Two days later Aziza was on a plane to Delhi and relations between Uncle Sami’s family and ours were cut. Papa got a bill for work on the house that Uncle Sami claimed to have done. There was great drama, tears—blows, even—and screaming matches in the streets of Southall between Papa and Mummy’s relatives. But the uproar finally woke Papa from his deep sleep. He threw off the blanket and for the first time really looked around that Southall house, at what had become of us, and a few days later three secondhand Mercedes stood in front of the house—one red, one white, one black. Just like fishmonger Anwar’s phones.
“Come on,” he said. “Time to go.”
Mukhtar celebrated our exit from England by promptly throwing up creamy prawns and pasta all over the ferry bound for Calais. But then the trip began in earnest: our Mercedes caravan ran through Belgium and Holland, into Germany, then, in rapid succession, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, before winding mountain roads led us back into France.
Harrods Food Hall had profoundly affected Papa. Now acutely aware of his limitations, he decided to expand his knowledge of the world, and in his book that simply meant systematically eating his way across Europe, tasting any local dish that was new and possibly tasty. So, we ate mussels and beer in Belgium bars; roast goose with red cabbage in a dark German stube. There was a sweaty dinner of venison in Austria; polenta in the Dolomites; white wine and Felchen, a bony lake fish, in Switzerland.
After the bitterness of Southall the early weeks of that trip through Europe were like the first taste of a crème brûlée. In particular I recall our whirlwind trip through Tuscany, in the golden light of late August, when our cars rolled into Cortona and to a mustard-colored pensione built into the side of the brushy mountain.
Shortly after we arrived in the medieval hillside town we discovered, much by chance, the locals were in the midst of their annual porcini mushroom festival. As the sun set over the valley and Lake Trasimeno, Papa had us in line at the gates of Cortona’s terraced park, the promenade under the cypress trees festively decorated with fairy lights and wooden tables and jam jars of wildflowers.
The fête was in full swing, with a clarinet and snare drum pickety-picketing the tarantella and a couple of aged couples kicking up their heels on a wooden platform. It appeared as if the entire town was out in force, the throngs of children clamoring for cotton candy and roasted almonds, but we still managed to claim an unoccupied wooden table under a chestnut tree. Around us the locals carried on, a swirl of grandparents and baby carriages and laughter and the gesticulations of local chatter.
“Menu completo trifolato,” Papa ordered.
“Nah?” said Auntie.
“Quiet.”
“What do you mean quiet? Don’t tell me to be quiet! Why everyone shushing me all the time? I want to know what you have ordered.”
“Must you know everything?” Papa fumed at his sister. “It’s mushroom, yaar. Local mushroom.”
It certainly was. What came was plate after plate of Pasta ai Porcini and Scaloppine ai Porcini and Contorno di Porcini. One porcini after another porcini, plastic plates streaming out of the tent from across the park, where local women in aprons and dusted with flour dressed mushrooms that looked alarmingly like soggy slivers of liver. And to the tent’s side, a giant vat of sizzling oil, the size of a California hot tub, but rather endearingly shaped like a giant frying pan, the handle artfully piping out the fryer’s gassy fumes. And around the vat stood three men, fat, in massive toques, dunking the flour-dusted porciniinto the sizzling oil while they roared instructions at one another and sipped from paper cups of red wine.
For three days we soaked up the Tuscan heat and swam, gathering every night for dinner on the pensione roof terrace as the sun set over the mountains.
“Cane,” Papa informed the waiter. “Cane rosto.”
“Papa! You just ordered a roast dog.”
“No. No. I didn’t. He understood.”
“You mean carne. Carne.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Carne rosto. And un piatto di Mussolini.”
The perplexed waiter finally retired once we explained Papa wanted a plate of mussels, not the dictator on a dish. Waves of Tuscan food soon broke over the table as a nighttime musk of lavender and sage and citrus wafted over us from a border of terra-cotta pots. We ate wild asparagus served with fagiole, fat slabs of beef perfectly charbroiled on wood fires, walnut biscotti dunked in the patron’s own Vin Santo. And laughter, once again laughter.
Heaven on earth, no?
Ten weeks after we started our trip across Europe we were back in our funk. The family had become dead tired of all the driving and Papa’s restless rushing to nowhere, these arbitrary scratches in his dog-eared copy of Le Bottin Gourmand. And the eating in restaurants, week in, week out, it had become sickening. We would have killed for our own kitchen and a simple potato-and-cauliflower fry-up. But for us, yet another day packed in the cars like in tiffin tins, elbow to elbow, the windows all steamed up.
And on that October day in the lesser mountains of France when it all came to an end, things were particularly bad. Ammi wept silently in the backseat as the rest of us bickered and Father roared at us to be quiet. After a series of sickening turns up a mountainside, we came upon a pass covered in frosty boulders. The place was eerily shrouded in cold fog. The ski lift was closed, as was a shuttered café in cement, and we passed through without comment into another mountainside descent.
Over that ridge, however, on the other side of the mountain, the fog abruptly lifted, a blue sky opened up, and we were suddenly surrounded by sun-dappled pines and clean streams running through the woods and shooting under the road.