There I was, my back to the kitchen door, my hands and forearms discolored by a mixture of chili powder and grease. I shook some garam masala into a vat of mutton. A pot of clarified butter exploded over the counter, and I rather excitedly ordered Mehtab to spoon the runny butter—which had congealed with onion skins, spilled salt, and saffron—into a frying pan.

“Don’t waste it. Never mind. Still taste good.”

I looked over at the door.

I cannot describe the feeling that made me turn around like that, as if a great force of negative energy was at my back, shoving me forward.

But the glass portico in the door was empty.

Madame Mallory had seen what she wanted to see, and she returned to the dining room to take her seat opposite Leblanc. She sipped her beer and contentedly pictured the scene that was unfolding in her own restaurant across the street.

Stravinsky orchestrations softly playing in the background. The drama of silver domes over delicious dishes lifted simultaneously. The polite sipping of a bouillabaisse. The fecund aroma of orchids and roast suckling pig. Precision, perfection, predictability. “To Le Saule Pleureur,” Mallory said, holding up her glass of beer to Monsieur Leblanc.

Our pimply young waiter arrived with their food. Not very experienced, I’m afraid, and he just banged the pots down on the table. There was an urn of Goa fish stew, thick and gooey. Chicken tikka marinated in pink spices and lemon, grilled until the edges were black and curling. A skewer of yogurt-marinated lamb liver, sprinkled with crunchy pine nuts, was barely contained on a chipped dish. Mushrooms that thickened a masalaappeared as unidentified lumps under the film of tarka oil floating atop the dish. There was a copper pan of okra and tomatoes, and cauliflower heads in, I admit, an unattractive brown sauce. Yellow rice was fluffily heaped in a ceramic bowl, with pungent bay leaves buried under the kernels of basmati. Then came a confusing array of side dishes—pickled carrots, cool yogurt and cucumber, unleavened bread blistered with black boils and garlic.

“What a lot of food,” said Mallory. “I hope it is not too hot. The only other Indian food I’ve had, in Paris, was awful. Burned for two days.”

But the smells of the restaurant had made her hungry, as they had Monsieur Leblanc, and they spooned out the rice and fish and cauliflower and crispy liver onto their plates.

“You won’t believe what I saw in the kitchen.”

Mallory swallowed a forkful of yogurt and rice and okra and fish. “They’ll have the health inspectors in there shortly. The boy spilled—”

But Mallory did not finish the sentence. She looked down at her plate, her brow knitted. She took another forkful, chewing methodically, letting the flavors sensually roll across her tongue. Her fingers leaped across the table and dug into Monsieur Leblanc’s forearm.

“What is it, Gertrude? Good God. You look awful. What is it? Too hot?”

Madame Mallory trembled, shook her head in disbelief.

She took another forkful. But now all uncertainty, all shreds of hope, drained away and she was left with the awful truth.

It was there.

Madame Mallory dropped her fork with a clatter. “Ah, non, non, non,” she moaned.

“For God’s sake, Gertrude, tell me, what is wrong? You’re frightening me.”

Never before had Monsieur Leblanc seen such a terrifying look. It was, he thought, the picture of someone who had lost her reason for living.

“He has it,” she hissed. “He has it.”

“What? He has what? Who has what?”

“The boy,” she croaked. “The boy has what . . . Oh, the injustice of life.”

Mallory brought her napkin up to her lips to muffle the squeaks involuntarily popping out of her mouth.

“Oh. Oh.”

Diners at the other tables turned to look at Madame Mallory and she suddenly became aware she was an object of fascination. Gathering all her inner strength, she sat up straight, patted her bun of hair, a frozen smile plastered across her face. Heads slowly went back to their own food.

“Didn’t you taste it?” Mallory whispered.

Her eyes were ablaze, as if cayenne pepper and curry had internally set her afire. “Crude, yes, but there. Under all the fire, hidden, brought out by the cool yogurt. There, yes, distinctly there. It’s in the point and counterpoint of tastes.”

Monsieur Leblanc slapped his napkin down on the table. “What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Gertrude? Now, speak clearly.”

But Madame Mallory, to his utter amazement, lowered her head and began to weep into her napkin. Never before—never in their thirty-four-year partnership—had he seen her cry. Let alone in public.

“Talent,” she said through the muffled clutch of her napkin. “Talent that cannot be learned. That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along in a chef once a generation. Don’t you understand? He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an artist. A great artist.”

Unable to contain herself anymore, Madame Mallory burst into heartfelt sobs, great wracking gasps of pain that filled the restaurant and brought the entire room to a standstill.

Papa ran over. “What? What matter wit’ her? Too hot?”

Monsieur Leblanc begged their apologies, paid the bill, pulled the distraught chef up by the elbows, and half dragged the weeping woman back across the street to her restaurant.

The church dog howled.

“Non, non,” she wailed. “I can’t bear my guests to see me like this.”

Leblanc managed to get her up the back stairs of Le Saule Pleureur, up the winding servants’ stairway to her attic rooms, where the wretched woman collapsed on to the sofa.

“Leave me—”

“I’ll be just downstairs if you need—”

“Get out! Just get out! You don’t understand. No one understands.”

“As you wish, Gertrude,” he said quietly. “Good night.”

He gently eased shut her door. But in the darkened room Mallory suddenly missed Leblanc’s kind presence, and she turned to the shut door, her mouth agape. But it was too late. Leblanc was gone. And the elderly woman, all alone, threw her face down on the sofa, and sobbed like a teenager.

Mallory slept poorly that fateful night of Maison Mumbai’s opening, flopping about her bed all night like a distressed fish. Her sleep was a montage of horrid visions, of giant copper vats in which a mysteriously delicious food simmered. It was, she realized with a gasp, the long-searched-for Soup of Life and she had to have its recipe. But no matter how she circled and circled, how she tried to get a foothold on the pots’ smooth sides, she was unable to taste the potage. She kept on sliding down and landing in a heap on the floor, a Lilliputian, too small to learn the cauldron’s great mystery.

Mallory shook herself awake when it was still dark, when the first sparrows twittered in her beloved willow tree outside her window, the whiplike branches now covered in a seasonal gelée.

Mallory rose stiffly and went about her dark room with a stiff-legged determination. She violently brushed her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror without looking at herself—at the jowls of age, the bitterness around the brows. She folded her white bosom into a wire bra, dropped a navy blue wool dress over her head, and gave her hair a couple of violent yanks with a steel brush. In no time she was clattering down the attic stairs and banging on Monsieur Leblanc’s door.

“Get up. It’s time for the shops.”

In his blackened room, under a cocoon of warm duvet, an exhausted Monsieur Leblanc rubbed his face. He turned his creaky neck toward the luminous alarm clock.

“Are you mad?” he yelled through the door. “My God, it’s only four thirty. I went to bed just a few hours ago.”

“Only four thirty! Only four thirty! Do you think the world waits for us? Get up, Henri. I want to be first at the shops.”