Papa’s face trembled with disbelief. “Me treat her shabbily? She try to ruin my business. She almost kill my son!”

“It was an accident.” It was Madame Picard.

“You, too?” he asked incredulously.

“Forgive her.”

“She is just a foolish old woman,” said someone else.

Papa scowled at the mob.

He turned around and marched up to Madame Mallory.

“Stop it! Stop it now. You will fall ill. You are too old for this nonsense.”

And it was true. The elderly woman was now quite stiff, and when she turned her head her whole torso had to twist with her.

“Let Hassan come work for me.”

“Go freeze to death. Please. Be my guest.”

*   *   *

I remember that night, before turning in, sitting again with my little sister Zainab at my turret window. We watched, in the moonlight, the elderly Frenchwoman in the courtyard, her arms folded, not budging. The moonlight and swirling clouds above were caught at her feet, reflected back up to us from the puddles of the uneven cobblestone court.

“What will happen to her?” Zainab asked. “What will happen to us?”

I stroked her hair. “I don’t know, little one. I don’t know.”

But that was when I crossed sides and secretly began rooting for the elderly woman. And I think little Zainab must have sensed this, for I remember she squeezed my hand and nodded, like she alone understood what had to be done.

Papa tossed and turned in his bed that night, thrice got up to look out the window. The thing that most galled him was the idea that Mallory was using passive resistance to get what she wanted. Of course, this was the very same method with which Gandhi had created modern India, and it was intolerable, so infuriating, that she would use the same methods against us. Papa, I tell you, he was the picture of a man in turmoil during this time, and all through the night he slid eerily in and out of consciousness, muttering to himself in broken sleep.

Around four in the morning the hallway filled with creaking.

I, in my room, Papa in his, woke instantly at the noise and we clambered out of bed to see what was going on. “You hear it, too?” he whispered as we crept down the corridor, our nightshirts rippling in the frigid air.

“Yes.”

Luminous figures hovered on the stairs.

“What are you doing?” Papa bellowed, snapping on the overhead chandelier.

Auntie and Ammi screamed and dropped a plate. It smashed on the steps and three pieces of naan and a bottle of Evian rolled to the bottom of the staircase. We looked back at the two offenders. Ammi clutched a chamber pot.

“Who dat for? Who dat for?”

“You’re an animal, Abbas,” yelled Auntie. “The poor woman. She is starving. You will kill her.”

Papa roughly grabbed Ammi and Auntie by the elbows and hauled them back upstairs. “Everyone go back to bed,” he roared. “Tomorrow I will have that woman removed. Finish. I will not have this. She is an insult to the memory of Gandhi, using these techniques on us.”

Of course, no one slept a wink after that and we were all up early, watching Papa pace back and forth in front of the telephone. Finally, the slow-dragging watch hands pointed at the allotted time and Papa rang his lawyer at the office, demanding the police cart Mallory away for trespassing.

A funk had settled on the entire family, and we morosely shoveled our potato breakfast back and forth across the plate as Papa talked and talked and talked into the phone. Only Ammi ate well.

But Zainab, we learned that morning, Zainab was cut from the same cloth as Papa. My little sister walked over to Papa as he bellowed into the phone, and she tugged his kurta, utterly fearless.

“Stop it, Papa. I don’t like this.”

The look on his face, my God, it was horrible.

I stepped forward and took her hand. “Yes, Papa. It’s time to stop this. Now.”

I’ll always remember that moment. His mouth hung open, his torso frozen in an odd twist, half-talking on the phone, half-turned toward his two children. Zainab and I stood resolutely like that for some time, waiting for the bellow or the slap, but he turned back to the phone and told his lawyer he’d call him back.

“What you say? I don’t tink I heard you right.”

“Papa, if Hassan becomes a French chef, that means we stay here and make this home. Well, good. I am tired of moving, Papa. I don’t want to go back to drizzly old England. I like it here.”

“Mummy would want us to stop running,” I added. “Can’t you hear her, Papa?”

Papa stared at us coldly, as if we had betrayed him, but gradually the hardness in Papa’s face dissolved, and it was something quietly miraculous, like watching a chilled lump of goose fat warming in a hot pan.

The mountain air was crisp and clean, just like that first day when we arrived in Lumière those three months ago, and the region’s famous morning light was busy washing the mountains in pinks, mauves, and mild browns.

“Madame Mallory,” Papa called out gruffly across the courtyard. “Come and have breakfast with us.”

But the chef no longer had the strength to turn her head. Her skin was a deathly white, and her nose, I recall, was bitter red and sore, with beads of mucus hanging from its tip. “Promise,” she croaked in a weak voice, still staring straight ahead through a small opening among the layers of blankets. “Promise Hassan come work for me.”

Papa’s face darkened at the woman’s obstinacy, and he was again at the threshold of blowing his top. But little Zainab, his conscience, she was in his hands and at his side, tugging her warnings. Papa took a deep breath and released his terrible sigh.

“What you think, Hassan? You want to study French cooking? You wanna work for dis woman?”

“I want nothing more in this world.”

I think he was physically struck by the fervency of my answer, that irrefutable call of destiny that spoke through me, and for a few moments he could do nothing but stare intently at the cracks of the cobblestones beneath his feet, holding on to little Zainab for strength. But when enough time had passed, he raised his head. He was a good man, my Papa.

“You have my word, Madame Mallory. Hassan, you must work in Le Saule Pleureur’s kitchen.”

The joy I felt, like that incredible explosion of cream when you bite into a religieuse pastry. But Mallory did not have the arrogant smile of the winner on her lips, but something humble, something that expressed relief and somber thanks and somehow acknowledged my father’s sacrifice. And I think Papa appreciated this, for Papa planted his feet solidly before her, for balance, and offered her his outstretched hands.

And I remember, so well, that moment when she clapped her hands in his and Papa pulled her to her feet with a grunt, the way my maîtresse slowly and creakily rose from her courtyard chair. This, too, I remember.

And so, next day, Auntie and Mehtab helped me pack my bag and I crossed the street. A lot of emotion went into that hundred-foot journey, cardboard suitcase in hand, from one side of Lumière’s boulevard to the other. Before me the sugar-dusted willow tree, the leaded windows and the lace curtains, the elegant inn where even the warped wooden steps were soaked in great French traditions. And there, standing on Le Saule Pleureur’s stone steps, in white aprons, the taciturn Madame Mallory and kind Monsieur Leblanc, an elderly couple waiting with outstretched hands for their newly adopted son.

I went to them and my adopted home and the growing I had yet to do—as a student of French cuisine, as a servant of the kitchen. But at my back was the world from where I had come: little Zainab and watery-eyed Ammi, pomfret tikka and Kingfisher beer, the wailing of Hariharan, the hot kadai spitting oil and peas and ginger and chili.

And as I passed Papa at the iron gates, as each new generation is meant to do, he wept unabashedly and wiped his grief-stricken face with a white handkerchief. And I remember, as if it were yesterday, his words as I passed.