“Remember, sweet boy, you are a Haji. Always remember. A Haji.”
It was such a small journey, in feet, but it felt as if I were striding from one end of the universe to the other, the light of the Alps illuminating my way.
Chapter Twelve
My room at Le Saule Pleureur was at the top of the house, down the narrow hall from Madame Mallory’s flat. In winter, my monk’s cell was intensely cold; in summer, it was unbearably hot and stuffy. The bathroom was down a half flight of stairs at the end of the hall.
That day when I moved to Le Saule Pleureur, I found myself standing alone, for the first time, in the attic room that was to be my home for the years to come. It smelled of old people and a long-ago-sprayed bug treatment. A gaunt Christ on a crucifix was gushing blood from his wounds, and the emaciated figure hung, with a small mirror, on the wall directly above my bed. A dark-wood closet, with two ancient cedar hangers hanging inside, seemed to glower malevolently from the corner of the room, opposite the narrow cot. There was hardly enough space to turn around in; a portico high up on the wall looked out on the gabled roof outside but did little to alleviate the close space.
I set my suitcase down. What had I done?
I was—I don’t mind admitting it—completely rattled by the austere room, so Catholic and foreign to my upbringing, and a voice in my head, half-hysterical, urged me to dash back to the safety and comfort of my cheerful bedroom in Maison Mumbai.
But a book on the bedside table caught my eye and I stepped forward to examine it. It was a fat tome with yellowed pages and ornate illustrations depicting different butchering cuts on every kind of livestock from cattle to rabbit.
An unsealed envelope was slipped inside its pages.
The handwritten note, from Madame Mallory, was a formal welcome to Le Saule Pleureur and stated, in her old-fashioned penmanship, how much she looked forward to having me as a student in her kitchen. She urged me to work hard and absorb as much as possible in the coming years; she was there for me and would help me any way she could. To start our adventure, she said, I should study this Lyon butcher’s treatise with utmost care.
Her letter hit just the right note, and a manly voice inside my head suddenly and roughly said, Get on with it and stop acting the damn fool. So I made sure Madame Mallory and Leblanc had closed the door firmly behind them, before locking it tight. Reassured I couldn’t possibly be disturbed, I stood on the cot and took down the frightening crucifix, hiding it deep in the back of the closet, totally out of sight. And then, finally, I unpacked my bag.
There was a dream that repeatedly visited me during those early days of my apprenticeship, which now, looking back, seems quite significant. In this dream I was walking alongside a large body of water when suddenly an ugly, primordial fish from the water’s deep, flat and round with a bull head, crawled up the beach using its fins as primitive feet, pushing itself with a great deal of effort out of the water and onto dry land. And there, exhausted by the Herculean effort, the fish rested, its tail still in the water, its head on the dry sand, gills opening and closing like fire bellows, shocked and pumping and gasping in this new amphibian state, half-in and half-out of the two vastly different worlds.
But truth be told, there was no time to concern myself with such things, or even the niceties of boudoir décor, because from that first afternoon forward, I was hardly ever in my room, but to put my head down and pass out.
My alarm went off at 5:40 every morning. Twenty minutes later I was having breakfast with Madame Mallory in her attic flat. Bombarding me with questions on what I had studied during the previous twenty-four hours, Madame Mallory used these early morning sessions to lay the intellectual groundwork for the real lessons held down in the kitchen later in the day.
Verbal interrogations completed, we promptly headed off to the markets in furtherance of my education, before returning to the inn with our purchases, where the day’s work began in earnest. The first six months of my apprenticeship Madame Mallory rotated me through every low-level job: At first I did nothing but wash dishes, mop the kitchen floors, and scrub and prepare les légumes; the next month I was out front, in the restaurant, a bread-boy in tunic and white cotton gloves, instructed to closely study the ballet of service unfolding around me, or ordered in off-hours to set the dining room, Madame Mallory personally following me from table to table and clicking her tongue in consternation every time I positioned a silver spoon not perfectly aligned with the other cutlery’s military order.
No sooner had I found my footing there, than I was marched back to the kitchen, this time to spend my days plucking and cleaning wild pigeons, quail, and pheasant for hours on end, until I thought my arms might drop off. Chef de Cuisine Jean-Pierre barked at me continuously during this period, and by the end of the day I was barely able to stand, for the stiffness of my back. This assignment was followed, then, by a stint alongside Monsieur Leblanc, at the front desk, taking reservations and learning the skill of properly seating a restaurant and the delicate politics of not offending repeat customers.
But still no hand at cooking.
I worked this way every day until three thirty, when we were given the midafternoon break hoteliers call“room hour,” and I crawled back to my attic cell for a nap that bordered on a coma. Early evening, I tumbled bleary-eyed down the stairs again, to engage in my next lesson: thirty minutes of wine tasting and corresponding lecture, under the tutelage of Le Saule Pleureur’s sommelier, before taking up my regular work shift until midnight. The alarm would go off at the unforgiving hour of 5:40 the next morning, and the tyranny of the workday started all over again.
Monday was my day off, and all I had the energy for was to stagger back across the boulevard, to the Dufour estate, to collapse on our old couch.
“They make you eat pig?”
“Arash, stop it with the stupid questions. Leave your brother alone.”
“But did they, Hassan? You eaten pig?”
“You are looking so thin. I tink dat woman starve you.”
“Try this, Hassan. I made it just for you. Malai peda. With golden blossom honey.”
I lay stretched out on the couch like a Mughal prince, Auntie and Mehtab feeding me sweetmeats and milky tea, Uncle Mayur and Ammi and Zainab and my brothers dragging chairs over to listen spellbound to the morsels of information I passed on from the inner sanctum of Le Saule Pleureur across the street.
“The special tomorrow will be palombe, wood pigeon. I tell you, I have been plucking and cleaning pigeon for two days. Very difficult work. Mehtab, please, massage the shoulders. See how tense, from all the work? We are serving salmis de palombes, which is pigeon pie, very succulent, in a Merlot and shallot sauce. It is best served with . . .”
Papa behaved very curiously during this period. Warmly roaring his greetings at the door and throwing his arms around me when I first entered, he would then drift off, oddly distant, allowing the rest of the family to swarm in. For some reason, Papa never partook in the family’s ritual interrogation about my work, but hovered at the back of the room, pretending to fuss over some task at the partner’s desk, like slitting open bills with an ivory letter opener, but clearly listening to every word that was being said, even though he never asked a question himself.
“All week I have been learning about the Languedoc-Roussillon, the wine region around Marseille. Makes a huge quantity of wine but, you know, it produces only ten percent of the nation’s Appellation Contrôlée.” Seeing how wide-eyed they were, at my every pronouncement, I couldn’t resist adding, with an affected wave of the hand, “I recommend the Fitou and Minervois. The Corbières is rather disappointing, particularly the vintages of the more recent years.”