Once a month Papa paid Malabar Hill a visit. He would put on a fresh-washed kurta and take me by the hand up the hill so we could “pay our respects” to the powerful politicians. We gingerly made our way to the back doors of vanilla-colored villas, the white-gloved butler wordlessly pointing at a terra-cotta pot just inside the door. Papa dropped his brown paper bag among the heap of other paper bags, the door unceremoniously slammed shut in our face, and we were off with our rupee-stuffed paper bags to the next Bombay Regional Congress Committee official. But there were rules. Never to the front of the house. Always at the back.
And then, business done, humming a ghazal under his breath, Papa bought us, on the trip I am remembering, a mango juice and some grilled corn and we sat on a bench in the Hanging Gardens, the public park up on Malabar Hill. From our spot under palm trees and bougainvilleas we could see the comings and goings at Broadway, a spanking-new apartment building across the torrid green: the businessmen climbing into their Mercedes; the children emerging in school uniforms; the wives off for tennis and tea. A steady stream of wealthy Jains—silky robes, hairy chests, gold-rimmed glasses—headed past us to the Jain Mandir, a temple where they washed their idols in sandalwood paste.
Papa sank his teeth into the corn and violently mowed his way down the cob, bits of kernel sticking to his mustache and cheeks and hair. “Lots of money,” he said, smacking his lips and gesturing across the street with the savaged cob. “Rich people.”
A girl and her nanny, on their way to a birthday party, emerged from the apartment building and flagged down a taxi.
“That girl is in my school. See her in the playground.”
Papa flung his finished corncob into the bushes and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
“Is that so?” he said. “She nice?”
“No. She think she spicy hot.”
At that moment, I recall, a van pulled up to the apartment building’s doors. It was the fabled restaurateur Uday Joshi, delivering his latest business, home catering, for those distressing times when servants had the day off. An enormous picture of a winking Joshi stared at us from the side of the van, a bubble erupting from his mouth. NO MESS. NO FUSS. WE DO IT FOR YOU, it said.
The doorman held open the door as the caterer, in white jacket, bolted from the back of the van with tin trays and lids and foil. And I remember the deep rumble of Papa’s voice.
“What Joshi up to now?”
Father had long ago done away with the old U.S. Army tent, replacing it with a brick house and plastic tables. It was a cavernous hall, simple, boisterous with noise. When I was twelve, however, Papa decided to move upmarket, closer to Joshi’s Hyderabad Restaurant, and he turned our old restaurant compound into the 365-seat Bollywood Nights.
In went a stone fountain. Over the center of the dining room, Papa hung a disco glitter-ball, made of mirrors, revolving over a tiny dance floor. He had the walls painted gold before covering them, just like he had seen in pictures of a Hollywood restaurant, with the signed photographs of Bollywood stars. Then he bribed starlets and their husbands to regularly drop by the restaurant a couple of times a month, and, miraculously, the glossy magazine Hello Bombay! always had a photographer there precisely at the right moment. And on weekends Papa hired singers who were the spitting image of the hugely popular Alka Yagnik and Udit Narayan.
So successful was the whole venture that, a few years after Bollywood Nights opened, Papa added a Chinese restaurant to our compound, and a real disco with smoke machines that—much to my annoyance—only my oldest brother, Umar, was allowed to operate. We occupied our entire four acres, the Chinese and Bollywood Nights restaurants seating 568, vibrant businesses catering to Bombay’s upwardly mobile.
The restaurants reverberated with laughter and the thump of the disco, the smell of chilies and roast fish in the air wet and fecund with spilled Kingfisher beer. Papa—known to everyone as Big Abbas—was born for this work, and he waddled around his studio lot all day like some Bollywood producer, yelling orders, slapping up the head slovenly busboys, greeting guests. His foot always on the gas. “Come on, come on,” was his constant cry. “Why so slow, like an old woman?”
My mother, by contrast, was the much-needed brake, always ready to bring Papa down to earth with a smack of common sense, and I recall her sitting coolly in a cage just upstairs from Bollywood Nights’ main door, penciling in the accounts from her lofty perch.
But above us all, the vultures that fed off the bodies in the Tower of Silence, the Parsi burial grounds up on Malabar Hill.
The vultures I remember, too.
Always circling and circling and circling.
Chapter Two
Let me think happy thoughts. If I close my eyes I can picture our old kitchen now, smell the clove and bay leaf, hear the spitting of the kadai. Bappu’s gas rings and tawa grills were off to the left as you entered, and you’d often see him sipping his milky tea, the four basic masalas of Indian cooking bubbling away under his watchful eye. On his head, the toque, the towering chef’s hat of which he was so proud. Energetic cockroaches, antennae waving, scampered across the trays of raw shellfish and sea bream to his elbow, and at his fingertips were the little bowls of his trade—garlic water, green peas, a creamy coconut and cashew gruel, chili and ginger purees.
Bappu, seeing me at the door, signaled for me to come over to watch a platter of lamb brains slide into the kadai, the pink mass landing among prattling onions and furiously spitting lemongrass. Next to Bappu stood a fifty-gallon steel vat of cottage cheese and fenugreek, simmering, two boys evenly stirring the milky soup with wooden trowels, and to the far right huddled our cooks from Uttar Pradesh. Only these northerners—my grandmother decided—had the right feel for tandoori, the deep coal pots from which emerged toasted skewers of marinated eggplant and chicken and green peppers with prawns. And upstairs, the apprentices only slightly older than myself working under a yellow garland of flowers and smoking incense.
It was their job to strip leftover tandoori chicken from the bones, snap beans over a barrel, shave ginger until it liquified. These teenagers, when off-duty, smoked cigarettes in the alleys and hooted after girls, and they were my idols. I spent a good deal of my childhood sitting with them, on a footstool in the upstairs cold kitchen, chatting away as an apprentice neatly split okra with a knife, using his finger to smear a lurid red chili paste on the vegetable’s white inner thighs. There are few things more elegant in this world than a coal black teenager from Kerala dicing coriander: a flurry of knife, a chopping roll, and the riot of awkward leaves and stems instantly reduced to a fine green mist. Such incomparable grace.
One of my favorite vacation pastimes, however, was accompanying Bappu on his morning trips to Bombay’s Crawford Market. I went because he would buy me jalebi, a twist of fermented daal and flour that is deep-fried and then drenched in sugary syrup. But I wound up, without trying, picking up a most valuable skill for a chef, the art of selecting fresh produce.
We started at Crawford’s fruit and vegetable stalls, baskets stacked high in between narrow walkways. Fruiterers delicately built pomegranate towers, a bed of purple tissue fanning out below them in the shape of lotus flowers. Baskets were filled with coconuts and star fruit and waxy beans, and they rose vertically, several floors up, creating a sweet-smelling tomb. And the corridors, always neat and tidy, the floor swept, the expensive fruit hand polished to a waxy gloss.