Indeed, that night, after work, I returned to the apartment behind the Institut Musulman Mosque. I dropped my keys and phone on the hall table and went into the kitchen; my nighttime snack plate—a spoonful each of my sister’s bainganbharta and dumaloo, mashed eggplant and potatoes in yogurt—was waiting for me on the kitchen counter. But Mehtab was not in her bed, as was normal at this late hour, but sitting in her nightgown at the counter before a pot of chai, her eyes red-rimmed and sagging in their fleshy pouches.
She got up, poured me a glass of sparkling water from the fridge, and handed me a napkin. “Very serious,” she said. “I see it now. We will be back to selling bhelpuri by the roadside in no time.”
“Mehtab, please. I am very tired. Don’t get me riled up before I go to bed.”
She sucked pensively on her lower lip for a few minutes, but I could tell she was in one of her pugilistic moods. The next thing she said was, “And what happened to that Isabelle? Why she doesn’t ring anymore?”
“We broke up.”
“Aiiieee. You dumped her. You are like a teenager, Hassan.”
“I am going to bed, Mehtab. Good night.”
Of course, my sister had gotten under my skin—it was her comment we’d soon be selling bhelpuri at the side of the road that did me in—and I tossed and turned that night. Somewhere in the middle of the blackness I flashed to a trip I had made just the month before, to a greenfield site outside Paris. One of my poultry suppliers had opened a new factory, and, very proud of his state-of-the-art plant, he had invited me for a tour. It was the size of an airport hangar, smelled of hot feathers and guano, and inside this cavernous space I was greeted by chickens flying down a chute to a pen, where North Africans in hairnets, white coats, and rubber boots stood waiting. The men, burly but oddly graceful, grabbed the squawking birds by their scaly legs and rhythmically slotted them, one by one and upside down, into clips moving along a conveyor belt overhead, a magic carpet heading straight to a black flap in the wall.
Pulled through the opening in the wall, the chickens—dangling upside down, their hearts pounding, wattles trembling—were plunged into a dark and warm and confined space, their automated journey lit softly by a soothing purple tube light overhead. The birds were instantly calmed, their shrieking wing-flap suddenly reduced to a cluck now and then. The belt headed—smoothly, inexorably—up to another flap. As the belt turned the corner, the silent birds’ dangling heads brushed against an innocent-looking wire. The electric jolt to the head instantly stunned them. Then another wire, again, as they went through the last flap.
So they never saw the rotating blade, like an electric can opener, coming in to slit their throats, or heard their spurting blood hit the steel walls. They never saw the butcher leaning in, with his steel-gloved hand, knife at the ready, slitting further any chicken neck not completely opened up, the slop trays underneath filling up with tapping fluids. But I did. And I saw how the dead birds continued on their automated journey into a block-long metal box, where they were dragged through boiling water to loosen feathers and where rollers peeled off their white coats, so they emerged pink and naked and ready for the rows of men and women sitting at their posts, ready to quarter and package and ship.
This was the vision that visited, in that restless space between sleeping and waking, and it greatly soothed me. For this vision of the chickens heading to slaughter reminded me that there are many points in life when we cannot see what awaits us around the corner, and it is precisely at such times, when our path forward is unclear, that we must bravely keep our nerve, resolutely putting one foot before the other as we march blindly into the dark.
And it was just before I fell asleep that I remembered one of Uncle Mayur’s favorite expressions, often repeated as we walked, hand in hand, through the slums of Mumbai when I was a little boy. “Hassan, it is Allah who gives and takes away,” he liked to tell me, with a cheerful wobble of his head. “Always remember this: His will is only revealed at the right time.”
And so, finally, I arrive at the last pivotal event of those strange days. Following Claude’s dismissal, Jacques and I searched for a front-room replacement. We interviewed I don’t know how many prospects—a Welshwoman with a ring through her nose; an earnest Turk who seemed promising but spoke very poor French; a Frenchmen from Toulouse who looked superb on paper until we found out, during a background check, that he had been arrested three times for torching cars during student riots. In the end, we hired the half brother of Abdul, one of our best waiters, who promised he would take personal responsibility for his younger sibling.
It was toward the end of this wearisome process, late one afternoon, that Jacques stuck his head in my office to announce that there was a chef downstairs asking to see me personally.
I looked up from the stock sheets I was studying.
“What’s this? You know full well we don’t need another chef.”
“She says she used to work with you.”
“Where?”
“Le Saule Pleureur.”
I had not heard that name for some time, but hearing it again on Jacques’s lips was like a bolt of lightning. My heart began to pound.
“Send her up.”
I don’t mind admitting, in that peculiar mental state I was in, I was strangely frightened and half-expecting Madame Mallory to walk through the door.
But of course it was not the old woman.
“Margaret! What a wonderful surprise.”
She stood hesitantly at the door frame of my office, shy and retiring as she had always been, waiting for me to invite her in. I instantly came from behind my desk, we hugged and kissed, and I gently led my old culinary comrade and lover by the hand into the center of the room.
“I am so sorry to barge in on you like this, Hassan. I should have called.”
“Nonsense. We are old friends. Here. Sit. . . .What are you doing in Paris?”
Margaret Bonnier, in a fleur-de-lis dress and cardigan, calfskin Kelly bag at her shoulder, nervously fingered the crucifix around her neck, bringing it up to her lips, just as she had done so many years ago when Madame Mallory used to terrorize us. She was more matronly, of course; her hair was now bottle-blond. But through the thickening of age, she had somehow managed to hold on to something soft, and even through the marks of time I could see my old friend from long ago.
“I am looking for a job.”
“In Paris?”
“I married. The mechanic, Ernest Borchaud. Do you remember him?”
“Yes, I do. My brother Umar was mad about cars. Ernest and Umar, they used to work on engines together. Doing I know not what.”
She smiled. “Ernest owns the Mercedes and Fiat dealerships now. We have two children together. A boy and girl. The girl, Chantal, she is eight. Alain, he is just six.”
“That’s marvelous. Congratulations.”
“Ernest and I divorced. The papers came through two months ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “I am sorry.”
“The children and I, we have moved to Paris. I have a sister here. We all needed the change.”
“Yes, I understand.”
She looked at me, steadylike. “Perhaps, it is something I should have done long ago. Moved to Paris.”
I did not say a thing.
“Of course, the city is so expensive.”
“Yes, it is.”
Margaret looked out the window for a moment, gathering herself, before turning her eyes back on me. “Forgive me for being so bold,” she said, in a voice so battered of its self-confidence, only a whisper came out. “But . . . do you need a sous chef? I will work any position. Hot kitchen. Cold kitchen. Desserts.”
“No, I am afraid not. I am sorry. I cannot afford to take on more staff.”
“Oh,” she said.