I remember clearly the menu complet started with a salade frisée and mustard vinaigrette, followed by frites and a minute steak on which sat a dollop of Café de Paris (a delicious pat of herbs-and-garlic butter), and ended, finally, with a wet and wobbly crème brûlée. I’m sure it was a mediocre lunch—the steak as tough as Mummy’s newly acquired footwear—but it was instantly elevated to my pantheon of unforgettable meals because of the overall magic of the day.
For the sweet caramel pudding that dissolved on my tongue is forever fused in my memory with the look on Mummy’s face, a kindness graced by the inner glow of our carefree outing. And I can still see the twinkle in her eye as she leaned forward and whispered, “Let’s tell your father French food is new favorite. Nah? Much better than Indian, we’ll say. That should get him excited! What d’you think, Hassan?”
I was fourteen.
I was walking home from St. Xavier’s, weighted down with my math and French books, picking away at a paper cone of bhelpuri. I lifted my head and saw a black-eyed boy my age staring back at me from the filthy shacks off the road. He was washing himself, from a cracked bucket, and his wet, brown skin was in places turned white by the blinding sun. A cow was collapsed at his feet. His sister squatted in a watery ditch nearby while a mat-haired woman behind them lined a concrete water pipe with ratty belongings.
The boy and I locked eyes, for a second, before he sneered, reached down, and flapped his genitals at me. It was one of those moments of childhood when you realize the world is not as you assumed. There were people, I suddenly understood, people who hated me even though they did not know me.
A silver Toyota suddenly roared past us on its way up to Malabar Hill, breaking the boy’s mean-eyed spell, and I gratefully turned my head to follow the shiny car’s diesel wake. When I turned back, the boy was gone. Only the tail-twitching cow in the mud and the girl poking the wormy feces just squeezed from her bottom.
From inside the water pipe, shadowy rustlings.
Bapaji was a man of respect in the shantytown. He was one of those who had made it, and the poor used to press their palms together when he made his arrogant way through the barracks, tapping the heads of the strongest young men. The chosen tore through the clamoring crowds and jammed onto the back of his three-wheeler put-putting on the roadside. Bapaji always picked his tiffin delivery boys from the shantytown, and he was much revered because of it. “Cheapest workers I can find,” he rasped at me.
When my father refocused the business on the higher-margin restaurants, however, he stopped hiring the young men from the slum. Papa said our middle-class clients wanted clean waiters, not the filthy rabble from the barracks. And that was that. But still they came, begging for work, their gaunt faces pressed against the back door, Papa chasing them away with a roar and a swift kick.
Papa was a complicated man, not easily put in a box. He could hardly be called a devout Muslim, but he was, paradoxically, careful about staying on the right side of Allah. Every Friday, for example, before the call of prayers, Papa and Mummy personally fed fifty of the very same slum dwellers from cauldrons at the restaurant’s back door. But this was insurance for the afterlife. When it came to hiring staff for the business, Papa was ruthless. “Nothing but rubbish,” he’d say. “Human rubbish.”
One day a Hindu nationalist on a red motorbike roared into our world, and before our very eyes the Napean Sea Road–Malabar Hill division between rich and poor widened like a causeway. The ShivSena was actively trying to “reform” itself at that time—the Bharatiya Janata Party was just a few years from power—but not all of the fiery extremists went quietly into the night, and one hot afternoon Papa came back into our compound with a clutch of flyers. He was grim-faced and tight-lipped and went up to his room to talk with Mummy.
My brother Umar and I studied the yellow papers he’d left curling on the rattan chair, the overhead fan making the paper shiver. The flyers singled us out—a Muslim family—as the root cause for the people’s poverty and suffering. A cartoon depicted an immensely fat Papa drinking a bowl of cow’s blood.
The images come now like postcards, such as the time my grandmother and I cracked nuts under the compound’s porch. Behind us we could hear the nationalists shouting slogans into a megaphone. I looked up at Malabar Hill and saw two girls in white tennis outfits sipping juice drinks on a terrace. It was a very strange moment, for somehow I knew how it would end. We were not of the shantytown, or of the upper classes of Malabar Hill, but instead lived on the exposed fault line between these two worlds.
From that last summer of my childhood I can still extract sweet tastes. Late one afternoon Papa took us all out to Juhu Beach. We staggered with our beach bags and balls and blankets through an alleyway ripe with cow dung and frangipani, and out onto the boiling sand, dodging the tinseled horse carriages and their lumpy deposits of hot plop. Papa spread three tartan blankets out across the sand as we children tore down to the platinum blue water and back.
Mummy never looked so beautiful. She wore a pink sari, her gold-sandaled feet curled under the thigh, across her face the soft, sweet smile of ghee. Kites shaped like fish fluttered loudly above us, and the strong wind made Mummy’s kohl-lined eyes run. I snuggled up against the soft heat of her leg as she rummaged in her string sack for a tissue, dabbing at herself in the pocket mirror.
Papa said he was going down to the water’s edge to buy my youngest sister, Zainab, a feather boa from a hawker. Mukhtar and Zainab and Arash, the four of us, we ran after him. Paunchy old men tried to recapture their youth with a game of cricket; my oldest brother, Umar, did backflips across the sand, showing off with his teenage friends. Vendors lugged coolers and smoking trays down the beach, singing out their wares of sweet breads and cashews and Fanta and monkey balloons.
“Why only Zainab get something?” wailed Mukhtar. “Why, Papa?”
“One ting,” Papa yelled. “One ting each. And then no more. You hear?”
The taut kite strings moaned in the wind.
Mummy sat on the blanket, curled into herself like a pink pomegranate. Something my auntie said must have made her laugh, for Mummy turned gaily, her teeth white, her hands stretched out to help my sister Mehtab thread a garland of white flowers through her hair. That is how I like to remember Mummy.
It was a hot and humid afternoon in August. I was playing backgammon with Bapaji in the compound courtyard. A chili-red sun had just dipped behind the backyard banyan and the mosquitoes whined furiously. I was about to tell him we should move indoors, when Bapaji suddenly jerked his head up—“Don’t let me die,” he rasped—and then violently pitched forward onto the spindly-legged table. He shuddered; he twitched. The table collapsed.
When Bapaji died, so, too, did the last scrap of respect we had in the shantytown, and two weeks after he was buried they came at night, their distorted, rubbery faces pressed up against Bollywood Nights’ window. All I remember was the screaming, the terrible screaming. The torchlit mob pulled my mother from her cage while my father hustled us children and a stampede of restaurant guests out the back door and up to the Hanging Gardens and Malabar Hill. Papa rushed back to get Mummy, but by then flames and acrid smoke leaped from the windows.
Mother was bloodied and unconscious under a table in the downstairs restaurant, flames closing in all around her. Papa tried to enter, but his kurta caught fire and he had to retreat, slapping his blackened hands. We heard his terrible screams for help as he raced back and forth in front of the restaurant, helplessly watching Mummy’s braid of hair, like a candlewick, catch fire. I never told anyone, because there is a chance it was my overactive imagination at work, but I swear I smelled her burning flesh, from our safe perch up on the hill.