I stared at him.
“Did I not mention that?”
“No. Intezar, what are you doing? Just talk to Natari. She seems really cool. You don’t have to pay some holy guy to do magic for you—”
“It’s not magic,” Zar snapped.
“Whatever. Also, isn’t the pir super religious?”
“Absolutely. That’s the entire job.”
“So how was he helping you get Natari?”
“I paid the sin surcharge.”
“The… wait, you were paying him?”
“Of course, yaar. Pirji’s gotta eat too.”
“How much?”
My friend wouldn’t look me in the eye. “That’s not important.”
“Dude.”
Zar sighed. “You sound a lot like Sohrab right now.”
“Hey!”
“Look, I’m only telling you this because maybe the reason you flopped at Renaissance Man in Pirji’s vision is because you went after Churchill. Maybe your father is right. Just get through the paper and presentation and graduate.”
“All right,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I definitely didn’t need Zar siding with Ahmed Jilani. “I’ll think about it. Could you please go do whatever you were going to do? I’ve got food to make.”
I understand the world less than I should. A lot of things just don’t make sense to me, though they seem to be perfectly clear to everybody else.
People seem to expect that you’ll just get algebra and mitochondrions and how gravity made the globe round. You’re supposed to intuitively grasp that gerrymandering is a problem and understand why no one can fix it.
You’d think being awful at a bunch of stuff would bother me, but it doesn’t. Not usually, anyway, because there is one thing in the world I do understand as well as anyone I’ve ever met: food. Always have.
Something in my soul recognizes the bright yellow of turmeric and the dull, grim red of ground red pepper. The sizzle of sirloin on a grill, the whisper of a swift, determined whisk were always familiar music. I simply knew the deep, alluring aroma of coffee and the quiet, rich scent of olive oil.
I can’t figure out people who ask me why I cook. Why did Tennyson paint? No. That guy wrote plays, I’m pretty sure. Raphael painted, right? Who drew the creepy smile lady, the Mona Lisa? Definitely one of the guys named after the Ninja Turtles. Anyway, my point is that I cook for the same reason they pursued their craft, for the same reason Shakespeare wrote poetry. It’s what was given to me. It’s what I am—despite being inept at everything else—good at.
At least, that’s true on most nights.
That night at Intezar’s I decided to make chicken tikka masala, which everyone thinks of as an Indian dish, but is ridiculously inauthentic. Mom tells me it is more of an ABCD—American-Born Confused Desi—thing. A lot of people like it, though, and I can make a mean one.
I wasn’t concentrating when I made the yogurt-based marinade, though. I just couldn’t stop thinking about what Dad had said.
My first reaction had been that he was just a jerk face, but while definitely true, that wasn’t what really bothered me.
It didn’t sit well with me that he just assumed I would fail if I took on the Bengal Famine for Renaissance Man. Was he disappointed? It seemed that way, sure, but there had to be a different word for it, because I hadn’t done anything yet. Saying my food isn’t any good before you’ve tasted it isn’t disappointment. It’s doubt.
“You know,” I told my perfectly butchered chicken, even though it seemed totally uninterested in my problems, “I don’t think that’s happened before.”
You could say a lot of things about Ahmed Jilani—like more things than there are grains of salt in the world—but he’d never, ever assumed I couldn’t do something before.
He’d made me try everything from Model UN to baseball to karate, even though I’d sucked at it all. Hell, my father had even done the usual desi parent thing and gotten me to volunteer at a hospital in the hopes that I’d develop a passion for medicine.
He’d hated seeing me fail, sure, and he’d yelled at me for it, but he’d actually believed I could do those things once.
“That was kind of nice,” I said, “in an ‘I made this steak for you, but with tofu’ kind of way.”
Tonight, though, for the first time, it seemed like his faith in me was broken.
“I shouldn’t care. This is good, right? Maybe now that he understands that I’m no good at any of the things he wants me to be, he’ll stop pushing me. I should be happy, really. I am happy. Honest.”
The chicken, the only other one there, remained silent, being in no condition to respond, but it looked skeptical.
“Shut up,” I muttered as I went to work on the tikka masala.
It didn’t turn out great. It ended up more watery than creamy, and worse, the botis were overdone. I hadn’t screwed up a dish this simple this badly in a long time. It seemed, in that moment, that I could do nothing right at all.
“You should’ve gone to sleep, Mom.”
Aisha Jilani marched up to me and took the Tupperware container I was carrying. “I wasn’t waiting for you. I was waiting for your food.”
“You didn’t eat with Dad?”
She shook her head. “Come. Sit with me.”
“Can I just go to my room? I’m really not in the mood to hear about how much he loves me.”
My mother’s answering smile had a little steel in it. I knew I had to follow her, and that it probably wasn’t a good idea to make her repeat herself. I mumbled a complaint and shuffled like an exhausted zombie to the dinner table.
Mom remained unmoved by the display. She popped open the chicken tikka masala container and when she got some on her finger, tasted it. “Hmm.”
“Yeah. It sucks. Can I go now?”
“What’s your hurry? You’ll have plenty of time to sulk.”
“I thought I’d get an early start.”
Shaking her head, my mother went to the microwave. “Jaan, you’re going to have to make a decision about what you’re doing with Renaissance Man.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Your father isn’t wrong about one thing. Passing history is important. If your teacher is a big Churchill fan… Danyal, you can’t get held back again. Do they even let you go back into high school if you’re twenty?”
That was a really good question. Given my current standing in Tippett’s class, it was definitely something I should’ve already looked up. I sat in silence as my mother cracked a frozen naan into two so that it’d fit into our toaster. It wasn’t long before she was sitting with me, a steaming plate before her.
“On the other hand,” she said, “telling people truths they haven’t heard is important too. You’re in a tough spot.”
“This is not a helpful talk.”
“Acha, baba, fine. You can go to your room. Before you do, though… Did you know that Ahmed’s father marched for independence from the British?”
“Really?”
“He was only sixteen, but it was the great struggle of his time, and he wanted to be part of it.”
Sixteen? My great struggle when I’d been sixteen was convincing my parents to buy me a gaming console, which they’d promised to do if I could get my grades up.
That deal had not worked out for me.
“He marched and starved. His friends fought and bled. I know you never got to know your grandfather, but Ahmed was close to him. He grew up hearing stories about the Raj. Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai and all that.”
“Um… I don’t know what that means.”
My mother sighed. “That’s our fault. We come to the New World and forget, I think, that the Old World still has things to teach us.”
When I didn’t say anything, she went on. “It’s a poetry verse from back then that became like a slogan. It means ‘the desire for revolution has seized our hearts, so let’s see what strength is left in the arms of our murderers.’
”
“Dark.”
“Yes. Anyway, I’m just saying that your father isn’t… he’s not objective when it comes to the Raj or Churchill. I think he’d really like it if you wrote about the Bengal Famine. He just doesn’t want you to risk your graduation.”
“That isn’t what he said.”
“I know what he said, jaan. I was there.”
“Why doesn’t he believe I can do a good enough job to impress Tippett and talk about the famine?” When she didn’t answer, I took a deep breath. I didn’t want my voice to shake when I asked the next question. It shook a little anyway. “Why doesn’t Dad believe in me?”
“Well, they say that Allah sent anywhere from twenty-five to over a hundred thousand prophets to make people believe in Him.”
“That’s a big range.”
“What I’m saying is that even God can’t get people to have faith in Him. So maybe don’t worry about yourself too much, hmm?”
I smiled despite myself. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Also, Ahmed is only hard on you—”
I groaned. “Noooo. Don’t say it.”
“—because he loves you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “So you keep telling me.”
After I escaped Mom, I went to my room and made things worse for myself.
I started reading about Churchill. There really was a lot of information out there.
I found out, for example, that he was bad at school, which was kind of my brand.
He had a sucky childhood because his dad was sucky. I could relate.
But then I found out he hated freshly squeezed orange juice and realized we could never be friends. What kind of person doesn’t like fresh orange juice?
Nothing I found, however, mentioned the Bengal Famine.
So I googled that. Almost one and a half million results came up. A lot less than the almost billion hits I’d gotten when searching for Churchill, but still enough to switch to an image search.
That was a mistake.
I was not ready.
I wasn’t ready for the complete devastation of the human form that was a famine. I wasn’t ready to see what a lack of food does to a human being.
I saw, in black-and-white pictures, people who’d become walking skeletons with haunted, empty, mournful eyes. Their suffering was so raw that it cut me across centuries. I felt tears come to my eyes. Breathing got difficult. And fast.
I was not ready to believe that this was a world that had been. A world where you could count the ribs of every man and woman. A world where the skin on people’s faces was pulled so desperately tight that they seemed like little more than skulls.
There was no dignity in these pictures. There was no modesty. People were naked and half-naked, lying broken on the ground or barely standing up, leaning against pillars or on sticks, no longer strong enough to bear their own weight.
Why had this been allowed to happen?
Why did the fact that Churchill had come to California and hung out with Charlie Chaplin seem to interest historians more than the suffering his actions had caused in India?
What had really happened to my people?
And didn’t everyone need to know?
CHAPTER NINE
There were only three days a year when Chef Brodeur broke out a set of small, porcelain, heart-shaped dessert dishes at Remarquable. I was good at setting hearts aflame, so it totally made sense that I was the one she asked to torch crème brûlée the night before Valentine’s Day.
It was a holiday that Brodeur took seriously—how can it be a “holiday” if we still have to go to school?—but I didn’t know if that was because it was good for business or because she actually cared about it. She did care about the special dishes, though, because she was on me like a hawk when I almost dropped one.
“You must pay attention to what you are doing,” she snapped, pointing savagely down at the desserts.
“Sorry, Chef,” I said.
She sniffed, obviously disdainful of both me and my apology. I waited for her to say more, but when she didn’t, I went back to work.
I love a good crème brûlée. Actually, I love custard. There’s a simple purity about it. I don’t necessarily like standing there with a torch, caramelizing the sugar on top. It can get to be boring if you do it over and over again.
Today, however, I was happy to be doing it. For one, the late-lunch crowd didn’t really order dessert a lot. Second, watching the white sugar turn a lovely, crunchy brown felt like a satisfying middle finger to Churchill. Sometimes a little color is a good thing, Winston, so fu—
“You seem distracted tonight,” Chef Brodeur noted. “But I suppose it is that time of the year for young people.”
It took me a moment to figure out that she thought I was distracted because of a girl. It would have been a good guess, usually, but it had been a weird semester so far.
“Actually, I was thinking about Winston Churchill.”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “I suppose there is no accounting for taste.”
“What? No. It’s just… I read some depressing things for school about the British Raj, and they kind of got to me.”
“Ah,” Brodeur said, her French accent suddenly becoming more pronounced, her tone a little sneering. “The British.”
“You don’t like the British?”
“Their empire was the greatest tragedy in the history of the world.”
“Really?” I asked. “Are you interested in politics?”
“Politics? Of course not. Food, Mr. Jilani. All that matters is food, yes? Can you imagine if the French had taken India? What magnificent fusion of our two food cultures would the world have seen? Instead, the British got there, and all they came up with was”—she paused to shake her head in disgust—“chips and curry.”
For the first time since I’d googled the Bengal Famine, I laughed.
She nodded. “Better. You must always smile when you are cooking, Mr. Jilani, otherwise your work, I have found, is not as good.”
“But you never smile when you’re working.”
“This is true,” Chef Brodeur agreed. “I am, however, much more talented than you. In any case, fools should always be happy. It is, you see, all they have.”
I was pretty sure I’d been insulted, but I wasn’t really sure how to respond. “It’s just… did you know that there were a series of famines in India under the British, and the biggest of them, the Bengal Famine, killed like three million people or something?”
“I did not.” Brodeur sounded more serious than usual, which I hadn’t thought possible. “Nature is cruel at times.”
“Not nature,” I said. That sounded like a ridiculous thing to say, of course. It was hard to imagine that human beings could cause a famine. From what I’d read, however, scientists had somehow studied the soil and found that a lack of rainfall had not been a problem. “I mean, it was the way the Raj handled things. What lives they chose to care about, what lives they didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“When they were trying to figure out where to send food, Winston Churchill said it was less important to feed Indians, who already didn’t have enough to eat, than to feed sturdy Greeks.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Sturdy Greeks?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t the one who’d said it. “Also, the British totally looted Bengal, so the people there couldn’t help themselves, and then they adopted policies that made everything worse. Churchill even had food that could have gone to Indian ports kept in some country called the Balkans—”
“That isn’t a country.”
“Oh. Okay. But still.”
“Still,” she agreed.
“Anyway, I’m sorry, Chef. I mean, I guess no one thinks it matters anymore, but everyone says Churchill is great and no one tells this part of his history. It just…”
“It bothers you.” When I nodded, she smiled. Actually smiled. I didn’t know her face could do that. I glanced around quickly
to see if anyone else had seen it, but it didn’t appear they had. No one would believe me if I told them. “Good.”
“Good?”
“But of course. Maybe you’ll be a chef after all, no?”
“What? I don’t see how they’re connected.…”
“What I don’t see,” she said, “is how you can expect to stand around talking and keep your job when there is work to be done.”
I opened my mouth to protest. I wasn’t the one who’d started the conversation. But then I stopped myself. I knew perfectly well that there was only one acceptable response, the two words I said most often in my life.
“Yes, Chef.”
“Hey, Danyal.”
A lot of people have used my name in my life, and I must have heard it like a million times, but no one, ever, said it like Kaval Sabsvari. She made my name sound like it had been dripped in rich, creamy, melty chocolate. I don’t think I was imagining it either, because her friends, who’d been walking with her, giggled and scattered, leaving us alone.
How were girls so good at that? I’d never managed to make Sohrab or Zar get lost when I’d wanted them to leave. In fact, just like they had at the Sabsvaris’ basketball court, they tended to show up when they were least wanted.
“Happy Valentine’s Day.”
I swallowed. “Uh… yeah. You too.”
I didn’t really know what to make of that. Muslims and Valentine’s Day didn’t mix well. A bunch of people think celebrating romance runs counter to Islamic values. Saudi Arabia actually bans roses and everything in the shape of a heart on the fourteenth of February.
In Pakistan, there is a court ruling prohibiting Valentine’s Day celebrations. I remember my parents laughing about it, wondering if it would lead to an underground market for suddenly dangerous flowers. Apparently, there is little a government can do to keep people from celebrating what they want.
Personally, I had never made a big deal out of the day because I’d never had anyone to celebrate with. I hadn’t even thought to say something to Kaval, much less get her a card or whatever. I had no idea how she, or Sohrab, would react.
More Than Just a Pretty Face Page 10
