Sara, A Tale of Love and Betrayal by Shashi Warrier

I visited Abba and Ammi and my sisters regularly, at least three or four times a year, but the squabbling continued during the visits. What did the old man want to tell me now? I wondered, because it wasn’t in his nature to apologize to one of his children. ‘What?’ I asked warily.
‘This last week in bed, I wondered why we fought so much,’ he said. ‘Now I understand.’
‘Well, then tell me,’ I said, sceptically.

He smiled through his exhaustion. ‘Light,’ he said. ‘Lighting.’
‘Light?’ I exclaimed softly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You learned to cook in a bright, modern kitchen,’ he explained. ‘You depend too much on your eyes. Me, I learned
in a dark, smoky room. I go by memory and feel and smell and sound more than sight.’
‘Let me think on it,’ I told him.
‘No need to think,’ he said. ‘We’ll try it out the next time you visit.’
‘Rest,’ I told him.
‘I’m resting,’ he replied testily. ‘What else do you think I can do alone in bed with a needle in my arm?’

He drifted off seconds later. He was on a drip that contained something that encouraged him to sleep, and there was a catheter to make sure he didn’t have to get out of bed to pee. I dozed in my chair by his bed until he stirred again, perhaps a couple of hours later.

‘What did you mean about the light?’ I asked, picking up where we’d left off about my cooking, which I thought was pretty good.

‘Because you should learn to use every sense when you cook,’ he replied, ‘and you don’t.’ He paused. ‘Enough. I’m
going back to sleep.’
And he did. We never spoke about it until a few months later, when he had recovered enough to do half of what he’d been doing before the illness. I was visiting again, and helping him out in the restaurant kitchen – he’d taken on a sort of assistant since his heart attack, but the boy just refused to learn– and the power went off, leaving us in darkness, only partly lit by the cooking fire. Abba just leaned over someplace in the
dark and fished out a candle, lighting it with a spill. He picked up a little bowl of what I knew was coarsely powdered pepper and handed it to me.

‘Is this ready?’ he asked.
I sniffed at the powder, took a pinch between my finger and thumb, letting it fall back into the bowl. ‘I think it is,’ I said.
‘Don’t just pat it with your fingers, boy, feel it! Dig your fingers in,’ he said, a tinge of his old impatience entering his
voice.
I held back my sharp response, and did as he said. It was a revelation. Deeper inside, I felt the finer grains below the layer of coarse grains on top. It was too finely ground. We’d have to use it elsewhere, and grind some more for now. Since the electricity was gone, I’d have to do it the old way, with mortar and pestle, but I didn’t mind because I’d learnt something. I grinned. ‘Okay, Abba,’ I told him. ‘I’ll grind some more.’

He straightened up from the pot he was supervising. ‘In every other way,’ he said, his bearded face Mephistophelian
in the light of the flickering cooking fire, ‘of the two of us, you are the better cook. Now that you understand your one weakness, I expect you to be the better in every way by the next time you come here.
‘Then, if you are ready, I will tell you the secret that my father passed on to me.’
I wanted to hug the old man but I didn’t because that was how it was between us. I thought I knew which secret he meant and wanted to get my hands on it, so I paid attention to my fingers and skin and found my judgment of all sorts of things getting finer and finer.
On my next visit home, he barely gave me time to leave my bag in the house before dragging me off to a series of shops to buy a range of spices and herbs, very small quantities ofsome, and surprisingly large quantities of others. He took meto the kitchen, and there, under his supervision, I ground and powdered and heated and toasted and mixed over a hundred ingredients together into a soft brown powder. At the end we had a week’s supply of the family’s signature spice mix,something that he’d hitherto made all by himself behind lockeddoors, never allowing anyone else a peep at what he was doing. Then he watched me carefully as I prepared my own welcomedinner – a delicately scented biriyani – tasted a spoonful, and, closing his eyes in pleasure, brought tears to my own. ‘You’re
ready now,’ he said, savouring the taste. ‘You will do this for your son if he, too, becomes a cook.’

I couldn’t help pulling his leg. ‘What if it’s my daughter who becomes a cook?’ I asked.

He glared at me. After a long, heavy, silence, he said, ‘If she is as gifted as you are, you will do it for her.’

Again, I didn’t hug him, because that was still how it was between us. He was always cranky, and I never did work up the nerve to tell him how much I loved him and how much I owed him, but we got along well enough since that night in the hospital. We didn’t quarrel even when, some years later, I brought home a bride-to-be who was both a firangi and a kafir. Abba and I did quarrel, though, over the knowledge that followed my firangi kafir bride, and that was serious …

Excerpted from Sara by Shashi Warrier

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B/paperback | INR 399 | Modern and contemporary fiction