The Hundred-Foot Journey (11 page)

“And what’s this? And this?”

The other vendors laughed as the red-faced Madame Picard rushed to restack her pears.

“Hiding worm holes under ‘quality’ stickers. Disgraceful.”

Madame Mallory turned her back on the Widow Picard and walked to a stall at the far end of the first row, where a shrunken white-haired couple in matching aprons and looking rather like salt-and-pepper shakers stood behind the counter.

“
Bonjour, Madame Mallory.
”

Mallory grunted a good-morning and pointed to a basket of waxy purple orbs on the floor at the back of the stall.

“I’ll take the aubergines. All of them.”

“I am sorry, madame, but they are not for sale.”

“They’ve been sold?”

“
Oui, madame
.”

Mallory felt a tightening in her chest. “To the Indian?”

“
Oui, madame.
A half hour ago.”

“I’ll take the zucchini, then.”

The elderly man looked pained. “I am sorry.”

For a few moments Mallory was unable to move, to speak even. But suddenly, from the far end of Lumière’s markets, a booming voice in accented English rose majestically above the general din.

Mallory’s head jerked toward the sound of the voice, and before the elderly farmer couple could recover, Mallory was barging through the early morning market crowd, her baskets bunched in front like a snowplow, forcing the other shoppers out of her way.

Papa and I were at the edges of the market bidding for two dozen red and green Tupperware bowls. The trader—a tough Pole—was holding firm, and Papa’s approach to such obstinacy was to roar his price at an ever-louder decibel. The final touch was the menacing pacing back and forth in front of the stall, intimidating other potential customers from coming forward, a tactic I had seen him use to devastating effect in the markets of Bombay.

But in Lumière there was the slight obstacle of language. Papa’s only foreign language was English, and it was my job to translate his ravings into my schoolboy French. I did not mind: this was how I eventually met several girls my age, such as Chantal, the mushroom picker from across the valley, her nails always gritty with dark humus. In this case, however, the Pole across the table could speak no English and just a little French, and that protected him from Papa’s full frontal assault. So what we had was a stalemate. The Pole simply crossed his arms across his chest and shook his head.

“What is this?” Papa said, poking a green Tupperware lid. “Just a bit of plastic, no? Anyone can make this.”

Madame Mallory deposited herself squarely in front of Papa’s path as he paced, and he was suddenly forced to stop short, his great bulk towering over the little woman. I could see this was the last thing he expected—to be stopped by a woman—and he peered down at her with a puzzled expression.

“Wah?”

“I am your neighbor, Madame Mallory, from across the street,” she said in excellent English.

Papa gave the woman a dazzling smile, the Pole and the savage Tupperware negotiations instantly forgotten. “Hello,” he boomed. “Le Saule Pleureur, nah? I know. You must come over and meet the family. Have tea.”

“I don’t like what you are doing.”

“Wah?”

“To our street. I don’t like the music, the placard. It’s ugly. So unrefined.”

I have not often seen my father at a loss for words, but at this remark he looked as if someone had punched him hard in the stomach.

“It’s in very bad taste,” Mallory continued, brushing an imaginary thread off her sleeve. “You must take it down. That sort of thing is all right in India, but not here.”

She looked him straight in the face, tapped him on the chest with her finger. “And another thing. It is tradition here in Lumière that Madame Mallory has the first choice of the morning’s produce. It’s been this way for decades. As a foreigner, I appreciate you would have no way of knowing this, but now you do.”

She offered Papa a wintry smile.

“It’s very important for newcomers to start off on the right foot, don’t you agree?”

Papa scowled, his face almost purple, but I who knew him so well could see—in the downturned corners of his eyes—he was not mad but deeply hurt. I moved to his side.

“Who you tink you are?”

“I told you. I am Madame Mallory.”

“And I,” Papa said, raising his head and slapping his chest, “I am Abbas Haji, Bombay’s greatest restaurateur.”

“
Pff.
This is France. We are not interested in your curries.”

By this time a small crowd had gathered around Madame Mallory and Papa. Monsieur Leblanc pushed his way into the center of the ring. “Gertrude,” he said sternly. “Let us go.” He pulled at her elbow. “Come, now. Enough.”

“Who you tink you are?” repeated Papa, stepping forward. “Wah dis talk in third person like maharani? Who you? God give you right to all best cuts of meat and fish in the Jura? Nah? Oh, then perhaps you own dis town. Yaar? Is that what give you right to the fresh produce every morning? Or perhaps you are some big important memsahib who owns the farmers?”

Papa thrust his enormous belly at Madame Mallory and she had to step back, a look of incredulity slapped across her face.

“How dare you talk to me in this impertinent manner.”

“Tell me,” he roared at the onlookers, “does this woman own your farms and your livestock and vegetables, or do you sell to highest bidder?” He smacked his palm. “I pay cash. No waiting.”

There was a gasp from the crowd. This they understood.

Mallory swiftly turned her back on Papa and shrugged on a pair of black leather gloves.

“Un chien méchant,”
she said dryly. The assembled crowd laughed.

“What she say?” Papa roared at me. “Wah?”

“I think she called you a mad dog.”

What happened then is forever burned in my memory. The crowd parted for Madame Mallory and Monsieur Leblanc as they began to leave, but Papa, agile for a man of his size, quickly ran forward and stuck his face close to the chef’s retreating ear.

“Bowwow. Roooff. Rooff.”

Mallory jerked her head away. “Stop it.”

“Rooff. Rooff.”

“Stop it. Stop it you . . . you horrible man.”

“Grrrrr. Rooff.”

Mallory covered her ears with her hands.

And then she broke into a trot.

The villagers, never before having seen Madame Mallory ridiculed, roared with amazed laughter and Papa turned and joyously joined them, watching the elderly woman and Monsieur Leblanc disappear behind the Banque Nationale de Paris on the corner.

We should have known then what trouble was ahead. “She was jabbering away like a madwoman,” Auntie told us when we came home. “Slam car door. Pang.” And over the next days, as I glanced across the street, I periodically spotted a pointy nose pressed up against the fogged windowpane.

Maison Mumbai’s opening day approached. Lorries backed into the Dufour courtyard: tables came from Lyon, dishware from Chamonix, plastic menu folders from Paris. One day a hip-high wooden elephant, trumpeting, suddenly greeted me as I entered the restaurant’s doors. A hookah went into the corner of the lobby, and brass bowls on little tables were filled with plastic roses purchased at the local cash-and-carry.

By now the carpenters had converted the three reception rooms into the restaurant’s dining room, and across the teak-paneled walls Papa hung posters of the Ganges, the Taj Mahal, Kerala tea plantations. On one wall he had a local artisan paint a mural of Indian life—of a village woman hauling water from a well, of all things. And all day while we worked speakers on the walls blasted out geets
and ghazals, the warbling Urdu ballads and love poems of our heritage.

Papa was Big Abbas again. He worked for days with my oldest brother designing and redesigning an advertisement for the local newspapers. They finally settled their differences in a notebook of inky scratches, driving their design to
Le Jura
’s office in Clairvaux-les-Lacs. A silhouette of a trumpeting elephant, usually between the sports and television listings, filled an entire page of the newspaper. The balloon coming out of the elephant’s mouth offered everyone who showed up at Maison Mumbai’s opening night a free carafe of wine. The ad ran in
Le Jura
three weekends in a row. The restaurant’s slogan:
“Maison Mumbai—la culture indienne en Lumière.”

And I, at the age of eighteen, finally took up my calling. It was Papa’s idea, ordering me into the kitchen. Ammi was simply incapable of serving a hundred people at a time, and my aunt was the only woman in all India who could not cook. Not even an onion bhaji. But I choked, suddenly afraid of my destiny. “I am a boy,” I yelled. “Make Mehtab do it.”

Papa swatted me across the back of my head. “She got other tings to do,” he roared. “You spend more time than anyone else in the kitchen with Ammi and Bappu. Don’t worry. You’re just nervous, yaar. We’ll help.”

And so my days disappeared in belching smoke and the steamy rattle of pots. Tentatively, backed by constant consultations with my sister and Papa, a rough vision of my menu emerged. I rehearsed and rehearsed until I was sure: lamb brain stuffed with green chutney, coated with egg and tawa-grilled; chicken cinnamon masala and beef cooked with vinegar-spices. For side dishes I settled on steamed rice crumpets and cottage cheese simmered with fenugreek. And as a starter, my personal favorite: clear trotters soup.

The wheel of life was turning. Ammi steadily lost control as I steadily gained it. Dementia had her now, full by the throat. The occasional erratic scene we witnessed in London had become commonplace, and she drifted in and out of this fragile mental state, only rarely again returning to us in moments of lucidity. I recall her looking over my shoulder, giving me useful tips on how to extract the rich flavor from cardamom, very much like she was in the old days on the Napean Sea Road. Moments later, however, she was frothing at the mouth and cursing me as if I were her worst enemy. It broke my heart. But with the restaurant opening so soon, I could ill afford hand-wringing, and I instead buried myself in the kadais.

But there were scenes. Ammi’s obsessions often fixated on the daal
,
the chickpea staple of Indian cooking I was making in the kitchen, and we frequently argued over the subject. One day, as I was preparing for the grand opening, I simmered an aromatic mix of onions, garlic, and daal. Ammi wandered over and smacked me hard on the arm with a spoon.

“That not how we Hajis make it,” she said, grimacing the Indian way. “Do like I said.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I add a tomato at the end. When it bursts, give a bite to the daal and lovely color.”

Ammi scrunched up her face in disgust and again swatted me on the head with the spoon. But Papa nodded at me over the old woman’s back, and his support shored up my confidence. I rubbed the back of my skull, still smarting from her smack, and then gently eased her toward the door and out of the kitchen.

“Leave, Ammi, please! Leave until you can control yourself. I must prepare for the opening. You understand?”

It was around this time that I undid my apron and walked into town with Uncle Mayur, just a young man desperate for a break from all the pressures of the opening. It was late morning and Mehtab had sent us out in search of supplies, laundry detergent and steel wool pads to scrub the pots and pans.

It was when we returned from town, arms laden with bags from the local Carrefour, that Uncle Mayur made a face and clicked his tongue, nodding in the direction of Le Saule Pleureur.

A young farmer led a monstrous pig around to the back of the restaurant by a rope tied to the ring through its nose. Must have been five hundred pounds of animal. Mallory, Leblanc, and the rest of the staff were looking very officious as they fussed out back with buckets of water and knives and laid out large planks of wood and scrubbed down the country table standing at the top of the field. The snorting pig clattered onto the planks of wood at the sight of a dish of nettles and potatoes carefully placed in a strategic spot under a sturdy chestnut tree. I noticed a complicated system of pulleys hung from the branches overhead.

St. Augustine’s parish priest read from the Bible, sprinkled holy water on the pig, on the ground, on the wooden plank, his lips ceaselessly moving in whispered prayer. The mayor was there, too, standing alongside the local butcher, who was sharpening knives on a whetting stone.

I remember Lumière’s mayor respectfully had his hat off, and in the sharp wind his elaborate comb-over unraveled and began to flick foolishly about his head. And I remember this ludicrous picture of the mayor and his dancing hair as the butcher removed a revolver from his apron, walked over, and dispatched the pig with a shot through the head.

A bark, a defecation, and the thud of the pig as its legs buckled and it landed heavily on the wooden planks. Leblanc and three of the other men instantly pulled at the pulleys, hoisting the planks over onto the scrubbed table, even while the pig still twitched madly, its hooves scrabbling and jerking.

“Christians.” Uncle Mayur snorted contemptuously. “Come, let us go.”

But we couldn’t move, not as the pig’s throat was slit and blood by the liter pulsed from the gash, the red spray pumping into a large plastic bucket. And I’ll always remember the sight of Madame Mallory washing her arms under the outside tap, then whipping the hot blood with her forearms as her sous chef added vinegar to the bucket, to keep the blood from coagulating. The way they later added cooked leeks and apples and parsley, along with fresh cream, to the bucket of fresh blood, before stuffing boudin skins with the thickened paste. And I remember the smells that came to us in the wind, so powerfully of blood and shit and death, and the way they scraped the pig’s hooves clean, scattered straw around the carcass, and set it alight to remove the animal’s bristles. All this I remember, as the three of them carved the animal up over the rest of the day, the butcher and Mallory and her sous chef periodically sipping from tumblers of white wine as they hacked away at the warm slabs of bloodied meat still steaming in the air. And how this public butchering went on into the next day, almost all through the weekend. How they showered shoulder meat with salt and pepper and then spooned the ground flesh into skins,
saucissons
to dry in Mallory’s back shed, where pears and apples and prunes were stacked on wooden shelves according to size.