Excerpt from Operation Monsoon

from "Gopal's Kitchen"

I sat at the table and blinked a few times. Eggs, orange juice, my mother, my brother, the servants, the smell of warm, thick date syrup over toast, all shimmered like apparitions. “Eat something.” My mother’s voice was far, far away, weakly penetrating the dense fog squeezing my head. “You can go back to sleep...sleep your jet lag off...this is what happens when you make a seventeen-hour flight after six years….” Scrambled eggs. A delicate hint of coconut and almonds, silken against my tongue. “Rajiv Gandhi assassinated…Tamil Tigers…God knows what kind of riots will start…Floods, prices going up…Who’s to take over….” Eggs melted in my mouth with that blend of secret spices only he knew—I dropped the fork and stood up startled, the grogginess vanishing for a few seconds, swept away by a roaring storm of light.

“Who made the eggs?”

“Don’t scream so.” My mother pushed me back into the chair.

“Namaste, didi,” I heard from the kitchen door.

“Gyan,” said my mother. “Taken over, two years now.”

He stood against the doorframe, bowing his head slightly, clasping his hands against his chest. His white kurta had a few turmeric stains. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, smiled, touched his forehead. I nodded. He nodded back, swinging his lank, straight hair that fell across his eyes. There was something very gentle and calm in his face and about his slight form.

“Who’s he?” I muttered under my breath
.
“He’s the one,” my mother answered, touching my shoulder. She let out a nervous giggle.

“He’s the one—the one—he got the kidney.”

The fog coiled around my head, making me gasp. At the center of its steely haze, I saw a fresh green coconut.

Gopal’s kidney. I lay on my bed and looked around the room I had abandoned eight years earlier. Rajiv was blown up the night I landed in Delhi. “India is finished,” my brother said. “There’s a strange calm all around, like a lull before a storm.” Just like that day, years ago, when I came back from school and I heard my mother’s shocked voice, “How could you?” And Gopal, bowing his head, asking her to keep it down, not to tell the children. That long scar across his back. But his face calm, a tired calm, in spite of it all.

My room had a petrified calmness about it this afternoon. Eight years ago it used to look like a cyclone had ripped through it. Clothes, books, shoes, cassettes scattered in heaps all around. Posters of twisted agonized faces and bodies screaming silent messages of chaos. Plants, half collapsed from lack of water, lying limp in pots as if ready to give up the ghost any second.

The books, the posters, the plants were all still there. The bed was in the same old place by the windows. My desk next to it, then the dressers. The rug had been cleaned and the reds and blues glowed bright. The paisleys on the rug turned into little kidneys from time to time as I stared at them. They turned green for a second, altered shape, became green coconuts. I wiped the coconuts off with one strong blink. Paisleys, kidneys.

So he had it now. Gopal’s kidney. Gyan, then, was the murderer. And here he was how? why? Bringing forth those exquisite scrambled eggs, Gopal’s special.

For the next few days, lunches and dinners were spectacular. Gyan overwhelmed the table with Gopal’s special lamb chops, chicken korma, biryani, all the different vegetable and fish concoctions, and the fabulous desserts that Gopal had been famous for. I chewed and swallowed cautiously, every mouthful a time bomb of flavors. Curling shrimp quivered at the end of my fork as if ready to explode. We ate, smiling, cracking jokes, bursting out laughing. “Tatva-gyan,” my brother said to Gyan. “Hey, Enlightenment, get more rice, yaar.” Gyan, quiet, shy, withdrawing, smiled and vanished into the kitchen. He didn’t have Gopal’s garrulous charm, his effusiveness.

“I don’t understand,” I said to my mother and father. They smiled, shrugged.

“Well, it’s sort of this way,” my mother said. “He appeared just after Holi two years back. Said he could cook and wanted to work. Of course, I was wary at first. You know, he had never worked anywhere before, he said. There was no one I could call to inquire about him. And he refused, just flatly refused, to tell us where he was from. He begged for a trial run. So I let him cook for a day. Well, that was that. When we sat down to eat, we nearly passed out with amazement. Gopal’s egg korma! Gopal’s shrimp curry!”

“We found out about the kidney business almost a year later,” my father said.

“The mali found out and told me,” my mother added.

“How is it you didn’t choke on the kormas and curries,” I asked, “knowing that Gopal died of kidney failure four years ago?”

“But the food, sis,” my brother rolled his eyes, “made us lose it, just swoon. Hey, A-gyan, rice!” Unconscious, my brother called him in jest, adding an ‘A’ to his name.

“What are we eating here?” I asked weakly, in spite of wanting to scream.

“Just delicious,” my brother drawled, a snarl of a smile expanding across his face. “Let the taste seduce you.”

Copyright © 2003 by Shona Ramaya. All rights reserved.