I remember the delight with which I read the Canadian edition of Chef more than a year ago. Finally,somebody had written a human story from within the barracks. We run Kashmir,as we do much of the Northeast,using our military. Every significant decision is about security and on all decisions of security the military has the final say. Nevertheless what people often forget is that the military is made of human beings. Jaspreet Singh is uniquely well placed to draw out the irony of what it means to be part of such a regime. This is not just because he grew up in Kashmir where his father served in the Border Security Force,but also because they returned to Delhi in the 1980s. Almost immediately afterwards,as a teenaged Sikh during the 1984 riots,Jaspreet found that for him it was Kashmir that was safe,Delhi that was the abode of savages. The main character in Chef,Kirpal Singh or Kip,also approaches the subject obliquely. He is very much attached to the military; his father was a decorated war hero,and Kip himself serves at the table of the General,the Grand Chef himself,who watches over the brew that is Northern Command. Nevertheless Kip does not fully belong either. A failed medical exam means he cannot be an officer and enters through a back door as a trainee chef guided by the cynical,difficult but brilliant Chef Kishen. His real problem in following in his fathers footsteps is that he is an aesthete,not a soldier. Kips reaction to music,food,women,or even terrain,is a sensualists. He is hypnotised by beauty,but this appreciation from within the military regime means that it is trapped within him. Most important things in our lives,like recipes,cannot be shared. They remain within us with a dash of this and a whiff of that and trouble our bones. This is not a simple soldiers gaze,and Chef is a poetic,sensually rich exploration of Kashmir. It also means that when the hard realities of the military regime intrude the rampant corruption,the corrosive effects of ruling over the lives of others,the futility of imposing the policy of incompetent political masters Kip is literally unable to process it. His disaster is foreordained,but it is not the disaster of losing ones humanity,instead it is the disaster of holding on to his humanity in such an environment. This is not a book to be read for answers. There is a conversation between Kishen and Kip that seems to capture the why of the book,when Kip confronts Kishen about what is written in Kishens journal. But,why? Why did you want me to read it? Kip asks. Because otherwise men are strangers to one another. Even if we carry the same wounds,we remain strangers. We cant express ourselves properly. Not even our anger. I was able to write certain things down because I was writing them for you. At times though there seems to be too much in the slim book from the Hazratbal crisis involving the missing relic,to the traumas of Partition,to the great ice-ridden folly of Siachen around which much of the plot revolves. It creates an almost hallucinatory effect,but this at times seems to swallow up the storyline,with the climax atop the great glacier,the weird story of the unexpected prisoner from the other side remaining somehow beyond the grasp. It remains a book of great beauty,both in the musical,dancing use of language as well as its stirring evocation of all that makes us human,makes life desirable. Nevertheless it is also confusing,the kernel of it remains elusive,the great issues can be glimpsed but not really resolved. In the end though,maybe that is not so much the limitations of the writer,or the story he tells,but of the reality we currently live with,and which we still do not know what to do with. Omair Ahmad is an author and works with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation
