The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil

Bilal chuckles.

‘A lot of shopping you’re doing,’ Doctor observes, looking to the bags in Bilal’s hands, which strain with tomatoes, potatoes, and packets of spices.

He raises a grizzled eyebrow. ‘So much food, beta?’

Bilal looks down at the packets in his hands and grins. ‘I find nothing feeds the soul as well as food. Don’t you?’ He hesitates. ‘My wife – cooking reminds me of her.’

Doctor smiles. ‘She was a good cook, beta?’ Bilal looks sheepish. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Well, you must teach me how,’ says Doctor. ‘I’ve always wanted to learn.’

‘Of course,’ says Bilal amiably. ‘In fact, I was thinking of having a dinner for everyone. You can help me.’

Later, upstairs in his kitchen as Bilal unloads packets of spices into the cupboards, he considers the bag of coriander seeds in his hands; just a few years ago he wouldn’t have known what this was and yet now he knows how to clean it, roast it gently in a pan, and grind it with cumin to get the most out of its flavour. This learning process was how he had managed his grief.

He had been widowed at a young age from a distant wife, left with a daughter on the cusp of puberty. The loss had overwhelmed him with an unbearable feeling he had not known what to do with. Immediately after her burial, he threw himself in his wife’s study and locked the door. Surprised at this passionate display of emotion from their usually docile relative, his family had attempted to break the door down. It was while he was sitting among her papers and complicated books – works that even in her death mocked him with their serious titles and dull covers – that he saw a heavy red book planted on top of one of the shelves. While his relatives banged at the door, he climbed up a small stepladder, pulled the book down, and blew dust off the cover. It was Indian Delights, the legendary local Indian cookbook his mother had bequeathed them for their wedding, that his wife had never used. Curious, he opened the book and turned the pages slowly. He muttered the words to himself under his breath, rolling his tongue over each pronunciation: paratha, korma, jalebi, papadums, and Ras malai.

He ran his finger under each word and wondered what they would taste like. When they finally broke the door down, that was how his family found him; perched upon the stepladder with the heavy book on his lap, his head bent low. He calmly climbed down the ladder and walked past them muttering, ‘Gulab jamuns.’

And that was how Bilal Malek ended up cooking.

He spent much of his mourning period in the kitchen, whisking bowls of cream in the crook of one arm while inspecting a recipe with the other, then ladling rich curries onto visitors’ plates. For hours in the day he read cookbooks and at night he tossed and turned in bed as he dreamed about beating egg whites to stiff peaks and braising fresh garlic in curry leaves. Now, over pots of boiling water, he steams rice and potatoes, sifts through pans of cumin as they toast on the stove.

It softens the blow somehow, makes something come alive again.

***