The Hundred-Foot Journey Read Online Free PDF

looked to me like a desiccated bug. The woman’s sunken eyes were heavily lined with kohl, I remember, but in the heat the makeup had run into the creases of her face; red lipstick had been applied earlier in the day with a very shaky hand. So the overall affect, in the bad light, was rather frightening, like being served lunch by a cadaver.
    But the woman’s gravelly-voiced Hindi was lively, and she handed us some menus before shuffling off to make us mango
lassi. The strangeness of the place overwhelmed me. I didn’t know where to begin with this stiff menu—such exotic-sounding dishes like bouillabaisse and
coq au vin
—
and I looked panic-stricken up at my mother. But Mummy smiled kindly and said, “Never be afraid of trying something new, Hassan. Very important. It is the spice of life.” She pointed at a slip of paper. “Why don’t we take the day’s special? Do you agree? Dessert is included. Very good value. After our shopping, not such a bad thing.”
    I remember clearly the
menu complet
started with a
salade frisée
and mustard vinaigrette, followed by
frites
and a minute steak on which sat a dollop of Café de Paris (a delicious pat of herbs-and-garlic butter), and ended, finally, with a wet and wobbly crème brûlée. I’m sure it was a mediocre lunch—the steak as tough as Mummy’s newly acquired footwear—but it was instantly elevated to my pantheon of unforgettable meals because of the overall magic of the day.
    For the sweet caramel pudding that dissolved on my tongue is forever fused in my memory with the look on Mummy’s face, a kindness graced by the inner glow of our carefree outing. And I can still see the twinkle in her eye as she leaned forward and whispered, “Let’s tell your father French food is new favorite. Nah? Much better than Indian, we’ll say. That should get him excited! What d’you think, Hassan?”
    I was fourteen.
    I was walking home from St. Xavier’s, weighted down with my math and French books, picking away at a paper cone of bhelpuri. I lifted my head and saw a black-eyed boy my age staring back at me from the filthy shacks off the road. He was washing himself, from a cracked bucket, and his wet, brown skin was in places turned white by the blinding sun. A cow was collapsed at his feet. His sister squatted in a watery ditch nearby while a mat-haired woman behind them lined a concrete water pipe with ratty belongings.
    The boy and I locked eyes, for a second, before he sneered, reached down, and flapped his genitals at me. It was one of those moments of childhood when you realize the world is not as you assumed. There were people, I suddenly understood, people who hated me even though they did not know me.
    A silver Toyota suddenly roared past us on its way up to Malabar Hill, breaking the boy’s mean-eyed spell, and I gratefully turned my head to follow the shiny car’s diesel wake. When I turned back, the boy was gone. Only the tail-twitching cow in the mud and the girl poking the wormy feces just squeezed from her bottom.
    From inside the water pipe, shadowy rustlings.
    Bapaji was a man of respect in the shantytown. He was one of those who had made it, and the poor used to press their palms together when he made his arrogant way through the barracks, tapping the heads of the strongest young men. The chosen tore through the clamoring crowds and jammed onto the back of his three-wheeler put-putting on the roadside. Bapaji always picked his tiffin delivery boys from the shantytown, and he was much revered because of it. “Cheapest workers I can find,” he rasped at me.
    When my father refocused the business on the higher-margin restaurants, however, he stopped hiring the young men from the slum. Papa said our middle-class clients wanted clean waiters, not the filthy rabble from the barracks. And that was that. But still they came, begging for work, their gaunt faces pressed against the back door, Papa chasing them away with a roar and a swift kick.
    Papa was a