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Teeku, Feeku

M. L. Owen

    Once, on the way to a restaurant, I passed a beggar with a dead child in her lap.
    The Kwality Cafe sat on the banks of the Tapti River behind Lal Bagh, Red Park. I ate there often at first. It was known as the only western style restaurant in Surat, which mostly meant you could get the kind of Indian food there that one gets in an Indian restaurant outside of India. On one such occasion I ordered the tomato soup, one of the actual western dishes on the menu. It was so spicy I could not eat it. I complained to Mr. Sharma, the owner and a neighbor. He insisted that it was not spiced.
    The child’s belly was distended, its mouth agape. Its hair was reddish brown.
    I hired a cook, Ushiben. The food she made was horrible. All of her curries tasted the same, except that some were too spicy and some too bland, teeku or feeku. Only her chapatis, a tortilla-like bread, tasted good. No wonder, I thought, that so many Indians were malnourished. Soon, I would be also. I ate lots of chapatis and made regular trips to the Kwality Cafe.
    Maybe the child is not dead, I thought. Flies gather on the faces of many beggar children. The sores attract them.
    Bakul came to dinner one night. He could not eat the food. “She is a Maharati. They don’t know how to cook. You need to hire a Gujarati. We say, ‘Cassi-mun muri gai, Surat-mun kai.’ Die in Benares - because you will lose much bad karma by dying there - and eat in Surat. You must find a new cook.”
    She held the child to her breast, as though nursing it, but its head lolled off to the side.
    Bakul brought Ramesh by one day. “He is a very good cook. He worked for missionaries. He is very honest, and he can make anything.” That meant I would have to fire Ushiben. I had never fired anyone in my life. Until Ushiben, I had never hired anyone.
    Perhaps, I thought, she does not realize the child is dead. Perhaps she thinks it is sleeping.
    Ushiben informed me that she was pregnant. I had asked her about that when I hired her, and she had assured me that she was not. I reminded her of that. She said she had not realized that she was, back then. Her periods had only recently become regular. Indeed, regular menstruation was why she had finally gotten married, at the age of seventeen. Ushiben discovered why her periods were absent when her mother came to visit from Maharastra and explained it to her. “It is well you have a job,” her mother said. “You should go to a doctor for your first child.”
    The woman did not look at me, nor at the child, nor, that I could tell, at anything else.
    Ramesh cooked the meals. Ushiben made the chapatis. Ramesh did not cook Gujarati food. At home, his wife did the cooking. He had learned to cook in the home of missionaries. When I wanted Indian food, deshi khana, he would do it, but it was not his strong suit. At first he made six-course meals, and my living allowance quickly ran low. Then Ramesh learned to live on a Peace Corps, rather than a missionary, budget, and to serve chapatis with all meals.
    The child’s corpse may have been supplied to the woman by someone else. There were stories about purposeful mutilations in the pursuit of a career in begging.
    Ushiben was frightened and homesick. Her husband was always away. She went home to Maharastra to have her baby. Ramesh made chapatis, but they were amoeba-shaped. Sometimes he would serve sliced bread he had purchased in the market, and would tell me, in Gujarati words of one syllable, that he had not had time to make chapatis. When he had something complicated to tell me, he would bring his son with him. His son studied English in school, and Ramesh would say he needed to practice his English. I knew it was because he did not trust my Gujarati. I went along with it. I did not trust my Gujarati.
    I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit with my dead child in my lap, under the gaze of strangers.
    Ushiben stayed in Maharastra. Ramesh proved that one can make a chocolate cake with the equivalent of Nesquik. Before I left India, I tried the tomato soup one more time. It was bland. “Mr. Sharma,” I said. “Your tomato soup used to be teeku and now it’s feeku.” “My tomato soup is just as it has always been. How was the shai korma?”
    I gave her some coins.

 

M. L. Owen explains that this was originally published in Mosaic, Magazine for Short Fiction, Autumn, 1999 issue (with some slight differences).

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