'The Paradise of Food' by Khalid Jawed, a kitchen cabinet of memories

Bindu Menon

KHALID JAWED has a rare quality that not all storytellers possess: the art of deception. His novel ‘The Paradise of Food’ has a slow, surreal unravelling and when one has almost settled into the unhurried pace of the narrative, Jawed catches hold of your collar and drags you deep into the dark abyss of the protagonist’s soul.

Jawed’s book, originally published in Urdu as ‘Ne’mat Khana’ in 2014, deserved a wider readership, and that has been made possible through this remarkable translation by Baran Farooqi. Jawed belongs to the new wave of fiction writers in Urdu. As Farooqi elaborates, Jawed’s fiction is “overshadowed by the consciousness of fear, disease and failure, spawned by the evil in human nature”.

The novel takes us through the life of the narrator Hafeezuddin Babar alias Guddu Miyan from his orphaned childhood to old age, and then beyond as memories emerge from the black hole of his rather despondent existence. Are these memories of his ancestral home and his large extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins a burden bogging him down, or are they the very reason for his living? Or, for that matter, are life and death any different?

As Miyan expounds on these existential questions, we also learn of his power or rather curse of premonition, uncannily linked to the kitchen. The kitchen is, as Miyan reiterates, a dangerous place. Miyan, at regular intervals in the novel, is seized by the strong feeling of an impending tragic event, a foreboding that is connected to food. And he often pontificates the stark truth that humans live within their bowels, mentally and spiritually.

‘Ne’mat Khana’ incidentally refers to the kitchen cabinet that stores delicacies. In Miyan’s household, the kitchen is the little battlefield where women rule, cohabit, socialise and even fight with pots and pans. It is also from the kitchen that they draw their sustenance, as do the men who are cavernous eaters. The kitchen is both sacred and defiled, the setting of many of the ominous events in Miyan’s boyhood.

The kitchen and its crevices are also the abode for other smaller beasts. Rats, roaches, lizards and the pet squirrels are as important as the many women — curiously bearing the same name, Anjum — in Miyan’s seemingly desultory life. In Jawed’s scheme of things, nothing is lowly, nothing is sanitised. Even children are no symbols of innocence, but diabolical creatures capable of murder and triggering bloody riots. His descriptions of filth, sickness and other “unpleasant” subjects are treated with as much equity as any other subject, event or thought. It is not that Jawed celebrates squalor, disease or morbidity; it’s just that he acknowledges their reality in everyday living.

The most evocative passages in the novel are the ones about the dingy kitchen. They set the tone for the approaching hopelessness in the crumbling household. There is a brutal starkness with which Jawed draws out Miyan’s loneliness, as an orphaned child, as the husband in a loveless marriage, as the misfit lawyer and as the bewildered father who helplessly watches the breakdown of family ties in the face of Islamic radicalism. While the novel mirrors the growing communalism and hardening of positions in an increasingly intolerant India, the narrative is dominated by Miyan’s philosophical ruminations. Where the line separating life and death is a blur. As Miyan says, “You obtain in life whatever death has snatched from you and in the darkness of death you find all your lost stuff.” Much food for thought indeed.