Food Trail

He lives in the Canadian Rockies because it is closest to living in Kashmir . The 41-year-old Jaspreet Singh does not let go of the Valley — where he spent his school days — even in his writings. After his debut short-story collection,Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir (2004),his novel Chef (Penguin,Rs 450) mixes food and memories of Kashmir.

Chef opens with the protagonist Kirpal “Kip” Singh returning to Kashmir after 14 years. In the train,a young girl asks her mother,“What do we miss most when we die?” Kip almost responded: “Food… We miss peaches,strawberries . . . The dead do not eat marzipan. The smell of bakeries torments them day and night.” Death lingers in Kip’s mind: a tumour in the brain is eating his life away. But before he dies,he must return to Kashmir to prepare one last banquet. Singh,a former research scientist-turned-writer,says,“After Proust it is impossible not to connect food and involuntary memories. A jalebi or bakerkhani dunked in warm milk is to me what a madeleine in tea is to Proust. Kirpal knows his mind is disintegrating fast. He tries very hard to keep his memories of Kashmir alive.” Singh began writing the book in 2002,and since food is at the heart of this one,he even began cooking in a big way to understand his characters better.

Singh was born in Punjab and thanks to his father’s position in the army and then the paramilitary,they were constantly on the move. “I was only six years old when we first moved to Kashmir. At school I was great friends with a Kashmiri Muslim and during recess we would swap our lunch boxes. I introduced him to Punjabi food and he introduced me to very delicate Kashmiri dishes such as roganjosh and gushtaba. Those lunch boxes are permanently embedded in my mind,” says Singh. He went on to study chemical engineering at Punjab University and then moved to McGill University,Canada,for graduate studies and continues to live there.

How did the engineer turn writer? “I recently read Orwell’s essay ‘Why I write?’ He talks about how he knew early on that he should be a writer and how later in his adulthood he tried to abandon the idea,only to settle down and write books. My relationship with writing is somewhat similar,” says Singh,who is currently working on another novel and a short story collection.