ABOUT
THE BOOK

It is 2006, and President Bush has travelled to India to sign the controversial nuclear deal. Kirpal, a Sikh former military chef with a newly diagnosed brain tumour, is on his way from Delhi to Kashmir, returning after a fourteen year absence to cook his last official meal at the General’s residence. The occasion? The wedding of the General’s daughter, Rubiya, who has fallen in love with a Muslim man. During the long train and bus journey, Kirpal looks back over his days of culinary apprenticeship, as well as at the painfully tangled history of India and Pakistan. As he reflects on his own damaged life, and on the scarred history of his country, he remembers his relationships with his father, a military hero who died on the glacier years earlier, and Irem, a young Muslim woman from the wrong side of the border who “is a bit like garlic that has entered the pores” of his skin.

Written in prose that is by turns lyrical, lusty and mournful, this is a brave and compassionate novel of remembering and hope, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of army-occupied Kashmir.