Chef

by Jaspreet Singh

Chef is a hypnotic novel that tells the story of the India-Pakistan conflict from the point of view of an apprentice chef who is posted to the base of the Siachen Glacier, the coldest battlefield in the world at 20,000 feet.

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.

(From Publisher).

Jaspreet Singh’s debut fiction collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish and Punjabi. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2009 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean, the Quebec Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Canadian Authors’ Association Literary Award, and the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. He lives in Canada.

Chef Carpal returns to Kashmir to cook a wedding meal for a general’s daughter. Through his eyes the reader looks back on the fallout from the partition of India by the British-war, a colonial past, religious and cultural prejudice, and love and betrayal. A compelling look at history,  complete and beautiful language.