The Time Machine E-Book

Nikesh Shukla

• Herausgeber: Galley Beggar Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

"We grew up in households where food was important. We grew up in households where the kitchen was the centre of our universes. The main family thoroughfare happened in our kitchens." 'The Time Machine' is a new novella about food and grief by award-winning author Nikesh Shukla. It tells of Ashok's attempts to cook food like mum used to make. If he succeeds, his time machine will have worked and he'll be transported back to a time when the family home was alive with the sounds of cricket, the smell of food and the presence of his mother. The story is a tender, funny ode to home-cooked Gujarati cooking ('not tandoori or balti, are you rogan joshing me?'), peppered with family recipes and charmingly outdated wisdom from over-bearing aunties.

Leseprobe

The Time Machine

The Time Machine

Midpoint

The Time Machine

Nikesh Shukla

Praise for Nikesh Shukla’sCoconut Unlimited

‘Funny and irreverent.’ (The Guardian)

‘An entertaining portrayal of late-adolescent angst and musical ineptitude, Coconut Unlimited will have a broad appeal not limited merely to those who are nostalgic for high-tops and a time when Skee-Lo’s “I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller” was still in the charts.’ (GQ)

‘A riot of cringeworthy moments made real by Shukla’s beautifully observed characters and talent for teen banter.’ (Metro)

‘Energetic, tender and fizzing with some hilariously awful rapping.’ (The Word)

‘Without attempting to smack you in the face with originality (or whatever else new writers think they need to do to get attention), it manages to be heartfelt and an utter pleasure to spend time with. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone being anything other than charmed by Shukla’s endlessly readable prose. Possibly the most fun this writer has had with new fiction this year.’ (Bookmunch)

Ebook version published in 2013 by

Galley Beggar Press Ltd

The Book Hive,

53 London Street,

Norwich, NR2 1HL

Typeset by Galley Beggar Press Ltd

All rights reserved

© Nikesh Shukla, 2013

The right of Nikesh Shukla to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, so please don’t re-sell it or give it away to other people. We want to be able to pay our writers! If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, please visitwww.galleybeggar.co.ukand buy your own edition, or send a donation to make up for the money we and our author would otherwise lose. Thank you for understanding that we are a small publisher dependent on each copy we sell for our survival – and most of all, thank you for respecting the hard work of our author and ensuring we are able to reward him for his labours. And don’t forget to keep visiting our site to see what else is happening in the Singles Club!

Thank you

The Time Machine

For Jayshree, Saraswati and Patu who were.

For Rukhsana who is.

(1) Kitchen

Ingredients:

1 room

1 oven

4 gas rings

1 fridge/freezer

1 table

3 chairs

2 spice tins

1 mum

Preparation: On the left, you place cupboards that contain rice, oil, spices and four cookery books. Next to them is a fridge/freezer. The freezer compartment has those clear plastic takeaway containers stacked up in them, filled with leftovers. There are bags of frozen vegetables, like corn, peas, broad beans, spinach, okra, carrots. There are frozen parathas and rotlis and an old ice cream box that contains flattened wafers of garlic and ginger. Break off as much as you require. Next to that is the microwave and television. The television is always on, showing Eastenders, the news or sitcoms. Adjacent, is the oven. It’s fancy now we’ve renovated and next to the oven, you have four gas rings. The small ones you might as well not bother with. The bottom right, that’s the one with the juice. In the centre is the table and chairs. Standing next to the table and chairs, one flip-flopped foot up on a chair, cutting potatoes into the palm of her hand with a small, serrated knife is my mum.

In order to make room for all the food my dad has been sent by well-intentioned family members in the two weeks after my mum died, my wife Jess and I are clearing out space. I find the food mum left at the back of the freezer. It’s sweetcorn kadhi. I also find some frozen bhajias she made. I can’t date when she made them from how frozen they are but all I can tell you is, we find them.

I have to take a decision. If I eat her food, that’s it. That’s the last of it. That’s all there is. That’s all there will be. And I will spend the rest of my life trying to recreate those tastes on my tongue. I worry that Indian food to me will become restaurant food and the one chana masala dish she showed me how to make when I moved out after university. I could never get it to taste like hers. I could never instinctively recreate the amount of spices, oil, yoghurt, cooking time – each time I tried to recreate food in her own image, it was too thin. It wasn’t warm enough. It wasn’t quite there.

We do it. We defrost her food in the microwave, heat it up in a saucepan. I make a hash of some frozen chapattis. We sit down at the kitchen table. I put on her favourite songs so the house sounds like her. It already smells of her.

That first taste takes me back. In that taste, I can feel her bustling around the kitchen, the mish-mash of heat from the oven and cool breeze from the back door, ajar. In that taste, she is there, in the kitchen. She owns it again. It doesn’t feel so clean and sterile and unused. The flames are dancing on the hob. The sizzle of oil and mustard seeds is popping in my ears. The way the cabinets never quite shut annoy me as it always does. I try my hardest to eat that plate of food slowly to savour every last bite. But I can’t ingest it quick enough.

I get a stomach ache. She always told me, ‘Ashok, eat slower’, that eating quickly so I could get back to the television would give me a stomach ache. And it does.

It makes me realise what I need to do. I need to learn how to cook.

My cousins, Jess and I are sat in the kitchen. I decide to play a game called ‘Zombie Apocalypse Job Description’. In it, you have to come up with your perfect dystopian team to help you rebuild society. The real reason for playing the game is to discuss our practical skills to check we have all the bases covered.

Sangeeta can write computer programmes, she understands engineering and mechanics. She can build us motors and diodes. Manish is a hunter. He is a businessman by day but he’s convinced he has what it takes to be a hunter. He insists killer instinct is part of his day-to-day already. Manish’s wife Lara, says she’d be happy to be a soldier. She says that none of us are concerned with future zombie attacks so she is happy to take on that role and be a frontline soldier. Jess and I, both working in marketing, elect to be in comms. I can tweet zombie hotspot areas to avoid, I could use Foursquare to highlight safe zones and safe houses. I could add posts to Facebook to build morale. Mine is the least useful of all skills.

None of us elect to be the cook. Because none of us can cook.

My cousins and I grew up in households where food was important. We grew up in households where the kitchen was the centre of our universes. The main family thoroughfare happened in our kitchens. Manish watched Eastenders in the kitchen because his father couldn’t abide it being on in the lounge. Sangeeta’s computer was located in the kitchen as a teenager so her mum could monitor her homework progress. Lara and Jess are English and so have a healthy attitude to mealtimes. It’s with the entire family sat around talking. We existed in chaos. None of our meals ever synced with our siblings or parents, we were allowed to watch television or read books; we weren’t required to communicate with each other. We would eat at the kitchen table, while our mothers stood over us making fresh chapattis and firing off pointed questions about our school days. That was our shared experience.

I lived on top of our kitchen. I would pretend to study, instead racing through paperback crime novels and Star Trek tie-in novels, lying on my front on the bed, the book resting on the floor, my chin feeling the tremors of my every move on the bouncy mattress. My reading was punctuated with bursts of steam from my mum’s pressure cooker and the low hum of Bollywood music from Sunrise radio. The fact that the kitchen was underneath me helped explain why my bedroom was unbearably hot. I would sleep with the window ajar, for most of the year, the radiator always on, the kitchen below, alive with frying, boiling, cooking. My mum would stand with her foot up on a stool, with her small black serrated knife cutting potatoes in the palm of her hand, singing along out of tune with whatever was on the radio.

I wouldn’t say I’m a foodie. I’m not bothered by fine-dining. I’m obsessed with home-cooking. Mostly because my mum was such an incredible chef of home-cooked Gujarati food. She knew her dhals, her shaaks, her chapattis and her pickles. It’s not that she cooked the way I liked and was used to and therefore I thought she was the best in the world. Generally, she was known throughout our family for being able to throw together the staples in a tasty way. I don’t even like the word foodie. It bothers me. It’s for people who see food as a hobby and not as the tie that binds a family.