Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie

indicate, ‘I am eating your praise.’ Then she would look across at Masood, who had walked in with hot
naans
to go with the
nihari,
and smile her smile of congratulations. Masood would incline his head in a gesture that was not so much a salaam of deference as an acceptance of well-deserved praise.
    (When I start to talk about Masood’s cooking to people who’ve never tasted it, I’m often greeted with looks of scepticism. All I’ll say is this: the Dard-e-Dil relatives of Dadi’s generation swear the finest meals they’ve eaten have all come from Masood’s kitchen. Such a compliment is not to be slighted when it comes from people who’ve eaten food from the fabled kitchens of the Dard-e-Dil palace where legions of cooks plied their trade, each one specializing in a different kind of food. So, for instance, there was one cook for the rice dishes and one for the
parathas,
one for the sweetmeats and one for the kebabs.)
    In our house, the only meal that ever surpassed those Ramzan meals was the one Masood and Mariam Apa conjured up for me the day I was accepted at a college in America. Halfway through the meal I burst into tears to say, ‘But who will cook for me when I’m there?’
    Masood almost touched my shoulder, said, ‘Don’t worry, Aliya Bibi.’ It was the first time he’d ever called me
‘Bibi’
and the deference it implied made me feel even more miserable. ‘When you come home for the holidays I’ll feed you so much they’ll have to roll you back on to the plane.’
    â€˜Promise?’ I said.
    â€˜Promise.’ He smiled back.
    Two weeks later he was gone.
    I pulled the airline blanket over my face and tried to regulate my breathing, which had become ragged just thinking about Masood’s departure and what followed.
    When I told Samia that I never told Mariam Apa’s story, I wasn’t entirely honest. Admittedly, I’d never said it aloud in one go, but in dribs and drabs I’d hinted at, implied and blurted out every fragment of it at college to my roommate, Celeste. Brilliant, artistic, revolutionary, multi-multi-ethnic and entirely unpindownable Celeste, who moved into our room at the start of freshman year while I was still in transit and decided to make me feel at home in Massachusetts by customizing her reproduction of Che Guevara. Imagine me, walking into the airy, brightly coloured dorm-room and seeing a six-foot-by-three-foot painting of a long-haired man with beautiful eyes, a mango in one hand and a cricket bat in the other, his teeth red with blood.
    Betel-nut juice, Celeste explained weeks later, when I felt I could query her artistic judgement.
    The first thing Celeste asked me when I’d unpacked was, ‘Who is she?’ She was Mariam Apa, captured in black and white, framed and displayed on my desk. I evaded answering in any detail until the end of that semester, when Celeste announced, ‘I’m going to make a painting of your cousin, Mariam. You got any input on that?’
    â€˜Yes. Can you paint her older? So I’ll have some way of knowing how age might change her face.’
    Celeste turned her attention away from the picture of Mariam Apa and towards me. ‘It’s more common for people to want a painting to remove a few years from the sitter.’
    I laughed. ‘The thought of Mariam Apa older … olderand happy. Can you, who never knew her, imagine that? I so wish that I could.’
    â€˜So she died?’ Celeste was never one for cloaking brutality in euphemism.
    â€˜My grandmother would doubtless say it would be better if she had.’
    â€˜Okay, spill.’
    How Celeste made sense of the garble that followed, I’ll never know. But I’m clearer now. So, deep breath, forget about Massachusetts, forget about the flight, and let me take you to the day of Masood’s disappearance, two weeks after he called me Bibi.
    I knew something