Does man survive on food or does its consumption pave the way for death? Does the longing for sumptuous food betray the treacherous undercurrents between ambition, passion, pleasure, jealously, insecurities and Knicks? Do food habits go beyond the articulation of identity? Does it produce a narrative about nostalgia related to the flavours of past that straddles different emotional and existential streaks? Is the kitchen a repository of sensuous pleasure or is it the most pernicious, perverse and skuzziest place? Does food denote foreboding? Could the rituals of cooking, eating, preparing and offering food produce a vividly woven, layered and perceptive narrative?
Answer to these questions is a definite yes and a cookbook or a marketing gimmick does not provide it but it is creatively affirmed in a well-tuned, taut and atmospheric novel “Nemat Khana”. Authored by a well-known Urdu novelist, Khalid Javed, whose first novel was published by Penguin, the novel uses food as a central trope to blur the lines between reality, fantasy and memory and through a brilliantly conceived third person narrator, a poignant tale of an excruciatingly painful life-altering situation is told. In the multi-fold narratives interwoven in the recently released 450-page novel, Khalid Javed spins many yarns to debunk several myths, which we hold very dear. The narrative asserts that man essentially lives in his intestines and his private parts only explore the elusive shadow of his being. At the outset, the protagonist emerges as a ravenous helline who says repeatedly that the kitchen is the most dangerous place. It is essentially a man-made text invested with tremendous potentiality of the meaning and will never become bereft of exploring the possibilities of human predicament. The fire at kitchen gives birth to all sorts of affection, affinity, intimacy, hatred, violence and envy. Jumping from memory to memory, many of which are food centric, the narrator seems to be deeply touched by religious devotion to cooking but he is simultaneously convinced that cooking by its very nature is fraught with many unarticulated dangers. For him, all kitchenware can be used as lethal weapons and they are to be feared more than a gun. It is the place where women turn mean, violent, irritated and jealous. Taste dips the narrator into a palette of sense and repressed feeling and it unfolds the innocence of childhood into bewilderment of adolescence. A haunting sense of gloom takes over and the complex yet vivid narrative displays the emotional outburst of the protagonist at being denied what he looks for. Since his childhood, the narrator is obsessed with eating and makes the food the object for a single pristine look. Kitchen is his favourite place and as a boy, he assassinated two people in the kitchen who betrayed two girls for whom he developed an infatuation.
“Nemat Khana”, in Urdu, is perhaps a standalone novel in Indian languages in which through the prism of the foraging experiences, the whole gamut of human existence is revisited. Here, narrative artistry reaches new heights and narration oscillates between utopias and thuggish cynicism. Khalid Javed hardly attempts to dress up lurid sex fantasy as romance. The narrator becomes the soothsayer as the preparation of certain food items enable him to foretell that something bad is going to happen in the future. For the novelist, writing itself denotes sudden loneliness in ephemeral world but after the day of deliverance, people will immensely enjoy their alienation and separation as that time kitchen lays abandoned. Still, paradise is not acceptable to the narrator, as it is the place where people will be devoid of memory, they do not even recognize their parents there. If memory fades away, the paradise turns into hell. The tale of the protagonist does not indicate a sense of schadenfreude but some anecdotes seem close to stereotypes. Through his exhilarating narrative dexterity, Khalid Javed quite aptly makes the ludicrous believable and he must be appreciated for handling a delicate subject with awe-inspiring sensitivity. It seems quite pertinent to point out that sharing food does bind one in a moral obligation which one has no intention to fulfilling.
