Ode to Kashmir

Kip Singh is aboard a train watching India pass by on his way to the most beautiful land on earth, Kashmir. He has been diagnosed with a tumour on the brain, but is travelling ostensibly to cook the wedding feast for his former commanding officer’s daughter. It is 14 years since he resigned from the army and returned to cook for his ill mother in Delhi. The circumstances of that resignation provide an undercurrent beneath the layer upon layer of anecdote, reportage, and metaphor that Jaspreet Singh peels back to reveal a work of intense lyricism and magnetic charm.

The younger Kip joined the army upon the death of his officer father during military service on the Siachen Glacier, the “second coldest place on earth” and the battleground of four wars between India and Pakistan. At the time of his enlistment, a million men are squaring up for the ultimate battle, nuclear war. Because he is the son of an officer and a hero, young Kip is placed in the kitchen of the commander of the northern army and on the fast-track to promotion. He is apprenticed to the enigmatic Chef Kishen who introduces the innocent Kip to the salivating sensuousness of haute cuisine, frustratingly absent sex, and the religious/political tensions at the core of the region’s “turmoil”.