Maravan lit the gas flame under the flask, pulled up his only chair and sat beside his improvised distillation plant. It was important to control the process. He knew from experience that unless the liquid was heated gently, the aroma would change. He had often tried to capture the essence of this smell, the smell of his childhood. But he had never succeeded.
Now the sides of the glass flask were beginning to steam. Drops appeared, increasing in number, and ran down the misty condensation, creating clear lines. The temperature of the vapour rose quickly to fifty, sixty, seventy degrees. Maravan turned the flame down and the tap on slightly. Cold water made its way up the transparent tubing, filled the double wall of the cooling jacket, exited the cooler, and flowed through a length of tubing into the plughole of the second basin.
The only sound in the kitchen was the occasional gurgling of the cooling water going down the plug. From time to time he could hear steps in the attic room above him. This is where Gnanam lived, another Tamil, as were all the inhabitants of Theodorstrasse 94. He had not been here long, and after the standard six months of not being allowed to work had found a job as a kitchen help, like most of the asylum seekers from Sri Lanka. He worked in the city hospital. The fact that Maravan could hear him wandering around at this time – it was just before two – meant that Gnanam must be on early shift.
Maravan had only asylum-seeker status and had to work as a kitchen help. But compared to Gnanam he was privileged.
There was no early shift starting at four at the Huwyler. When he was on days he had to be in the kitchen at nine o’clock. And he did not have to deal with 200-litre pots or scour blackened frying pans that were a square metre in size. At the Huwyler he was able to learn new things, even though they gave him no opportunity to do so. He had eyes in the back of his head; he picked up new techniques just by watching and learned from other people’s mistakes. He was not bothered that the other chefs did not treat him particularly well. He had suffered worse treatment. Both here and back in his homeland.
Marvan stood up, tossed two handfuls of wheat flour into a mixing bowl, added some lukewarm water and a little ghee, sat down again with the bowl and began to knead the dough.
During his chef’s apprenticeship in Jaffna, his teachers found it hard to accept that he was more skilful, talented and imaginative than they were. He had had to learn that he needed to play dumb in order to get on. And later, when he left Jaffna and worked in a hotel on the south-western coast, the Singhalese treated him with the usual condescension they showed Tamils.
The dough was now smooth and elastic. Maravan put the bowl to one side and covered it with a clean dishcloth.
Recently he had enjoyed working at the Huwyler. Or, more precisely, since Andrea had started there. Like everyone on the team, he was fascinated by this peculiar, slender, pale creature who looked straight through everybody with an absent smile. But he fancied he was the only one she ever paid any attention to – not very often, maybe, but it did happen. His suspicions were confirmed by the fact that the chefs behaved even more patronizingly towards him whenever she was around.
Today, for example, while he was rinsing plates and Andrea was waiting for Bandini to check a course, she had looked over at him and smiled. Not smiled through him, but at him.
Maravan did not have much contact with women. The unmarried daughters in the Tamil community were too sheltered to strike up relationships with men. A Tamil woman had to be a virgin when she got married. And traditionally her parents decided who she married.
There were some Swiss women who had shown an interest in him. But the Tamils considered them to be bad women because of their permissive lifestyles. If he got involved with one of them it would bring shame to his family in Sri Lanka. They would find out sooner or later; the community of Tamil refugees, the diaspora, would make sure of that. He had come to terms with the fact that he would have to lead a bachelor life, comforting himself with vague thoughts of a future as a husband and father in Sri Lanka.
But since Andrea had appeared on the scene, feelings were stirring within him which he had hoped to suppress with his intense and overwhelming passion for cooking.
The first drop of the distillate fell into the separating funnel, bright and clear. Another followed, then another. Soon, the distillate was trickling at short, regular intervals into the container. Maravan tried to think of nothing else except the drops. How they kept on falling, like the seconds, minutes, days and years.
He did not know how long it had taken for the contents of the flask to be reduced to a few centilitres and the trickling to stop. Maravan opened the small tap of the separating funnel and allowed the water to run off until all that was left in the lower part of the conical vessel was the essential oil. He mixed it with the concentrate from the flasks and put it to his nose.
He could smell the curry leaves, the cinnamon, the coconut oil. But he could not find what he was looking for: the essence of what these three things had combined to produce in Nangay’s iron pan over the wood fire.
Maravan took a tawa, a heavy iron pan, from the wall and put it on the gas. He sprinkled some flour on to the work surface beside the stove and made a few chapattis out of the dough. When the pan was hot enough, he put the first one in, browning it on both sides. Another aroma rose up from the pan, which transported him back to his childhood.
When Maravan was fifteen, Nangay sent him to Kerala in southern India. An old friend of hers was working there as an Ayurvedic chef in a newly opened hotel complex, the first in the country offering a broad range of Ayurvedic treatments. Maravan would work in the hotel kitchen and be initiated into Ayurvedic cuisine.
He had already learnt a lot from Nangay and made little effort to hide this. Like a child starting school who can already read and write, he got on the nerves of his teachers and fellow students with all his knowledge. Although they lived on top of each other in the cramped staff quarters, he could find little in common with his colleagues and superiors. Even Nangay’s friend distanced herself from him. She feared that he might have a more difficult time if he were seen as her protégé.
For the most part Maravan kept himself to himself, focusing on learning; this made him even more unpopular. In his spare time he would take long walks along the unending beach where not a soul could be seen. Or he would spend hours practising his elegant dives into the waves that rolled in unremittingly from the Indian Ocean.
In Kerala Maravan became a loner. And had remained one ever since.
The chapattis were ready. He took one, drizzled a little of the fresh concentrate on it, closed his eyes, and breathed in the aroma. He took a bite, chewed it carefully, then, instead of swallowing, pushed it to the roof of his mouth with his tongue and breathed slowly out through his nostrils – of all his failed attempts, he would give this one the second highest score: a nine. In a notebook labelled ‘Extracts’ he jotted down the date, time, ingredients, distillation time and temperature.
Afterwards he ate the product of his experiment as a seasoning on the chapattis, quickly and without much gusto, then washed the flasks and tubes in his kit, put them to dry on the draining board, turned off the light and went back into the sitting room.
On a small table by the wall was an obsolete, second-hand computer. Maravan switched it on and waited patiently for the machine to boot up. He connected to the internet and checked the auction for the rotary evaporator, which he had been following for some days. One thousand, four hundred and thirty, the same as yesterday. There were two hours and twelve minutes until the end of the auction.
A rotary evaporator would allow him to do precisely what he had unsuccessfully attempted again just now – in the correct time, at the right temperature, without any burning and no impairment of the taste. The only problem was that such a piece of kit cost over 5,000 francs, far more than Maravan could afford. Sometimes second-hand models were auctioned on the Internet, like the one on the screen in front of him.