in the basement except for Nana Shamsi. She would receive her ingredients at the door and disappear behind the thick curtain she had asked for. Khan did not like the arrangement. He suspected several of the items the woman ordered were not used in the recipe. She would probably sell them herself and keep the actual ingredients secret.
The ventilation problem had to be solved before the cooking could begin on a large scale. Word had it that the yellow smoke was emitted from the turmeric or orpiment in the concoction, depending on the recipe each cook used. Nana Shamsi promised an odorless cook with premium ingredients and a pinch of her special powder, a mixture of ground herbs and some unknown elements, but there was little she could do about the color of the smoke. Khan moved his furniture into the living room and repurposed his bedroom into an airtight smoke chamber. Trusted workers constructed a chimney system to direct the smoke directly from the lid of the cauldrons into the smoke chamber, sealed from ceiling to floor—except for the windowpanes—with tar. During the day, they would crack the window and let smoke out little by little, invisible against the bright sky.
Khan hired two hatters to make headgear out of wool, fabric, straw, and used paper. One shopping basket at a time, Pooran smuggled hats in every evening and passed them to Nana Shamsi in the basement. The cooking took the whole night. In the morning, Nana Shamsi removed the lids from the pots and squinted through the steam at the soft hats floating in the thick orange brew. She would then climb up with difficulty into the yard and leave the rest to the others.
Nana was a simple woman from a small village in the northwest who had come to the city after the wheat in her sons’ field died overnight shortly before the beginning of the famine. After a night of cooking she went to bed and slept for three hours, then got up and helped around the house without anyone having asked her. Not working was a state she was not familiar with. She washed the herbs, winnowed the beans and chickpeas, or pickled vegetables as if she was in her own house. Sometimes she sat in a corner of the living room or in the yard and told Pooran about her past while smoking her long pipe. When the crows, by their shrill, ominous caws, announced the imminent sinking of the sun below the horizon, Nana Shamsi would stand up to descend into her basement and close the door and curtains behind her. Two hours into the dark, fluorescent greenish-yellow smoke billowed out behind the pitch-dark window of the smoke room. Some nights Ahmad would roll up the outside wicker shades of the smoke-room window to let a soft glow light the yard for a short while. Khan became suspicious of that smoke. Nana was either a fraud or much less than a great cook. He decided to hire another, but Pooran walked up to his bed in the living room with a suitcase in her hand. “I’ll go if she goes.”
* * *
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AS SPRING CAME, AHMAD HELPED with the delivery of hats, hurrying out of the house with warm servings, and from his deliveries he rushed to Raana. For some time, Ahmad followed her at a distance, wary of prying eyes, not daring to approach, until he ran out of patience and stole one of his mother’s chadors. Shrouded in the large piece of fabric, trying to keep it from slipping down from his head and struggling to cover as much of his face as possible, he set out for the bakery. The soft spring breeze blew the chador open treacherously. He thought he could smell Raana before he turned the corner. He stood in the women’s line and covered his fine strands of mustache with the edge of the chador. His heart pumped hot blood into his face. He did not know how close he could stand to the girl in front of him. Four women separated him from Raana. He knew her from behind: her height, the curve of her shoulders, the way she held her head a little tilted to the side. The line grew longer. Unsuspecting bodies—all clad in chadors like him—pushed forward, rubbing against him. Squeezing past the women in front of him was not easy. Since the beginning of the famine, everyone was ready to fight. He stopped trying