The Cook by Ajay Chowdhury
In the second of this series, ex-Kolkata police officer Kamil Rahman is still working illegally in London, but he’s gone up in the world. Formerly a lowly waiter in Tandoori Knights, he is now a cook. There are other changes as well. His friend and roommate Anjoli is running the restaurant while her parents are away on a long visit to India. When Kamil falls for a beautiful green eyed nursing student, the duo of amateur investigators expands to form a triumvirate: “the cook, the nurse, and the restauranteur.”
As our sleuths move from one neighbourhood to the next by train, tube and on foot, Chowdhury grounds the reader in the sights, smells, and sounds of contemporary London. At Tandoori Nights, our mouths water at his descriptions of food. We also learn that a side benefit of being a cook is muscle-building, as Kamil carries large quantities of meat from the Halal butcher.
The author’s skill and comfort with his genre are demonstrated by his linguistic playfulness as well as his ability to stretch our willing suspension of disbelief to the very limit. When one police officer learns that Kamil has found a third body, he scolds Kamil by alluding to a comment originally made by James Bond: “Mr. Rahman, finding one corpse is unlucky, finding two could be an unfortunate coincidence, but three means you’re a serial killer taking the piss.”
Like The Waiter, this second novel in the series is sprinkled with allusions to earlier mystery writers. A fast learner, Kamil has been honing his detective skills, leading a fellow worker to comment that he spends more time “watching our guests than waiting on them.” While admitting he hasn’t “reached the mythical Holmesian standard,” Kamil figures he’s “pretty good at clocking interactions between people and making educated guesses about their relationships.”
Though the story is rife with jokes and humorous turns of phrase, Chowdhury tackles serious contemporary themes including honour killings, skyrocketing property prices, and the ballooning numbers of “invisible” homeless in the city. At the East London mosque, Imam Faisal Masroor is “trying to promulgate a more progressive Islam” and help ease Muslim integration.
Kamil thinks how sorely that is “needed in an age of fire and jihad preachers and police infiltrating mosques to identify and weed out radicals.” He respects the Imam for work with aiding the homeless, and for his interdenominational work with Catholic Father Spence. Indeed, the Imam has become a kind of friend and adviser, whose conversation is “cheaper than therapy.”
With a foot in two cultures, Kamil is in a good position to compare the problems of London and Kolkata. Noting how a young couple living in London have to “skulk around keeping their feelings for each other secret as if they were in a Bangladeshi village,” he notes that life in Kolkata is “more modern and accepting for educated young people” than for second-generation Bangladeshis in London.
After stumbling on yet another body, Kamil finds himself in Bethnal Green police station. Naturally, he compares this space to its counterpart in Kolkata. Carpeted and reasonably comfortable, the interview room is “a far cry from the dingy stained rooms with barred windows, hard plastic chairs and scratched tables we used in Lalbazar.” This causes him to reflect that he prefers the London cop shop, as “show over substance was never my bag.”
Should he try to restart his career as a police officer in London? His friend Tahir Ismael, an ambitious Muslim police sergeant, thinks so, reminding him of the ads in the Underground saying the Metropolitan Police are seeking “candidates from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.” This takes Kamil back to Lalbazar in Kolkata, and “the bitter taste of discrimination” he experienced as a Muslim detective in a Hindu force. Tahir assures him there’s no overt racism in the Met these days, at the same time noting that “you don’t see too many Black or brown faces in the senior ranks.”
The Cook is as eminently readable as it’s predecessor, and I’m looking forward to finding out what Kamil and Anjoli get up to next. For his first mystery, The Waiter, Ajay Chowdhury won the inaugural Harvill-Secker Bloody Scotland crime writing award. A London theatre director and tech entrepreneur, the author grew up in India. He enjoys cooking “experimental meals” for his family.