When I open the shop

By romesh dissanayake

In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely.Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa it takes flight into surrealism. A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781776921973

Book preview

‘Tell me the story

Of all these things.

Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.’

—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée

PART I

The rally

It’s been about five, maybe six months since my mother died.

Maybe longer.

It’s hard to tell exactly. I’ve been so busy with the shop.

All I remember is that last week. When it felt like she was going to pull through. Her eyes started to liven and her tongue, wickedly sharp as always, jabbered about bringing the washing in before the rains.

The bitter qualities of her former self were beginning to show. That’s what threw me off. All of a sudden she was back. In the kitchen, hobbling around. Peeling carrots, boiling potatoes, folding used Glad Wrap. I really thought she was beginning to heal and recover. Finally. Finally, I could stop treating her like a child. Playing keeper is tough.

Keeper of meds. Keeper of keys. Cleaner of hallways.

Human nightlight. Alarm clock.

For months I had just said okay, sure to everything. The hallucinations, the ghosts in the corner, the false trips to the bathroom, the delirious cravings for fried liver.

But in that last week she surprised me. Just when I thought the limbo I’d found myself in would end and I could finally get my life back, I walked into her room with a bowl of steaming rice porridge, like I had done the previous morning and the morning before that, and instantly I knew. You could feel it in the room.

My arms lost all their strength. The tray fell to the ground. My jaw slackened. The tension I’d been holding on to for months released through my shoulders. My bowels. My clenched cheeks. All the way down to my toes as they loosened their grip on the furry soles of my slippers.

All I could do was just stand there and smile. How did I fool myself into thinking it wouldn’t end like this?

Just like that, she was gone.

A couple of days later I organised a small funeral ceremony and invited a few of her close friends. I didn’t tell anyone back home. I hadn’t spoken to them in years. Let faraway seas be our buffer.

No one at work knew about her anyway, so I figured it wasn’t right to suddenly bring her up now. I couldn’t bear the thought of them having to pretend to feel sorry for me. No need to make things any more awkward than they have to be.

I texted the chef of the café kitchen really sorry. can’t come in to work. anymore then I threw my phone off the City to Sea Bridge and watched as a line of cars zooming down Jervois Quay crushed it up like candy.

I did consider trying to track down my father but then decided against it. It wasn’t my job to tell him. After all, he’d known her better than I ever had. Or at least he had at one point in time.

I don’t really know why but it felt like the right thing to do – to not tell anyone and start to hunker down.

While they assured me the process would be seamless and easy, working with the funeral home proved to be deceptively difficult. Though she’d never really been religious – I think we visited the church once when we first arrived and I played table tennis there all day – the funeral home organised a priest for the ceremony and then the priest insisted that she be buried in the Greek Orthodox section. The funeral director got me to upgrade to an inappropriately large headstone with a little compartment for putting in candles, as well as a wooden bench next to her graveside. I think she would have really loved that, he said.

By this stage things were so far from where they had started but I was too tired to say no. If I did, it might’ve all come bursting out of me. The temptation to push that nagging priest right into the grave with her was so strong. But that would’ve complicated things further. It was much simpler to just shrug and nod – even if it did balloon the costs.

Her funeral was just like a catering gig. And, rather than mourner, I was the chef. I went out and bought 5L plastic buckets from Moore Wilson’s and stayed up all night filling them with our most traditional salad spreads – a sort of greatest hits. Crowd pleasers for immigrants.

In the fridge there was a leftover jar of her carrot salad – the last remaining living thing of hers. I tried to make mine taste just the same. The way that she taught me. Tasting hers, adding more sugar to mine. Another taste, adding more vinegar. I remembered the way she taught me how to cut apples into matchsticks and had to race across town to Kilbirnie to find the type of apple she used to buy. While I was there I picked up a couple bottles of Bernardino, some red and green seedless grapes, and a pack of frozen mini quiches – you know, in case some white partners decided to show up and felt out of their depth.

*

When the day came I did my best to cry because that’s what I felt everyone was expecting. I could feel their eyes on my eyes, scanning and squinting, pressuring me to bawl on demand. I think it helped that my eyes were already bloodshot and puffy from staying up late straining the bouillon and boiling potatoes. This surely gave some the impression that I’d already cried sufficiently beforehand. And now had no more tears left to cry.

I wish that somebody had told me you’re allowed to wear sunglasses to a funeral. For some reason – I don’t know why – I thought this was a big no-no. When I looked around all the men were wearing them and it was hard to tell which of them were crying and which were just pretending. Smart.

I saw old Medvedev, who owned a furniture-moving company, standing across from me in big sunburst aviators. Next to him, wearing imitation Ray-Bans like a Georgian Billy Joel, was Misha from the church, who’d had four failed marriages and a couple of dead wives. They had their arms round each other’s shoulders. Hunched over, sobbing, tears streaming out from behind their dark shades. Not their first rodeo.

It all made me sick. And all I could do was just stand there and stare.

When the time came, I grabbed a fistful of dirt, threw it across her casket like I was rolling dice and watched as she got lowered into the ground.

And just like that her body was gone too.

At the reception I put a bowl of the carrot salad out along with the rest of the food and it was the first thing that had to be topped up. Through the kitchen serving-hatch I overheard them saying it tasted exactly how they remembered. Exactly like how she used to make it. I watched them all in their little groups scattered around the hired-out hall of the Wilton Bowling Club, nodding into their paper plates and pointing with their plastic forks.

Her old friend, Lilivanovna, the one with the limp and the bung eye, came up to me and made me promise to make the carrot salad for her at her funeral. I couldn’t tell whether she was being serious or not – she has that way of talking – so I smiled and told her I would, knowing full well that I wouldn’t.

That whole day, being around all those old people, all sulky and hobbling around stinking of death, I found it all so repulsive. What are you here for? Is it the food or to mourn your own mortality? Seeing her go, younger than many of them, served as a reminder that one of them could be next. She’d jumped the queue.

After all the fuss of the funeral and the headstone and the ceremony, I went back to Karori where we had been living and began clearing out the rest of her stuff.

This was relatively straightforward. Over the course of two weekends, two potbellied men in a white Salvation Army truck came and collected her stuff. The beds, the dining table, the chairs. All gone. The drawers, the chiffonier, her crystal vases. I even got rid of the bathtub. I didn’t have the patience to sell any of it even though I probably could have made a bit of money. I just wasn’t thinking like that at the time. Anything that reminded me of her, had to be gone. Even the carpet – the trail where she hadn’t quite made it to the bathroom and had tried to clean it up with Jif – I got a box cutter and cut small squares out of it. Now whenever I walk down the hallway I’m reminded of thought-bubbles in comic books.

Back then the stuff the hospice kept sending us was starting to feel like junk mail. They sent us all sorts of trash. And we left it unopened, spilling out of once-vacant drawers. While I was clearing out her bedside cabinet I found a purple-and-teal booklet crinkled under TV Guides and Sudoku books.

A Guide for Carers:

The Five Stages of Dying.

It is quite common for a patient to ‘rally’

when faced with the end of their life. They become more

stable and may want to talk or even begin eating

and drinking again. This period of perking up

can be accompanied by such a notable change in

mental clarity that hospice professionals have coined

the term ‘terminal lucidity’ to describe it. Sadly,

rallying is usually a hallmark sign of pre-death.

The End-of-Life Rally.

After I had rid myself of her body and all of her stuff, I felt empty. Not sad. Cavernous.

Like I had enough room to fill myself up again.

I don’t quite understand how it happened, but at the height of that summer, when my hay fever was at its worst and no amount of antihistamine or rubbing could relieve the itch, I found an obsession that could temporarily, even if just for a second, transport me outside of myself.

I made a habit of going to the central library on Victoria Street and borrowing DVDs. I’d make popcorn in the microwave and boil water for two-minute noodles and sit in front of the TV watching movie after movie while snacking from a bowl of burnt kernels.

It started with Dark Habits and What Have I Done to Deserve This? I fell in love fully with Carmen Maura. I adored her and then craved her. At first she was my aunty, caring and relatable, then I was her younger lover. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, I watched her stroll in her nightgown through her pop-art Madrid apartment with its vivid reds and pastel blues. As she sliced tomatoes and blended them with cucumbers to make gazpacho, I thought, She’s the One.

The more I watched, the more I wished that Chus Lampreave was related to me. That she was some distant grandma of mine. She made me really believe that life was absurd and humour was the language to access that knowledge. Her comedic timing, her jam-jar glasses – it appealed to me on levels I can’t even begin to comprehend. In Bad Education, I fixated on the short shorts that Gael García Bernal did push-ups in and those socks Fele Martínez wore. I went down to Kirkcaldie & Stains the very next day and bought orange Hugo Boss socks to be just like him. And when I watched Caetano Veloso sing ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma’ in Hable con ella for the first time, something stirred in me that closely resembled an urge to cry. Where was this potency when I needed it at the funeral?

But then I realised it wasn’t Carmen Maura or Chus Lampreave, or even Gael García Bernal at all. It was Pedro Almodóvar. It was him all along. His fluffy hair, his round, lovable nose. My world was tangled up in his. I didn’t leave the house for days at a time, rewatching each film, one after the other. By the time he’d become bored with Carmen Maura, so had I. We were both ready for someone new. So in Live Flesh and All About My Mother, Pedro and I discovered Penélope Cruz and the cycle began all over again.

Watching those movies, I was starting to get better. Whatever gloominess had set over me started to clear. I went for walks around the town belt and sat in cafés drinking Americanos with a side of cold milk thinking about what dirty talk would sound like in Spanish. What Penélope Cruz would’ve made of Pedro and me. What I should do next.

The peak of summer passed and my hay fever cleared up. I cleared out the apartment again. All those empty antihistamine packets, the loose toilet paper rolls scattered across the living-room floor, the sink full of dishes. Once again I felt empty both inside and out, so I bought a plastic table from Briscoes, positioned it at the edge of the fold-out sofa bed in front of the TV and began planning the