To write about Kashmir is to enter contested territory. Calgary-based Jaspreet Singh (author of the short story collection Seventeen Tomatoes) sets his first novel, Chef, there in 2006, amongst an Indian general’s staff as the army faces its enemies on both sides of the mountainous border. After a 14-year absence, chef Kirpal Singh receives a summons from the General to cook at his daughter’s wedding to a Pakistani. Newly diagnosed with cancer, Kirpal decides to return from New Delhi to Kashmir, hoping to face his past.

As Kirpal journeys northward by train, he retraces his entry into army life as a girl-crazy 19-year-old, assigned to work under chef Kishen. His younger self is more of an observer than a participant; the people around him remain shadowy figures. When his Hindu mentor accidentally upsets Muslim clerics at a diplomatically sensitive meal and is exiled to the armed border on the Siachen Glacier, Kirpal’s apprenticeship is over.

As Kishen’s life unravels, so does Kirpal’s. The General asks him to question “the enemy,” a woman from the Pakistani side fished out of a local river. Kirpal gently woos her in the only language they truly share – their taste for rogan josh. But her sudden disappearance takes him into the murkier side of India’s control over Kashmir.

Singh intersperses poetry, journal entries, Kashmiri script, and, yes, recipes to create a melancholic world where death is forever hovering. The writing is spare, with a tendency to veer toward the fantastic. Singh writes like a poet but has difficulty maintaining such an ambitious style. Glimpses of India from the train read like a checklist, and food similes – an easy cliché when writing about India – get pushed too far: “Her face resembles a plate of samosas left overnight in rain”; “peaks flash like the inside of a tandoori”; etc.

Chef ends uneasily, as Kirpal reaches Kashmir and meets the General and his daughter, a poet. Her choice of a Pakistani husband painfully taunts the men around her, as if their lives were devoted to “one big nothing,” and casts doubt on the very nature of the struggle that has engulfed Kashmir for so long.