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  Copyright © 2022 by Farezeh Durrani

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Ballantine is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Bon Appétit for permission to use excerpts from “I’m a Chef with Terminal Cancer. This Is What I’m Doing with the Time I Have Left” by Fatima Ali (October 9, 2018), © 2018 Condé Nast and from “ ‘Top Chef’ Contestant Fatima Ali on How Cancer Changed the Way She Cooks” by Fatima Ali (May 1, 2018) © 2018 Condé Nast. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ali, Fatima, –2019, author.

  Title: Savor: a chef’s hunger for more / Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morrell; foreword by Farezeh Durrani.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022000429 (print) | LCCN 2022000430 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593355190 (hardback) | ISBN 9780593355206 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ali, Fatima, -2019. | Women cooks—United States—Biography. | Cooks—United States—Biography. | Bones—Cancer—Patients—Biography.

  Classification: LCC TX649.A425 A3 2022 (print) | LCC TX649.A425 (ebook) | DDC 641.5092/2 [B]—dc23/eng/20220225

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022000429

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022000430

  Ebook ISBN 9780593355206

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Jaya Miceil

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  ep_prh_6.0_141463709_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About This Book by Tarajia Morrell

  Foreword by Farezeh Durrani

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1: Itwaar Bazaar

  Chapter 2: Days That Shone Like Polished Stone

  Chapter 3: A Convincing Feast

  Chapter 4: A Foreign Home

  Chapter 5: The Very First Taste

  Chapter 6: Shedding Skin

  Chapter 7: First Recipes and Lunchables

  Chapter 8: Tutoring and Temptation

  Chapter 9: Tepid Milk and Silken Salmon

  Chapter 10: Hunger at the Market

  Chapter 11: The Chorus

  Chapter 12: A Promise of Ice Cream

  Chapter 13: The Fire Inside

  Chapter 14: My A Student

  Chapter 15: And Then I Could See It

  Chapter 16: My Mother’s Blessing

  Part II

  Chapter 17: A Taste of Freedom

  Chapter 18: The Beginning of the Rest of My Life

  Chapter 19: Black Rice, Spanish Moon

  Chapter 20: A Perfectly Ripe Plum

  Chapter 21: Yes, Chef

  Chapter 22: The Unpalatable Truth

  Chapter 23: The Woman I Made

  Chapter 24: Chicken Intestines and Proclamations

  Chapter 25: The Pecking Order

  Chapter 26: Chef Life

  Chapter 27: Guilty Goose (Must Spread Her Wings)

  Chapter 28: Introducing My Craft to My Culture

  Chapter 29: Patta Tikka

  Chapter 30: An Interview with Fate

  Chapter 31: The Nocal Dream

  Chapter 32: The Contest in Colorado

  Chapter 33: The Life I Always Wanted

  Part III

  Chapter 34: The Health Department

  Chapter 35: Fallen Palms

  Chapter 36: The Dinner Rush

  Chapter 37: 86

  Chapter 38: Kidney Pain and Such

  Chapter 39: Falling Through the Cracks

  Chapter 40: A Book by Many

  Chapter 41: Order Fire

  Chapter 42: Pickled Onions and Peach Fuzz

  Chapter 43: Hot Coals on Small Lips

  Chapter 44: A Flock of Wild Peacocks

  Chapter 45: My Dream, Abbreviated

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments by Mohammad Ali

  About the Authors

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  By

  TARAJIA MORRELL

  It was mid-October 2018 when I got the call.

  “Are you familiar with Fatima Ali?” my literary agent began after niceties.

  “I am,” I told her. “I just read her second essay in Bon Appétit yesterday.”

  “Well, she wants to write a book about the time she has left,” she explained. “She needs a collaborator.”

  “Yes,” I answered without a pause. “Yes—I want to be considered. Please put me forward for it.”

  * * *

  —

  I hadn’t watched Fatima on Top Chef; I didn’t know her personally and I’d never tasted her food, but I’d read her essays in Bon Appétit and, just like many, I admired her. In her first essay, from May 2018, I’d recognized a hard-working, charismatic young woman on the cusp of coming into her own—of becoming—when cancer callously interrupted her. As she fought the vicious disease, I inwardly applauded Fatima’s stalwart grit. After reading her second essay for the magazine the day before my agent called, in which Fatima revealed that she was terminal, I was in awe of her pledge to live the rest of her abbreviated life to the fullest in the face of a literal death sentence: her vow to accomplish her bucket list against all odds in the year that she was given to live. If I could, I wanted to help this ambitious, spirited young woman to go out fighting.

  I submitted some writing samples and embarked on a long-planned trip. While I was gone, Fatima was a guest on Ellen DeGeneres’s TV show. I watched on my laptop: a pale Fatima, on crutches but poised, conceding her diagnosis but not letting it curtail her plans. She was determined to make her last year count, to travel the world, to eat at her dream restaurants, to go on safari. Her humor and cheekiness were contagious as she gracefully, wittily volleyed back to Ellen, the professional prankster. Fatima impressed me anew.

  Our appreciation must have been mutual, because our agents facilitated a conversation. Over Skype, she and her brother, Mohammad, reiterated the proposition: to write a bucket list book based on her dream travel and meals. I encouraged her to journal, to write down anything—words, fragments, memories, recipes, smells, lists—whatever felt too important to forget, and I offered a few memoir suggestions for her to read while they sorted out the specifics. Mohammad and I mostly glossed over the details of where and when the project might begin, other than that they hoped to start on it as soon as possible, and we said our goodbyes.

  In late November, I learned that Fatima had chosen me as her collaborator. The plan was for me to record the reflections of an intrepid young woman living as best she could for what would be the last year of her life. I’d write down what she saw, heard, tasted, and felt so that she could simply be in the moment, for the moments she had left. She mentioned wanting to go to Noma in Copenhagen, Chef Rene Redzepi’s nature-driven temple of New Nordic gastronomy, and Osteria Francescana, Chef Massimo Bottura’s storied je
wel in Modena, Italy, which I longed to visit as well. What, I asked myself, will I see with this stranger? What might I learn from this impermanent life force?

  I returned home to New York and awaited my marching orders, but a week passed, then two, and none came. Several days before Christmas, Mohammad called from Los Angeles and explained: Fatima’s condition had deteriorated rapidly and she was in constant, harrowing agony. She was about to undergo a procedure that would help her better manage the pain, and he wanted to give her a few days to recuperate before we began our work together. We decided I should join them right after the holidays. The parameters were rapidly changing.

  I flew to Los Angeles on January 3, 2019, concerned and nervous, feeling ill-equipped for whatever lay ahead. I’d never written a book before. I’d never written a book with a dying woman. Already this hardly resembled the poignant but delectable voyaging that I’d signed up for. How could we make Fatima’s book come to life from a hospital room in Santa Monica?

  Upon my arrival, I was met by a hollow-eyed family with faces worn down by preemptive grief, still playing at being strong for the woman in room 435 of UCLA Medical Center’s Cancer Ward. My initial conversation there with Mohammad left me with a series of questions: What was I doing there? How could I best serve this woman I’d never met, her family, and my assignment, the framework of which shifted hourly?

  The promised year from her terminal diagnosis had been cruelly pruned to four pain-filled months. Mohammad admitted that unless something changed drastically, Fatima didn’t have long. I’ll confess that I considered excusing myself. What can we achieve together, I wondered, under these tortured circumstances? And with so little time left, why does she want to spend it with a stranger?

  “You’ll see lots of people here with us,” Mohammad explained, as if reading my thoughts. “Fati’s friends, my mom’s friends, our family. I don’t want you to worry. I’ve explained to them why you’re here and they understand that what you’re doing is for Fati.”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” I told him. “At any time, someone can just ask me to step out or away.”

  “Yes, that’s right, but for now this is what Fati wants to focus on. She wants to work with you. And the rest we just check in with her and follow how she’s doing. She fades off sometimes, but she’s there. She’s still really there.”

  So I stayed. I decided to give this young woman whom I’d never met before all I could for the week I’d committed to spending with her, whether a book came out of it or not. What would it cost me to keep this initial commitment to a dying woman? How often in life is simply showing up of such value to a stranger? If life and control were being torn from me, how much would I appreciate those who kept their word?

  I followed Mohammad into Fatima’s hospital room. She was propped up in bed, wearing glasses, head shaven with thick black hair starting to grow in. Her twenty-nine-year-old face was symmetrical and void of makeup or wrinkles; her dark eyes were haloed in black lashes. She was all the lovelier for her lack of ornamentation, but I sensed a sallowness had snuck into cheeks that were meant to be a richer hue of toffee. I reached for her hand in greeting, and she didn’t draw back, but serenely said, “Not a lot of touching,” and my worried withdrawn hands quickly found each other, as if in prayer. Though I knew she was unwell, my first impression was that she exuded a sort of regality: as if it was not her infirmity, but her distinction that made us orbit around her quiet, reclining frame. We three were together for the first time then, in the same positions we’d inhabit in every session over our one week together: Fatima in her bed, me on her right side by her ankles, Mohammad by her left hip. And then, so near the end, we began.

  I asked questions. She spoke slowly. I listened. I recorded. Sometimes her faithful brother pressed her further for a hard answer, trying to stave off the inevitable sleepless nights and cravings for more clarity that stay with us when we lose those we love.

  After that first day, I left Fatima’s room feeling exhilarated by her storytelling but dazed by the circumstances: speedy and drowsy at once. My legs were heavy, as though I’d been trudging through sand, and I was thirsty for fresh air. I wanted to run out into the cool January evening. I wanted it to rain, though I knew it wouldn’t because it was Los Angeles. I wanted to scream open-mouthed into a deluge as my skin was pitted by cold sharp drops.

  Instead, I encountered Fatima’s mother, Farezeh, for the first time near the elevator bank, and she embraced me. She asked if we could find time to speak and I told her that I wanted that too, that “there would be time.” I flinched inwardly as I said this, knowing that there would be nothing but time, that when Fatima was gone, it would be Farezeh who was left, endlessly. Farezeh would outlive her daughter and together she and I would sit and fill in the gaps, the history from which Fatima had sprung. Farezeh, with hands like my own mother’s, would be left, surviving, without cessation, forever trying to solve the broken riddle of why.

  It was on our third day together that I caught the thread and understood why I’d been summoned. There was, of course, more to this woman than tales of culinary school and exhausting services on the line in bustling New York City restaurant kitchens; more even than far-flung internships and a star turn on Top Chef. Fatima wanted to leave a different sort of story in her wake: a deeper one. Less palatable, perhaps, but more human…more urgent.

  So, I became a pastor of sorts, a receptacle of secrets, ones that I was meant to sort through and figure out how to impart despite the complications of her truth. Someone they all shared and whose words carried the weight of a separate entity, beyond the family’s grief or flock. I was overwhelmed, yet committed: to listen, to wait, to gently prod, to encourage, to lead them into loving corners in which they already lived.

  This book was born out of that strange liminal week together. Woven into the narrative are essays that Fatima wrote at various points in her adult life, including those she published in the Lahore Sunday Times, in a university food journal, three from Bon Appétit magazine about her battle with cancer, and pieces she was working on when she died on January 25, 2019. Over that week together—and in the three years since—I’ve thought of Fatima and how to do this project for her as I fall asleep at night, struggling with the responsibility of imparting her experiences, her smells, her thoughts, her secrets, and transmitting them in her absence. I’ve spent countless hours asking questions of her grief-stricken family (and friends and colleagues) about a woman they wish were here to answer for herself. She hired you, I told myself. She chose you—perhaps because she sensed our similar command of language, our mutual fascination with the truth, with the undercurrent.

  In our week together in a hospital room in Los Angeles, Fatima invited me into her memory, her experience of a perplexing life, unjustifiably brief but replete with love and adventure, hardship, culinary inspiration, and ambition in spades. In a few short days, we established a rhythm that felt comfortable and even somehow sustainable. Perhaps we can go on like this for weeks, months: recounting her history, keeping each other’s secrets. Perhaps if I postpone my flight, I thought, we can keep at it, keep working together—as if our shared goal of making a book could keep her alive. As if we could trick the cancer into waiting for us to finish. The fallacy was irresistibly sticky and sweet.

  “Tell her your secrets,” Mohammad said one day in the dusky waiting room after we’d wept together. My secrets! “Your secrets are safe with her.”

  Indeed, I let snippets of my own story seep into our conversation. When she’d asked, I’d shared of myself, my circuitous professional and personal path to her bedside, thinking it unfair to hold back when she was being so open. And her brother was right: my secrets were safe with her. I’d signed on to help Fatima write a book about living life to its fullest over her final year, flavor rich. But that notion had fallen away like sand and I found myself making promises, taking oaths.

  On our last day of physical pr
oximity, she was past pain. There was a wildness in her eyes, that of a child, a seer. She was punchy and alert; she’d begun to have visions and she could see around edges and into dark corners.

  “You’re going to throw yourself into this like you throw yourself into everything you do,” Fatima informed me before I departed for New York. Fourteen days before she passed, my marching orders had finally come. She knew enough of me to recognize my tenacity.

  “You have my word,” I promised, unsure at the time of how exactly I might manifest it, though my allegiance to her had bloomed with our rapport.

  This is Fatima’s story, but essential to its very existence is her mother, Farezeh, who gave her life, whose own story shaped her. We stand on our parents’ shoulders, inheriting their choices. Whether we embrace or rebel against their perspective, it’s a jumping-off point to become who we are. Fatima and I cut to the quick of it in our week. We never left food behind; food was where we began, and from talk of feeling melons for their ripeness and the essential trifecta of ginger, coriander, and green chilis, we delved into the universal gorgeous and gnarled complexity of family and of life—the space between the meals. I listened to her in a time beyond hunger, when all that mattered was love: the love of her family, who shared her with me when time together was its most precious; the love in the room full of friends who waited for us to finish our truth-telling sessions before they gathered around her wilting frame. Their love was something visible, tactile, a haze in the room, a vapor that would billow if I swung my arms, and it changed me.