I would like to thank everyone at Véhicule Press (Montreal), especially Nancy Marrelli, Bruce Henry and Simon Dardick. To Bloomsbury, and Penguin India. For their generous advice on early drafts thanks to Umarraj Singh Saberwal, Chef Olivier Fuldauer, Renuka Chatterjee, Robert Majzels, Lissa Cowan, and Nidhi Srinivas. Thanks (for many reasons) to Adi, Rosa, Amit Pal, Janice Lee, Dilreen Kaur, Farhat Rehman, Denise Drury, Agatha Schwartz, Aparna Sundar and Taras Grescoe. To Chef Cameron Stauch, whom I interviewed in New Delhi, to Jerome Lowenthal, my ‘Beethoven consultant’, to Lorna Crozier (the line in italics on page 95 is inspired by her poetry collection The Sex Lives of Vegetables), to Maria José de la Macorra for the sketch on page 31, to Negar Akhavi for sharing the Dalai Lama ‘Chinese gulag’ story, to Nadia Kurd, Riaz Mehmood and Wajahat Ahmad for the Kashmiri translation and Perso-Arabic script on page 128.

Special thanks to Andrew Steinmetz, Jackie Kaiser, Natasha Daneman and Alexandra Pringle.

Jaspreet Singh was born in Punjab, and brought up in Kashmir and in several cities in India. He is a former research scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Montreal. His debut short-story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for four awards including the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Region. He lives in the Canadian Rockies.