WHAT'S FOR DINNER?

She turned off the heat and poured the coffee. Normally she did not drink it strong so late in the day, but John had not come home yet. He had called and told her he was eating down in San Jose, not to expect him much before twelve. That was later than he usually came home, the project must have entered a critical phase.

Dark, almost muddy. No sugar, no cream. She actually preferred espresso, but refused to go over to Columbus Avenue in the evening, as the combination of Eurotrash sexists and belligerent suburbanite yobbos living it up in the city during the warmer days of spring was too much to bear.
The one phrase she never wished to hear again was "have they started growing yet?"
Given that she was already in grad school, they had.
She just wasn't big and hefty.

And they were nobody's business, anyway.
As her plush T-Rex would say "mine, dammit!"
Meaning: 'don't even look, buster, get your own'.

Always listen to extinct lizards, even if they are fuzzy pink.

Sexism, primitive behaviour, and a complete lack of manners were par for the course in the Italian part of town. Though not from the Italians. Usually Eastern Europeans (hairy coarse-mouthed swine), North Africans (glib and superficial vulgarians), Oaklanders (wannabee toughs), Midwestern tourists (ignorant racists), New Yorkers (sneering brutes), English people (arrogant, belligerent, and drunk before nightfall), and, of course, the numerous drug addicts and mentally damaged weirdos who lived in all the residential hotels that lined Columbus and Broadway.

She liked North Beach, but only during the early part of the day.
By evening it was always a zoo.


Back in the living room she put the coffee on the rickety table next to the cane chair and sat down. Then picked up the book again where she had left off. Page 108: "'Three years later, in 1956, Esra made his boldest commercial move. He spent eighteen months planning it; an unprecedented campaign in the economic history of the island. You know, before that we had none of these musclemen takeovers you get now. People stuck to their place. Niche marketing - that was all that ever happened. Esra was our first real commercial predator.'"

She tried to imagine a muscled commercial predator, and couldn't. Perhaps a steel-clad android, a metallic drone, with grappling hooks. The very next sentence put a big grin on her face.

"You see, he was a button-arsed power freak."

That, strangely, re-humanized the man. The person talking clearly disliked Esra, which had to be taken into account, but a tightly-clenched merchant of near-toxic palm brandy was a concept that had colour, verve. She reached over, sipped her coffee, and grabbed the pipe she kept on the table. With deft pokes and prods she filled the bowl with Rattray's Accountant's Mixture, struck a match and lit up. This was good. Really good. These two families had grown to hate each other worse with each closer involvement. By the time they were inseparably intertwined, the dislike and venom that they had for each other bit savage furrows in the fabric of their shared flesh.

A page later, that hatred resulted in Lionel Samarasekera getting nearly choked to death, despite merely being the bearer of bad tidings, not the cause or crux thereof.
Poor bastard.

By the time her pipe had hit mid-range, and the Latakia reek in the living room was at its densest level in years (actually, since mid morning, when she had fired a bowl of Black Mallory), the book spoke of "thick black smoke spread in a dense cloud, rising from a huge blaze. In the flames you could see small speckled tornadoes rise to feed the cloud as though they were helping the sky itself turn blacker for the night.
Most of the warehouses in front were completely engulfed in flames. Huge robes of yellow and orange swirled; only the frame of the buildings stayed in a stencilled afterlife providing a temporary structure for the flames.......
then the beams splintered and crackled into a yellow emptiness."

Beautiful. The scene of the old railway warehouses ablaze in the valley below, near the jumble of railway lines that seemed to writhe in the flames around the disused shunting station was described in such glowing terms that she could almost feel the heat; the creosote from her bowl of tobacco seemed, almost, to be the pine plank and lead-paint soot itself, adding to the incendiary romance of the moment.

She was well on her second pipe by the time the novel got to Pearl's Christmas Cake. Her uncle still had not returned, and she could tell that the air outside had gotten colder, much colder, since daylight. San Francisco was always like that. You'd wander around in light clothes before tea-time, then by the cocktail hour you needed a sweater, and at mid-evening, a fur coat would not be amiss.

"Making the cake was a big affair. For two days it would dominate the kitchen. A huge mixing bowl would sit in the middle of the kitchen table like a bottomless well. Tons of ingredients would be chucked in: bags of raisins, heaps of currants, mixed fruit, cherries."
...
"After two days of mixing and stirring and wheeling the ingredients, she would bake the cake and then it would disappear for weeks leaving only the tantalizing scent of almond essence and rose water. She would hide it until Christmas or snow, whichever came first, but every room in the flat would reek of it."

Snow? How odd that a Ceylonese Christmas Cake should come out during snow. One would normally associate such an epic confection with warmer weather. London, however, had a worse climate than even the city. Or Scotland, where Charles Rattray had created the mixture that she currently favoured. Scotland sounded at times amazingly like the Bay Area. Miserable wind, fog, horrid food, and howling heathens. But exceptionally good tobacco, and reasonable whisky.

The speaker mentioned winter rice and curry during a freak blizzard on the next page. And she realized at this point that she was hungry.  Maybe after she finished the pipe she should have some food. She envisioned beef smoor, or chicken curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, and a saucer of sambol on the side. Plus rice, of course. Rice was the only thing she had in common with Sinhalese, Burgers, or the inhabitants of London. Though she imagined that there might be a shared a preference for Scottish pipe-tobacco with the latter.

Did curry taste better during cold weather? That, certainly, would explain why the British had turned Vindaloo and Chicken Tikka Masala into national passions.

The sudden mental image of skinny white boys climbing up palm trees along the Thames to harvest coconuts made her giggle. Wrong climate, of course, and there probably wasn't any cane-sugar growing in places like Yorkshire either. But, not having been there, she felt it was perfectly all-right to false-remember England as a fantasy tropical Middle-Earth. Filled with various races from the warmer regions in any case, and at times blitheringly odd.
Of course there would be coconuts.
Hot-house chilies too.


Maybe it was time for dinner. Such a pity that the Indian place on Polk had closed down, all that was left in the neighborhood was a miserable Paki dabba and a place run by unclean Muslims from Delhi.
She did not trust either restaurant. 

She decided to heat up an immersion packet of matar paneer, and have some easy vegies alongside. Chopped jalapeño peppers and zucchini with a drop of fish sauce, squeeze of lime, drizzle oil. Pack it in a bowl with plastic wrap, microwave it for a minute. Perfectly done, twixt crisp and juicy.
What the heck, heat up some rice-stick noodles for starch.
And have a spoonful of lime pickle for zest.

Thirty minutes after eating, she nodded off with The Sandglass by Romesh Gunesekera on her lap.
She dreamed of fire, and coconut trees.


Two hours later her uncle came home, and found her sleeping in her chair. The apartment smelled spicy and sooty. She had been smoking again. He doubted that she would start dating anytime soon, she didn't appear to like normalcy. And so few men tolerated good tobacco nowadays.
Or food with assertive flavours.

He covered her up with a throw-rug, removed the book from her grasp and put a pipe-cleaner in it to mark the page where she left off when her eyes closed, then turned off the overhead light.
If she woke up in the night she'd go to her room.
Otherwise she'd still be there at daybreak.

It was funny finding her in the living room in the morning. She'd yawn like a sleepy cat, then blink a bit. Before grumblingly stumbling into the bathroom.
Very much like her mother used to do.

She so much resembled his sister at that age.

Except for the pipe tobacco and curries.

Those were uniquely hers.



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