The House of Blue Mangoes Read Free Page A

Charity Dorai. Up before first light, she had bathed, prayed, made the coffee and measured out the day’s food for the twenty or so family members in the house. The number of people under Solomon’s roof was never constant, but expanded or contracted depending on who needed his help or shelter, or both. Visitors would arrive for a week and still be there six months later. No one minded. Solomon was the patriarch of the clan, and it was expected of him, as it had been of the ruling Dorai since his great-great-grandfather’s time, to take in any member of the family who needed hospitality or succour.
    As Charity bustled about the great kitchen, tending to three of the five wood-burning stoves which had begun their daily contribution of ash to the layers that already blackened the walls, she was joined by her sister-in-law. Kamalambal, widowed these past two years, was a plump and even-tempered woman. Charity and she got on very well and between them they ran the household. Kamalambal went off to supervise the milking of the cows and Charity began issuing instructions to the two women who helped her in the kitchen. There was still no sign of her brother-in-law Abraham’s wife, but this didn’t surprise her for Kaveri was a frail and sickly woman who frequently took to her bed, especially when her husband beat her, a regular occurrence. Abraham was away visiting some of their properties so maybe she was just ill.
    Charity was planning to make fish biryani, as she had done every festival day for twenty years. The grinding and mixing of the various masalas and spices had to begin early. But she could not ignore the morning meal either, puttu and stew; she had the puttu steamers, lengths of bamboo stem, cleaned and ensured that the huge iron vessel of stew was ready to be heated.
    Charity Dorai was a beautiful woman. Fair in a land where the paleness of a woman’s complexion outweighed every other attribute, it was expected that she would make a good marriage and she did. Rumours of her beauty travelled to the ears of the Dorai family, who had broken with Andavar tradition that cross-cousins marry and instead reached across the mountains to Nagercoil where her father was headmaster of a school. They had even foregone a dowry and paid all the marriage expenses.
    The fish biryani, her signature dish, had been unknown in the Big House when she had first arrived. Her husband and in-laws had taken to it. Indeed, they had come to like it so much that they had demanded it on every festive occasion. Only during the monsoon months, when the fishermen did not put out to sea, would they settle for the traditional biryani made with goat meat.
    The great cast-iron vessels in which the biryani would cook had been cleaned and oiled by the servants and she began setting out the ingredients swiftly and surely. Thick seer fish cuts, fresh and glistening, a gleaming mound of rice that had been washed and drained, onions, green chillies, garlic, ginger, coriander, red chillies, turmeric, curd, mint leaves, cinnamon, cardamom, clove, nutmeg, aniseed, cumin seed, cake seed and mace (all to be ground to make the masala which gave the dish its unique taste), a pinch of saffron, ghee, thick and fragrant. She smiled to herself as she thought of the experimentation she had resorted to when she had first arrived, trying to come up with acceptable substitutes for some of the ingredients used by her father’s neighbour, a friendly Mappilai lady, who had treated the motherless girl like her own daughter, teaching her, feeding her, and imparting to her the secrets of the tasty cooking of northern Malabar.
    As she worked, she kept an eye on the servants who were preparing the morning meal. In a corner of the kitchen one of the girls was filling the puttu steamers with rice flour, alternating it with layers of feathery coconut. In about an hour, Solomon would need to be fed. He would, as he always did when his brother Abraham was away, eat alone. After that