Curry in a cold climate
It is a hunched cold, a day of heavy damp and dripping grey. Here, it hangs over wet brown leaves, puddles on the pavements. But I have felt it too in streets turned to mud, with ashy fires by the side mixing smoke into the mist, turning coolies bronchial. I have known it where whole mountain ranges huddle together as fog blanks out whole swathes of landscape and creeps into the crevices. There, I have envied softly-stamping cows the warmth of their calves and beds of straw, my own shawl growing damp with my breath inside it. But there is a smell that causes me to lift my nose up out of its swaddling and into the cold. Lobia. Rajma. Garlicky beans. And I love it that this smell has followed me all my autumns-turning-to-winters, from Garhwal to the Nilgiris, the Pennines to the Decembers of Delhi and Lahore, the Karakorum to just south of Surrey. I find myself unfurling to breathe it in more deeply and pick up the song of the pressure cooker. Though I cannot see her, I know there to b...