The cooking happened on a Saturday in the first week of august.
He had been thinking about it since Uganda — not the meal itself, which had been planned since before he left, but the question of what it meant to cook Nalukwago's food in the Burrow kitchen rather than hers. The Burrow kitchen operated on different principles: different fuel, different equipment, different relationship to time and heat. He had thought about this on the flight home and had decided that the translation was itself the interesting problem, and that the interesting problem was worth attempting.
He thought about the South Indian cookbook he had bought in Bristol in the spring.
He had not opened it since he brought it home. He had known when he bought it what the difficulty was going to be, had bought it anyway on the principle that acknowledgement was a form of preparation, and had left it on the shelf since then, not quite ready for it. The smell of those pages — the combination of old paper and the particular spices that had soaked into the binding from forty years of use in some previous owner's kitchen — was the smell of his previous life's cooking, which was the smell of his previous life, and walking toward it required something he was still accumulating.
He had decided, sitting on the floor of his room in Uganda, that this was a door he would walk through during the school year. Not now. The decision to walk through it eventually was itself enough for now. It was the difference between a wound and a scar.
He made the groundnut stew. He made the matoke, which required banana leaves his mother looked at with the focused interest of someone encountering a cooking material entirely outside her tradition. He made the Rolex, which Fred had two of before the rest was plated.
His mother stood at the edge of the kitchen and watched him work with the quality she had been bringing to watching him do things since second year. She had developed, through practice, the specific discipline of watching Ron cook without contributing opinions, which she applied with the conscious effort of someone who considered her kitchen an extension of herself and was making exceptions.
He watched her attention shift from supervision to genuine interest when the matoke process reached its middle stage.
'What's in the leaves?' she said.
'Nothing,' he said. 'That's the point. They hold the steam.' He showed her the wrapping technique. 'The flavour comes from the plantain, from the steam, from the heat through the banana leaf. There's nothing else.'
She looked at it.
'That's very clever,' she said, in the tone she used for things that were genuinely good.
After dinner, with tea, she said: ' The Indian cookbook you bought back in December.'
He looked at her.
'I noticed you hadn't opened it, 'she said. 'I wasn't going to say anything. But I wanted you to know I noticed, and it's alright.'
He looked at her for a moment.
'I'll get there, 'he said. 'Not yet.'
'No,' she said. 'But when you're ready, the kitchen is available on Saturday mornings. As long as you need.'
'Thank you,' he said.
She picked up her tea. 'The groundnut stew was extraordinary,' she said. 'Teach me the process when you have time.'
'Next Saturday,' he said.
'Next Saturday,' she agreed.