Monsoon Summer Read Online Free PDF

about them. When the curry was cooked, she would eat it in a kind of trance, her eyes half-closed, very quiet.
    But this morning, the old magic wasn’t working. Her spine looked rigid as she lashed herself into her apron, a frown line like a sharpened blade between her eyebrows.
    â€œI’ll do that, Mummy,” I said, seeing a pile of onions and muddy carrots on the draining board. I took an onion and started to chop it, but she snatched the knife from my hand.
    â€œNot like that, like this.” Her hand flew down the onion in a blur. “There.” She scooped up the tiny pieces, hurled them into thelarge frying pan, made them sizzle, the air turned blue and for a second, there she was again: my sorceress, my magician.
    Daisy had brought her own spice box home from India, a carved wooden box with rows of tiny cupboards inside, each one filled with a different spice. My mother opened it now and sniffed.
    â€œMusty,” she said with an exasperated sigh.
    â€œTell me what they are,” I said, still hoping for a bit of fun with her.
    â€œThis is chili powder, very hot. Fennel seeds, chili, dried coriander. I won’t put that in, Ci Ci will complain of indigestion. I’ll use Daisy’s for the chicken curry, and mine for the vegetable. So . . .” She was lost for a moment, her voice lilting, leaning over the onions that had started to turn brown at the edges. “I put spices first, warm them nicely, now lentils.”
    â€œGet out! Go away!” Her sudden shout made me jump. It was Sid, Daisy’s old black Labrador; he was circling and about to flop in his usual place in front of the Rayburn when she kicked him.
    â€œNo dogs in the kitchen!” she shouted.
    â€œKeep your hair on, Mummy.” I was softhearted about animals. “He’s not the Loch Ness monster.”
    â€œDogs are full of germs and fleas,” she told me after I’d shut him in the freezing hall.
    â€œNow here, come close.” She added a teaspoon of coriander to the lentils. “These first,” she whispered, “now the other vegetables.”
    And soon it was all lovely in there, with the kitchen filled with smells piquant and strange, the fat hissing, windows steaming, and us absorbed and getting on again. I was accustomed to watching my mother as anxiously as a farmer observes the sky for signs of storms approaching, but now, almost in spite of herself, I saw her whole body soften and relax.
    â€œStir it clockwise,” she told me, stroking my hand. “Counterclockwise is bad luck.”
    My mother had a number of strange beliefs like this: don’t washyour hair on a Thursday, never shave your armpits on a Monday—things that when she was in a good mood, I could tease her about.
    â€œUm.” I closed my eyes, glad to feel the touch of her hand. “I love these smells.”
    â€œDoes Tudor like curry?” she asked out of the blue and with a sly look I recoiled from.
    â€œHow should I know?”
    â€œYou should make it your business to know.” She dropped my hand. “Because men appreciate these things, and you should wear a dress at night and stop wearing those awful gloves, like some farm laborer, and have you told him about your job?” I had the sense these reproaches had been dangerously backing up, and now they burst out like steam from a geyser.
    â€œMy job!” I put down the spoon and sat down. “Why would I talk to him about it?”
    â€œWell, Daisy has, because he’s mentioned it to me, and by the way, he thinks her charity is madness when the farm is so run-down, but anyway . . .” She’d said what she’d been building up to and now she continued in her wheedly voice, “Let’s not have a row about it.” She lifted a scrawny chicken from the saucepan. “Let it cool, take the flesh off it, chop it small.”
    But my blood was up. “Why are you so ashamed of