River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [91]
Only when he was eating his breakfast did Bahram make extended use of a chair. This meal was an elaborate affair, a ceremony that had evolved over many years: it was presided over by Mesto the cook, and it was served not in Bahram’s private dining room, but on a marble-topped table in a corner of the daftar. Shortly before the Seth entered the daftar, Mesto would cover the table with a silk cloth; then, once Bahram was seated, he would lay before him an array of little plates and bowls, containing perhaps some akoori – eggs, scrambled with coriander leaves, green chillies and spring onions; some shu-mai dumplings, stuffed with minced chicken and mushrooms; maybe a couple of slices of toast and some skewers of satay as well, and possibly a small helping of Madras-style congee, flavoured with ghee, and a small dish of kheemo kaleji – mutton minced with liver. And so on.
Bahram’s breakfast always ended with a beverage that Mesto claimed to have invented himself: the drink was made with tea leaves but it bore no resemblance to the chàh that was commonly served in Canton – indeed it was considered so revolting by the Achha Hong’s Chinese visitors that the very smell of it had made a couple of them vomit (‘Just look,’ said Vico, disparagingly, ‘these fellows are happy to eat snakes and scorpions but milk they cannot take!’).
Although it was Mesto who prepared the beverage, the responsibility for procuring the ingredients fell to Vico – and this was no small matter, since one of the drink’s most important requirements was milk, a commodity that was harder to obtain, in Canton, than myrrh or myrobalans. The foreign enclave’s main source consisted of a few cows that belonged to the Danish Hong; since many of the European merchants could not do without cream, butter and cheese, the Danes’ entire supply was spoken for as soon as it had squirted into the pail. But the tireless Vico had discovered another provider: directly across the river from the foreign enclave, on Honam Island, lay an immense Buddhist monastery which housed a sizeable contingent of Tibetan monks. Being accustomed to buttered tea and other comestibles that required milk, the Tibetans kept, as a substitute for yaks, a small herd of buffaloes: these were the animals that provided the milk for Mesto’s beverage. He boiled it with a measure of dark Bohea leaves and a sprinkling of cloves, cinnamon and star anise – all this was rounded off with a few handfuls of cheeni, the refined Chinese sugar that had recently become popular in Bombay. The resulting confection was called ‘chai’, or ‘chai-garam’ (the latter being a reference to the garam-masala that went into it): Bahram could not do without it, and tumblers were brought to him at regular intervals, providing the punctuation for the passage of his day.
Chai was the beverage of choice not just for Bahram but for the whole of the Achha Hong, and everyone in Bahram’s entourage listened keenly for the voices of the peons who came through periodically, chanting: Chai garam, chai garam! Particularly eagerly awaited was the mid-morning tumbler of chai, which was usually served with a snack. Of these the one that was most commonly provided was a Uighur speciality called a samsa – these were small triangles of pastry, stuffed usually with minced meat: baked in portable tandoors they were sold hot in the Maidan and were easy to procure. Being the ancestor of a popular Indian snack, they were consumed with much relish in the Accha Hong and were