The Game - Laurie R. King [53]
The cooking fires here smelt like nowhere else. Not coal or wood, nor Irish peat, nor even the varied substances used in Palestine. Here, cow dung mixed with straw was slapped onto the walls in dinner-plate–sized mounds to dry, then peeled off, heaped into baskets, and hawked to travellers in the caravanserai. The musky smoke rose around me, blended with the odours of fresher droppings, horse sweat, unwashed clothing, and the spices that went into the evening meals. Someone was cooking chapatis, the delicious smell of wheat flour waking my salivary glands and making me aware of a sharp interest in dinner.
I was just stirring to ask Holmes if he thought we had seen the last of Bindra and our rupees when the boy sauntered up, laden with sacks and twine-wrapped scraps of paper, onions and carrots sticking out of his pockets. He caught up one of the pots and filled it at the communal pump, then dropped to his heels before the fire that we had made (he had gathered a surprising quantity of sticks in his apparently aimless scrounging during the day) and set about constructing dinner. A generous pinch of mustard seed popped and spattered into melted ghee, followed by a sliced onion, half of a somewhat tired cauliflower, and pinches of turmeric, pepper, cumin. And as that mixture was cooking, he took a pair of bowls and placed them between his feet, then pulled over the heavy little canvas sack he’d come back with, rolled down the top, and plunged in a grubby hand. Without taking his eyes off the bustle and activity of our various neighbours, Bindra began to sort the contents. I watched his quick little fingers for a few minutes, then curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see what he had in the sack.
It held a mixture of rice and pulses—an inadvertent mixture, it would seem, because Bindra was separating it back into its component parts. And he did so at an amazing speed, flicking the rice into one bowl and the pulses into the other, dropping any stray pebbles to the ground. I looked at him, looked back at his hands, and couldn’t believe the mechanical speed and precision of his motions: Watching closely, I could see no rice grains join the lentils, no pulses among the rice. The boy pretended to ignore me, but if anything, his hands speeded up.
I took a handful from the bag, to try it myself. With fierce concentration, I could tell one tiny grain from the other after rubbing them for some seconds between finger and thumb. Without benefit of vision, it would take me hours, days to work my way through the two or three pounds his sack contained. He was halfway through it already.
I went to sit next to Holmes, and whispered in English what I had seen. He raised his voice and asked the boy, “Bindra, tell us why you have bought these sweepings from the market?”
“Not sweepings! I do not eat unclean food from off the ground. This is merely the work of a clumsy seller of grain, who allowed one to spill into the other. And he is lazy as well, for rather than going to the labour of sorting, he would rather sell it for next to nothing.”
“And have I paid the full cost of the dhal and the rice, or next to nothing?” Holmes asked drily.
“Not full, no!” the boy declared, filled with righteous indignation. But under Holmes’ gaze, he faltered, and made a show of checking the water to see if it was boiling yet. “I divide the cost of the two, that you may thus pay me for