When I was growing up in Mauritius, hurricane season came every year between January and April, and everyone in the house knew what that meant. There were days we simply couldn't go outside. The rain fell in heavy grey sheets and the wind started as a low moan and then turned into something much stronger. Our house, like most on the street, was built from timber and corrugated steel. It wasn't built for storms like that. It groaned.
Whenever the radio gave a warning, and it always seemed to come a day too late, my parents would go out and buy whatever provisions they could still afford. Rice, tins, flour, whatever curry powder was left on the shelf. My mother had her own private theory about hurricanes, one she never said out loud but lived by completely. She believed a house with a hot pot on the stove couldn't really fall apart. So while my father boarded up the windows, she started a curry.
It was always one of two things. Chicken curry if there was chicken to be had, butter bean curry if there wasn't. The method barely changed. Onion sweated slowly with a little salt, garlic and ginger and a fistful of curry leaves added once the kitchen had filled with the right smell, and then whatever we had, chicken thighs or a tin of butter beans, going in to simmer low while the storm did whatever it was going to do outside.
We were given jobs. Mine, and my sisters', was the chapatis. We rolled them out on the counter while my mother stood at the stove with her back to the window, stirring. I remember the rain hammering the tin roof and the wind finding every gap in the frame, and inside, that pot bubbling on like nothing outside could touch it. I think now that was exactly the point. She wasn't trying to distract us from being afraid. She was giving us something steady to hold onto while everything else outside wasn't steady at all.
I left Mauritius many years ago, and I live in Norfolk now, where the closest thing we get to a hurricane is a grey afternoon and rain that never quite stops. But I still make that curry. Chicken when I can get good thighs, butter beans when I want something simpler. It still does exactly what it did when I was small. The kitchen fills with the same smell. Something in me settles.
To this day, this meal brings me straight back to my island in the sun. Not the version of it on the postcards, but the real one, the one with a corrugated roof rattling overhead and my mother quietly refusing to let a storm win.
