The cooking came in the evenings.
Nalukwago had noticed his interest in the food from the first night — noticed the way he ate with attention, the way he asked questions about what he was eating with the focused curiosity of someone who was building a model rather than simply enjoying a meal. On the fourth evening she had asked, in Luganda, whether he wanted to learn.
'Yes,' he had said, in Luganda.
'Tomorrow then,' she said. 'Five o'clock. Before service.'
The kitchen at the inn was not a professional kitchen in the European sense — not the organised hierarchy of the Hogwarts kitchens or the precision-oriented space he had been building toward with Sable. It was something older and more personal, a kitchen that had been cooking the same food for decades with the accumulated knowledge of repetition.
What Nalukwago taught him: the groundnut stew from scratch, which began with raw groundnuts roasted over a wood fire until the oil released properly.
The matoke — steamed green plantain wrapped in banana leaves, which required the specific patience of someone who understood that the steam needed time and could not be hurried. The Rolex — egg omelette rolled in a fresh chapati with tomatoes and cabbage and Nalukwago's spices, the kind of thing that could be made in five minutes when everything was ready.
He took notes. Not recipes — the logic of each dish, the principle that was specific to it, the technique that made it what it was.
On the last evening, after the final cooking session, she ate with him — sat across the kitchen table and ate the groundnut stew he had made, which was his third attempt and the first one she had not corrected. She ate it with the quality of someone assessing work that had been done properly.
'You have good hands,' she said. 'And you listen. Most people who want to learn don't listen.'
'I don't know anything yet,' he said.
'You know more than you say,' she said, with the quality of someone who had been reading people across a kitchen table for forty years. 'But you listen anyway. This is the important part.'
He ate the groundnut stew in the kitchen of the inn in Kampala and thought about Sable in the Hogwarts kitchen in January, watching the consommé clarify, saying it is correct in the quiet way she had, and found the two moments sitting beside each other with the specific quality of things that were part of the same continuous thing.