But You Don't Look Like a Muslim

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  Blithe, blasé and not-a-little cynical as kids are nowadays, they might well ask: So, what’s the big deal? What was special about the gharelu dawat? Why does it deserve a place in this volume save its sentimental importance as a childhood memory? Looking back, I think its importance lay, primarily, in the sentiment behind having a gharelu dawat in the first place. It was an occasion to celebrate – not through an ostentatious display of wealth or means, but by making the person and the occasion a special one. Moreover, marked by a lingering Nehruvian idealism as my growing up years were, something as quixotic as the gharelu dawat was perfectly in sync with the times, with the mahaul or fiza of that era. After all these years, I am struck by the appropriateness of its fun-within-limited-means philosophy, how perfectly it encapsulated an entire way of life where axioms such as ‘waste not, want not’, or ‘jitni chadar ho, utne pair phailao’ (literally, ‘spread your feet according to the length of your sheet’ but used to mean ‘spend within your means’) were practised, and not merely preached.

  However, mere philosophy or sentiment, no matter how well meaning, cannot raise an occasion above the ordinary. What made these gharelu dawats stand out from the humdrum of daily routine was the food. It marked a change from the staple of a three-course meal – a salan, a sabzi, a dal – that constituted a daily balanced meal in middle-class homes like mine. Family favourites reappeared for the occasion – nargisi kofte (boiled eggs wrapped in a layer of spicy mince and served in a thick curry), pasande (a time-consuming and laborious restructuring of strips of mutton that had been pounded, marinated, and simmered on a slow fire) or the one-dish wonder that is haleem!

  Often, the season dictated the menu. I can remember several gharelu dawats which were somewhat in the nature of command performances, i.e., caused by the fruits of plenty. During the monsoon, a creeper full of rain-fed, bright-red kakraunda brought a dish of keema-kakraunda to the table. Of course, an especially strong monsoon shower was a de rigeur occasion for a variety of pakoras to be made and consumed by the plateful. Similarly, the plentiful arbi ke patte that grew wild and lush in the rains were transformed into pataude (arbi leaves rolled in a spicy batter of besan, tied with a string, steamed, cut into discs and fried, a bit like a leafier version of dim sums). And because family lore forbade the eating of fish in months that did not have an ‘r’ (that is, May, June, July and August), ingenious ways were devised to transform innocuous vegetables into fish-like substitutes for fish lovers in the family. The humble arbi was transformed into ‘fish cutlets’; unripe bananas were similarly pounded into ‘fish kababs’ that could well have fooled the most hardened of carnivores.

  Winters brought the full-bodied and flavoursome shab-degh (chunks of mutton cooked with turnips over a slow fire) and chhilke-wali urad ki dal ki khichdi (rice cooked with split black lentils), eaten with dollops of ghee, coarse ground lal mirch aur lassan ki chutney (red chutney made from dried red chillies and garlic), shalgam ka achar (thick rounds of turnip boiled with rye and ripened in the sun), mooli ki ungliyan (crudités of radish), rounded off with the divine shakarqandi ki kheer (a warm yellow kheer made from boiled, mashed sweet potatoes, flavoured with nothing but crushed cardamom and some sugar). Winter feasts also meant a dawat of only paaye (trotters) eaten with bazaar-bought tandoori roti. Other winter treats would be chuqandar gosht (a thick curry of beef and wedges of beetroot cooked with the beet stalks and greens), or the peasant fare of bajre ki roti and sarson ka saag (thick, unwieldy-to-make rotis eaten with mustard greens cooked over a slow fire). A departure from the usual desserts such as gajar ka halwa would be the lauki ka halwa or the lauki ke taar (long spirals of gourd steeped in syrup); and instead of the humbler kheer or phirni, a special occasion demanded gullathi (a close cousin of the kheer that had been thickened with coconut, dried fruits, etc. and served in small earthen cups or kullar).

  Occasionally, there would also be a special high tea which, again, meant a deviation from the standard tea-time snacks. Depending on the season, a special shaam ki chai would have: choker ki tikiyan (salted dough made from wheat husk and malai, cut into rounds and deep fried); shakar pare (sweet dough made from sugar and flour, cut into diamonds, deep fried and flecked with powdered sugar); ghugni (green peas lightly cooked with whole green chillies, cumin and pepper corns); ande ka halwa (eggs whisked in milk and cooked with sugar, browned besan and green cardamom). Even the sandwiches that were produced for these special occasions were seldom made from bazaar-bought mass-produced sliced bread; a loaf would be bought from a baker, its crust sliced off and elegant triangles made – oozing with a special mix of melted butter, mashed boiled egg and grated cheese.

  A gharelu dawat was often a special occasion for vegetarians who had a field day since they were normally relegated to being second-class citizens. A stew made from kathal (jackfruit) tasted like, if not better, than any self-respecting istoo (a mutton stew with roughly chopped onion, garlic, ginger and whole spices instead of pound ones) made by an old-fashioned khansama. So also, fake ‘shami kababs’ made from mooli but cleverly camouflaged to hide the pungent smell. Other family favourites that appeared on these occasions were neither elaborate nor labour-intensive; they were simply innovative ways to reuse leftovers and were given imaginative names such as: cutless (mince and potato cutlets, using leftover cooked mince that had been jazzed up with a dash of spice and chopped coriander); bawli handi (literally, ‘a dish gone mad’ and what a gloriously technicolour feast it was as it had a bit of everything the cook could lay his or her hands on); or rasawal for dessert, a sticky sweet confection of rice cooked in sugarcane juice (no, the shortcut of using gur instead of juice was strictly frowned upon) and flecked generously with plump raisins and grated coconut. For the true connoisseurs, rasawal was a dish fit for the gods, especially if it was served in an earthenware basin redolent with the fragrance of moist earth!

  Now, when we shepherd our kids to the nearest Dominos or dash to their favourite takeaway or pick up the phone to dial home delivery, I am reminded that something is amiss. I think it is the ingenuity that went into planning my mother’s gharelu dawats and the commitment to ensuring that the occasion somehow turned into a ‘special’ one.

  3

  COOKING IN THE AGE OF HOMOGENIZATION

  IN A WORLD OF FALLING standards, nothing has been worse hit than old fashioned home-style cooking in Muslim homes across upper India. I was struck by the full import of this somewhat simplistic pronouncement in the midst of my mother’s complaints about household help. Blissfully unaware of the political incorrectness of her terminology (much to my chagrin, she still calls them naukar), she is especially critical of those who pretend they can cook (aajkal ke naukar, as she calls them).

  At the same time, as she quite rightly points out, it is this new breed of folks passing themselves off as cooks (in Delhi they are more often than not from two eastern states known to export vast armies of assorted service staff to the rest of the country), who have homogenized cooking to a shocking degree and we, hapless victims terrified that they will take offense and leave us stranded, can do no more than mutter behind their backs. Let me give a few examples of the dreadful homogenization that has taken over our kitchens and numbed our palate in the wake of a silent and unsung putsch.

  First and foremost: the business of baghaar or tadka as those from the Hindi-speaking belt refer to the tempering with hot oil that is an essential part of most Indian-style cooking (north and south of the Vindhyas). No one can quite pinpoint when this subversive subterfuge took place but before we knew it we were eating everything with the same baghaar! There was a time - one that even I remember from my hoary childhood - when each dish had its own distinctive baghaar. The arhar ki dal for example - loved by the true connoisseurs, including Mirza Ghalib, as confessed in his letters - had a baghaar of one sookhi lal mirch (a whole dry red chilli) and roughly chopped cloves of garlic, giving it a wonderfully roasted, nutty flavour. The masoor ki dal would have browned onions; the urad (always white and
not yellowed with turmeric as it comes now) would arrive smothered under a melange of crispy brown onion, juliennes of ginger, finely chopped green chillies and fresh green coriander and the faintest smidgeon of heeng (asafoetida) popped in hot oil to reduce the dal’s baadi (gas-inducing) qualities!

  Of course, until our family moved to Delhi from Aligarh, we had never eaten the bigger legumes such as rajma or chhole or the sabut dals (those with skins on) except maybe as sabut urad ki kicchdi during deep, dark winter months. My father, until his dying day, would refrain from eating rajma and look wonderingly at us when we wolfed it down with a gusto we had emulated from our Punjabi friends and neighbours. But I am digressing … To return to the business of baghaar, aaj kal ke naukar give you a standard version – over-generous amounts of zeera (cumin) that lodge themselves in your teeth and make you urgently wish to floss; un-browned onions which float about like pale wraiths; and worst of all, chopped bits of uncooked tomatoes. It is the last, actually, that evokes the strongest reaction. ‘Har cheez mein tamatar daal dete hain,’ as my mother never tires of pointing out – this propensity to add tomatoes to everything!

  Like my mother, I too am convinced that these wretched red globes, the product of India’s famous Green Revolution, have done more harm than good to our palate. Frankly, I cannot recall very many dishes that once used to have tomatoes; now the most ubiquitous vegetable on our dining table is the tomato in some form or the other – diced, sliced, pureed, cooked, raw! And its absence from our fridges can cause our temperamental cooks to throw a mini tantrum. There was a time when the tomato made its appearance in a sharif Muslim household along with sliced onions, lemon wedges and long green chillies in the form of a salaad. Occasionally, it might even appear as tamatar gosht (an unimaginably reddish-brown dish of well-done mutton in thick gravy). After that, it was a strictly ‘no-tamatar’ zone.

  Now, as though making up for lost time, the tomato has surreptitiously entered every dish – be it vegetable, meat or legume. Also, instead of the distinctly flavoursome albeit anaemic-looking desi tamatar, we now have absurdly-large, uncannily red versions that are grown from hybrid seeds in hothouses. The new-age cooks use them to thicken gravies, add colour to dishes that don’t quite need help from a ‘foreign hand’ and slosh generous quantities of the pureed version to create another modern marvel that my parents’ generation had never dreamt of: the kadhai chicken. That something as utilitarian as a wok should walk from the kitchen to the dining table was itself an untenable idea, but that it should contain two such disparate elements as a tomato and a fowl was stranger still. Moreover, growing up in Nehruvian India, chicken (called murghi, it always made me wonder at the sagacity of those who had cooked the bird and knew its gender) was a special dish, and a standalone one. One did not eat it every day and therefore treated it with the deference it deserved.

  Another strange marriage wrought by the present crop of cooks is that between tomatoes and cottage cheese (paneer). Pretty soon, we will run out of a generation that had not grown up eating paneer and for whom it is strictly an acquired taste, one that they are still trying to figure out. Introduced to independent India by those who came from the other side of the newly-created border, its squishy whiteness lent itself to all manner of experimentation in a nation slowly shedding the ‘shackles of convention’. Initially, only those who suffered from gout or hypertension and were advised to stay off red meat, as well as those who adopted the new creed of vegetarianism by choice, embraced this new wonder, consumed in copious quantities by the newly-arrived Indians called sharanarthis (or ‘refuge-seekers’ as those from west Punjab were called in the early days). Along with rajma chawal and chhole bhature accompanied by gajar ka achar, it came to UP-wallah families like mine through Punjabi friends and neighbours in a middle-class ‘colony’ like ours in South Delhi. Now, however, we find ourselves eating paneer with virtually no assistance or prompting; although every now and then my racial memory gags at the thought of this Johnny-come-lately having nudged out several family favourites to become the default option on many a weekday night.

  Like the ubiquitous tomato, we have another country cousin and gift of the Green Revolution that has swamped our kitchens and played havoc with traditional menus, namely the green pea. Once eaten only in winter, for in the plains of upper India it grew only during the cold months, it is now easily available throughout the year. Cold storage and cold chains have caused problems of plenty for the pea on the same scale as the tomato; these green-eyed pods are everywhere and in such abundance that peas are paired with virtually everything. My memories of sitting in the sun helping shell vast mountains of tender field-fresh green peas – and popping as many into my mouth as into the waiting bowl – are only memories. The mystique of eating seasonal hari matar (fragrant with crushed pepper corns) for afternoon tea is just not there if it involves defrosting a reasonably-priced, easily-available packet from the deep freeze. What is more, I yearn for a time when one had matar only in the form of keema-matar or aloo-matar. Now it is everywhere, with everything.

  Of course, no rant on cooking in this era of homogenization can ever be complete without mention of roti. My children – deprived creatures that they are – have never known the delights of ulte tawe ki roti, those large, thin but perfectly round creations tossed on to the back of upturned skillets by skilful hands that knew how to knead the dough just so. Poor city-bred kids, they have been raised on a steady diet of phulka – a sort of roti that is only slightly bigger than a puri and is wonderfully fluffed out when eaten straight off the fire, but within seconds collapses into a leathery rubberiness which has none of the moist softness of the roti.

  And, finally, possibly the worst casualty of this coup d’état in our kitchen has been culinary vocabulary. There is of course the tadka that is commonly said for the baghaar, but what of the other words that possibly my children will only ever come across in qissa-kahanis or dictionaries: tarkari (now it is subzi or, more often than not, subji); pirch (plate); pyali (cup); chammach (spoon); kaanta (fork); saafi (duster). I can go on, but I must hurry. I have to tell my Shabnam (who hails from a village where her staple diet was bhaat eaten with freshly caught fish) to make matar paneer and remind her, yet again, that she must not put a fistful of zeera in it and also go easy on the tomatoes.

  4

  FASTING, FEASTING: FOODS FOR

  THE FAITHFUL

  MY EARLIEST MEMORIES OF RAMZAN are of Abbu, my father, sitting at the dining table making kachalu. The odd part was that he began to assemble this rather simple dish in the late afternoon, in fact a couple of hours before iftaar. I guessed that is when he was most hungry and he chose to while away the time doing mundane chores like peeling, coring, chopping, etc. His version of the kachalu usually comprised: guavas, apples, bananas, oranges and grapes, though others have been known to add a dash of pomegranate for extra colour or a handful of chiku for extra sweetness. Once done, he would cover the bowl and let it sit on the table. Years later, I figured that the kachalu tastes much better if made ahead because the fruit soaks in the lemon juice, pepper, sugar and rock salt that is sprinkled on top of the cut fruit. The whole thing does become a bit pulpy, but since the kachalu is essentially different from its western cousin, the fruit salad, which relies on the crispy crunchiness of the diced fruit for effect, the mushiness is quite all right – you might even say, it is kosher.

  Abbu has been gone for over fifteen years. The rhythm of my mother’s household faltered for the first few years, but such is the inevitability of time that some things soon fall back into place. Now, my mother makes the kachalu, perhaps with less diligence (and I might add, using ordinary table salt instead of the rock salt that gave Abbu’s version its unique pungency), but with unfailing regularity. Her flock is scattered in different cities but her home is still redolent with the fragrance of iftaari. She still sends tray-loads of goodies to the local mosque and on any given day, when I walk into her home at iftaar time, I can still find a combination of the fol
lowing on her table: pyaaz aur aloo ke pakode, chane ki daal, hari matar ki ghugni, dahi ki phulki, sonth ki chutney, chhole and/or keeme ke samose!

  The holy month of Ramzan, as many would know, is a period of fasting and prayer, charity and piety, retreat and abstinence. Lasting one lunar month (roughly twenty-nine or thirty days), it culminates with the festival of Eid. The faithful fast during daylight hours, abstaining from both food and water, and eat one meal before dawn known as sehri, and another upon sunset, known as iftaar. I try and keep as many rozas as I can – time, weather and circumstance usually dictate the number of rozas I manage to keep during any given Ramzan; however, much though I have tried, I cannot match the culinary spread of my parents’ home in my own at iftaar time. Nor have I always, I must confess, managed to send tray-loads of home-cooked savouries to the nearest mosque, it being customary to feed the needy and the wayfarer during Ramzan; sending money, instead, seems simpler, even pragmatic.