‘On Exile’ (to borrow Edward Said’s phrase)

My post is inspired by an evocative piece entitled, ‘York’, by Belgian Waffle, a fascinating blogger who has written about the things she misses whilst being away from the city of her birth and her homeland. And so, I wanted to write something about my city of birth, Lahore. My homeland, Pakistan.

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan and left my homeland when I was two years old. My life, if sketched as a path on a map, would be a series of zig zags, going from Pakistan to America, to Nigeria, to America, back to Pakistan, then to Kenya, to Bangladesh, to the UK, back to America again, to Italy and  finally, Canada. At the age of 13, when we were living in Washington DC, Baba, my father, decided to send me to live in Pakistan with Mader, my paternal grandmother,  because he didn’t want me to become “Americanised”. I didn’t want to leave my parents, my sisters, and I especially didn’t want to leave my Ami; my mother, my best friend. But I didn’t resist or fight back; racist children in school had made my life miserable beyond comprehension, and all I wanted to do was to run away from them.  (more…)

The chaunsa, sindhri, anwar ratol: Pakistan’s mangoes. Oh, and the dohsehri. That’s the one you soften with your fingers, till it feels like soft pulp and then you pierce a tiny hole at the top. You suck out all the juice. And that’s how you eat that mango. But my favourite, which appears in late July, is the langra- with a thick parrot-green skin. And when you cut into it, the juice starts to ooze out-like perfect yolk from a softly poached egg-and forms a puddle in your plate. The flesh is fibrous and honeycomb-sweet. (more…)

Dates filled with nuts & ‘sar shir’, a Persian-style cream; the ’skin’ from boiling milk.

Switzerland? No, this is the Naran Valley in Northern Pakistan. Photo taken by my husband’s cousin, Suraiya Khalid Anvery this summer. (more…)

I am utterly excited as I have taken these photos with my brand new lens.

Ami made sure there was always a kulfi popsicle in our freezer for me, for an after-school snackette. The equatorial temperatures soared above 40C in Lagos, Nigeria and on a day like that, a kulfi popsicle was just the ticket. No tea and biscuits, just something cool, milky and creamy. (more…)

Pray, Love and Eat

Guest Post written by Baba, my father.

Every child has a lucky day; mine was Thursday. It was the day Agha, my father, would take my brother and I to meet our grandparents and cousins inside Lahore’s Old City. (more…)

My first published article came out in Edible Toronto’s Summer Issue. Edible is a magazine based on sustainable food and the farm scene with over 65 chapters across the United States. The inimitable Gail Gordon Oliver is the founder of the Edible Toronto chapter in Canada. The article was about my move from Rome, Italy to Toronto, Canada a year and a half ago, and the aromas of my childhood which made me feel at home in a new city.

Here is the link to the article, which I have also pasted below, with the recipe and a video of myself talking about kheer. (more…)

Baba tells me that Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover would play repeatedly at picnics with his friends in 1960s Lahore. But for real affectation, there had to be some Françoise Hardy. Baba also tells me that if you didn’t know her hit La maison où j’ai grandi, or at least pretend to know it, then you were essentially a nobody.

And there were no picnic invitations for nobodies. (more…)

I was in the 7th grade when I baked my first cake. At school, we had been reading Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, in which Aunt Maudie bakes a Lane Cake for Aunt Alexandra’s homecoming. Our extra credit assignment was to prepare this cake.

I arrived at my Aunty Shelly’s to find she had measured out the ingredients and placed them along the wooden counter with the recipe in her Arabesque-like penmanship on a notecard. We were going to bake Lane Cake together; tall and ivory frosted, belying the four layers of neatly stacked sponge beneath. Each layer sandwiched together with a sweet, dense filling of buttery pecans, plumped-up raisins and aromatic coconut, held together with egg yolks and butter.

The kind of filling you lick off the spoon because it tastes even better than the cake itself. (more…)

Asghar squats on top of a wooden table and fans the coal embers as the chicken tikka, impaled on steel skewers, turns a carbon-black around the edges as it plumpens and becomes amber-hued in the middle. Asghar has worked at Punjab Tikka House in Main Market, Lahore for as long as I can remember. As I sit watching from the car, he effortlessly slides off the bite-sized pieces of chicken tikka with his bare hands. Onto a newspaper. One fold, two fold, then a third, just like fish & chips in England. Then into the plastic bag they go. (more…)

The silver filigree antique jhumkas you see in Ami’s earlobes- she gave them to me when I was 18- and the irresponsible teenager that I was, I lent them to a dorm mate who lost them. It didn’t even occur to me that they were missing till I saw this photo recently.

Andaaza

I watched Ami, as she stirred the pot in a circular motion. Round and round her arm circled, the gold bangles glistening on her wrist. Clink, clink, they went as she stirred and stirred. The same gold bangles given to her by her Ami, when she married my father in her China-red and gold brocade gharara.

(more…)