THIS is an essay that began as an enquiry around food, but I very quickly discovered that the boundaries between food and love are only imaginary, like the Equator. It is not surprising that Mirza Ghalib, an exemplary poet who wrote on love, was also known for his love for food. Particularly his love for mangoes and meat. Once, as a response to meagre food on his dastarkhwan full of crockery, he responded by saying, ‘If you go by the plentitude of crockery, then my dastarkhwan seems like Yezid, but if you go by the quantity of food, then it is that of Bayazid.’¹

I understand that to speak about food – particularly non-vegetarian food – within the context of a city like Ahmedabad is wrought. I dislike using the term ‘non-vegetarian’ because it implies that vegetables are the norm, and meat a deviation from it. We are reaching a stage in our present political discourse where our nationalist identities are increasingly getting intertwined with food and eating behaviour. We have seen over the last couple of years people being lynched to death on the mere suspicion of storing, carrying, or transporting beef. Each lynching is more performative than the other, almost a spectacle to manufacture belief in the part one is playing.²

 

I come from a mixed household. My father’s parents Punjabi refugees from Lahore/Rawalpindi, and my mother’s parents settled Gujaratis living in Ahmedabad over many generations. The premise on which the kitchen of my childhood was built embodies the sameness of complexity that Ahmedabad city has in its relationship with food. What I am urging the reader to problematically assume is that in the short description of my grandparents, I have embedded an imagination of their food habits: meat-eating and vegetarian respectively.

I was born and raised in Ahmedabad. For a large part of my childhood, the rules in the house regarding meat consumption were: (a) Eat meat at restaurants or other homes. (b) Bring meat cooked at restaurants and eat it at home. (c) Never cook meat at home. And so as an upwardly mobile middle class family living in West Ahmedabad,³ we had weekend outings or takeaways from a few standard meat serving restaurants: Tomatoes, Ellisbridge Gymkhana, Collegian which used to serve meat back then but doesn’t anymore, Sheeba or Neelam Lutf, all located in West Ahmedabad.

This was true until my mother’s road accident in 1998. The process of her subsequent recovery took 10 years, which was long enough for the norms of the house to change with an eager teenager assuming control, and the growing influence of my paternal grandmother. My grandmother, Usha Sethi, had by now honed her culinary skills to ‘Level Gourmet’. Hers was mostly a self-taught skill, learnt post-marriage.

 

There is a particular mutton dish she prepares that is well known across my family and our friends and their friends. But the recipe had a reputation for being tedious and time consuming and was therefore reserved for special occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, result days and so on. So good was her mutton that I often used it as bait to make friends in my new school. It helped a shy girl, who was going through a culture shock at an alternative school after 10 years of Convent education. She would pack half a kilogram of mutton curry with about 10 rotis and a box of rice, and the news would spread rapidly as the boxes would open. Most meat-eating people from my class would come, even those who I had had no prior conversation with. It is here that I also met my namesake who would go on to become one of my closest friends.

The story of our meat-eating escapades in school and beyond still remains dear. It is here that I first experienced the idea of Social Capital.⁴ It is also in the same breath that I was recognized as not being ‘Gujarati’ enough. That my eating behaviour somehow determined my relationship with the society I was operating in as either ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’. These markers became more evident every time I travelled on a Rajdhani from Ahmedabad: I was invariably the only person in a bogey of mostly vegetarian men ordering a non-vegetarian meal, and relishing the particular chicken curry served on the train. I would have many sets of judgmental eyes voyeuristically looking at the bone that I held and sucked clean, for that was the only real way of eating meat.

 

But the rampant vegetarian morality of the city is only one side of the story. The other side I discovered much later. My first memory of a foray into the eastern side of the city, also known as the ‘old city’, was one night when I insisted on tagging along with my elder brother and a friend of his who lived in Jamalpur. They wanted to make an outing well after dinnertime to the lari that made the ‘best’ tandoori chicken available in the city. Farooq was a name I had often heard from my brother’s gang of boys, but whether Farooq was the name of the roadside tandoor or the bhathiyara’s own name, I do not know till date.

The tandoori chicken I ate there was like nothing I knew: large, succulent, juicy pieces of chicken leg and breast all displayed in full public view, scarlet red on skewers, unapologetic. That street was lit with kerosene lamps, and was home to all kinds of tandoors and tawas. Sounds of large groups of people ordering bheja, gurda, kaleji; a celebration of food, the only thing hidden away on the back seat of the car was me, overwhelmed with my discovery. A transcendence beyond the kitchen of my childhood. Unable to locate Farooq again, I find myself comfortably eating on the same street today, where Ronaq Fry Centre has taken centre stage. The street is still, of course, a bustling celebration of food and identity.

 

The old city is a meat-eater’s delight. There are varied smells and flavours; each street well known for a particular delicacy. My occasional ventures into the old city were few and far between, and were mostly in groups with adventurous comrades or with a Muslim friend who knew the ins and outs of the place. It is only in 2012, when I started working on a project that contained me in Mirzapur, that I formed a new relationship with the old city. This project was the Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict housed in a 95-year-old colonial style Parsi house. The museum is a space for dialogue on conflict arising at multiple levels: political, social and personal, using art and culture practices. Conflictorium urges participants/audiences to come face-to-face with difference, to acknowledge and celebrate difference as diversity.

 

Gool Lodge, the building in which the museum is housed, is nestled between many iconic food joints: Karachi Bakery, Famous – their kebabs and mutton samosas are integral to exhibition opening nights at the Conflictorium – Bera, Roopali, Lucky Tea Stall (which has an original M.F. Husain painting on its wall, a couple of graves in the middle of the restaurant and really good bunmaska chai), Imperial Bakery, Nishat and many such more. My luncheons are held at New Irani Café; their mutton bhuna, rosh and anda kheema remain my favourites. We should be meticulous in not mistaking any of these dishes for derivatives of ‘Mughlai’ food; nor do they share any resemblance with average Punjabi versions of meat in homogenous tomato-onion gravies either. If there were any regional references to be made in the description of the food served at New Irani Café, these would most definitively have to be Gujarati.

 

The Conflictorium was not only proximate to the world of meat in Ahmedabad, it was also a propeller to transform my curiosity of food into a reified passion for food. Out of the gates of the museum, one often undertakes a serious exercise, a kind of ‘Walking in the City’.⁵

Walking, in de Certeau’s offering, is a kind of spatial practice. But walking here also opens up the possibility of smell and sight getting attached to what I want to suggest is a mnemonic practice. Food is a memory device that helps resolve knotted emotion, inflexible rationality, and unarticulated desire. It is during one of these walking exercises that I stopped to click a picture of a man frying fefda, a rather rubbery delicacy, near Teen Darwaza, only to discover the resemblance between this picture and another one from my archives, of a man frying champli kebab a country away, on Food Street in Lahore. The similarity of stance, frame, attitude, mood, and setting are ironically familiar.

 

The idea that the resolution of memory could lie in food was a powerful one. As an artist it became a trigger for a durational performance art piece I made called ‘Within a Zenana’. The performance starts as I enter a 10’x10’ enclosure made of white curtains that stands in the middle of a viewing room. I begin to cook; first the chopping of onions and garlic, which are then sautéed in mustard oil. The smells by now fill the room. After the onions are brown, I then add chopped mutton pieces of at least four inches each and with the spices, it is best kept simple: turmeric, red chilli powder, and salt. The oil separates. I add the water and close the pressure cooker.

It is the in-betweens that are moments of potential resolution. Every time I wait for the recipe to move forward, enclosed in the zenana I write to a lover; I write about making mutton curry and desire, I write about the tensions between domesticity and the freedom of mobility. I also write about being invisible as I traverse love. When the eighth whistle blows, the mutton is ready. I serve it, alongside the rice I make, and open the curtains. The zenana still exists, but the audience that sits around are no longer voyeurs glimpsing through the gaps between the curtains. Instead, they are transformed into legitimate spectators, sometimes more uncomfortable now than earlier.

 

I seat myself in the middle of the enclosure, wearing a sleeveless white slip, eating a plate of mutton curry and rice, sucking at the bone marrow, unapologetic for once. I leave. On display within the zenana is the letter, my plate, the cigarette I smoked, the mutton curry-rice and a set of plates. The audience finds their way into the zenana.

This performance premiered at Interlude, an exhibition at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU in Baroda organized by Knots Gallery, followed by a performance at the Conflictorium.

Cooking meat has been the ultimate liberation for me. The process starts by buying the meat myself: I have learnt how to distinguish young goat from old, and which cut tenses the muscle, leaving the meat tough. I discovered butcher shops sometimes nestled between the workshops of mechanics, or found a particularly responsive Qureshi at the Mirzapur meat market, who could fathom my need to eat meat on the bone. I have since been asked several times whether I belong here since ‘meat is always cut like vegetables in Ahmedabad’, and I seek for it to be cut differently, for it to be treated like meat.

 

All of these essentially Gujarati food preparations have made up my foodscape over the past five years. The city is growing, and so are the disparities. In the old city, one finds tandoori chicken Hakka noodles as an innovation. On the other side, the plushest hotels have begun to serve sushi and sashimi. The city that was once divided along the lines of the food it consumed has proliferating egg laris by the hundreds. Invisibility is transforming: the red dots on restaurant signboards are becoming less subtle. However, while newer food experiences are inaugurated in Ahmedabad every day, people are still refused homes based on their eating behaviour.

 

Footnotes:

1. Yezid was the second Caliph from the Umayyad dynasty who persecuted Hussain ibn Ali. Bayazid Bastami was a 9th century Persian Sufi.

2. Erving Goffman in his essay, ‘Performances: Belief in the Part One is Playing’ says: ‘At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on – and this seems to be the typical case – then for the moment at least only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the ‘realness’ of what is presented.’

3. The Sabarmati river, a seasonal/periodic river – which is now more of an all year round canal as a result of the riverfront project – flows through Ahmedabad, dividing it into two unequal parts. East Ahmedabad is where the old city is, West Ahmedabad is the new city. These divisions are also accompanied by other binaries such as minority-majority, poor-rich, etc.

4. Although used and explained by several sociologists, I would like to go with Pierre Bourdieu’s usage of the term in The Forms of Capital, ‘the aggregate of actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.’

5. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984, p. 91.