At
the Lahore Karhai, by Imtiaz Dharker
It’s
a great day, Sunday,
when
we pile into the car
and
set off with a purpose—
a
pilgrimage across the city,
to
Wembley, the Lahore Karhai.
Lunch
service has begun—
‘No
beer, we’re Muslim’—
but
the morning sun
squeezed
into juice,
and
‘Yaad na jaye’
on
the two-in-one.
On
the Grand Trunk Road
thundering
across Punjab to Amritsar,
this
would be a dhaba
where
the truck drivers pull in,
swearing
and sweating
full
of lust for real food,
just
like home.
Hauling
our overloaded lives
the
extra mile,
we’re
truckers of another kind,
looking
hopefully (years away
from
Sialkot and Chandigarh)
for
the taste of our mothers’ hand cooking.
So
we’ve arrived at this table:
the
Lahore runaway;
the
Sindhi refugee
with
his beautiful wife
who
prays each day to Krishna,
keeper
of her kitchen and her life;
the
Englishman too young
to
be flavoured by the Raj;
the
girls with silky hair,
wearing
the confident air
of
Bombay.
This
winter we have learnt
to
wear out past
like
summer clothes.
Yes,
a great day.
A
feast! We swoop
on
a whole family of dishes.
The
tarka dal is Auntie Hameeda
the
karhai ghosts is Khala Ameena
the
gajjar halva is Appa Rasheeda.
The
warm naan is you.
My
hand stops half-way to my mouth.
The
Sunday has locked on all of us:
The
owner’s smiling son,
the
cook at the hot kebabs,
Kartar,
Rohini, Robert,
Ayesha,
Sangam, I,
bound
together by the bread we break,
sharing
out our continent.
These
are
the ways of remembering.
Other
days, we may prefer
Chinese.
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