I have been a foodie since childhood – though my parents will have you believe otherwise because I was such a picky eater. Peeved by this, my mother would take me to doctors for frequent consultations and examinations to understand why I was skinny, despite all the food I ate.
Through school, university, and work in Mumbai, all my friendships were based on what people ate and carried in their lunchboxes. This bonding over food has continued well into middle age. I blame this on the “foodie gene” that I probably inherited from my grandfather. My family tells me that despite being a humble academic, he spared no expense when it came to food. On the weekends, his mornings started with a platter of fried goat’s brains and stir-fried livers and kidneys; in the afternoons, he would eat seyal teevan (onion-braised meat), bhugal bhee (stir-fried lotus stem); and in the evenings, he had friends over for a round of rummy over whisky and kheeme ji tikki (mincemeat patties).
This gene would make its way through icebreaker questions I’d pose to new students joining our class in school: “What is your food like?” When their answer contained words like nahari (a Mughlai dish of slow-cooked lamb shank), biryani, and mutton stew, I wondered how to get the teacher to move my seat next to theirs. I used to painstakingly save newspaper cuttings that carried reviews of new restaurant openings or identified ghettos that had the best kebabs and fish, and then coax my mother into taking me to those places. I even identified (read: silently judged) family, friends, and relatives based on the quality of their cooking. During all my years of working in Mumbai, and, later, in London, I became a quasi “good food guide” to my colleagues looking for ideas to eat out.
Undoubtedly, the best food was home food. It’s the reason why my foodie bar was set so high. My childhood memories, in fact, are all food-related: mornings before school my mum would make us loli ain baido (crispy biscuit bread and fried eggs), and on Fridays after school, we’d have daag mein teevan ain chawaran (mutton stew with rice) or seyal macchi (onion and tamarind fish) cooked by my aunt. Even on school nights, our dinners would include a piece of fried fish to go with lentils and flatbread, or else it would be regarded as plain. Many recipes in this book have been recreated by reminiscing those beautiful flavours. In South Asian cooking there are no written recipes – it’s all about seeing and feeling the food that you cook. Like my aunt Sheila told me when I asked her, “How do I know if the oil temperature is right?” Her response was simply that, “the oil will sing to you”.
I learned how to cook from a very young age. While the other kids were out playing, I observed my aunts drying and preserving vegetables and herbs, and practised how to make flatbread called mani. Both my parents cooked for the family so I never grew up thinking that it was a task meant for women. I just wasn’t allowed near the hob for a long time only because my family was concerned that I would end up hurting myself. Eventually, the first dish I learned to cook was okra, my favourite vegetable. Of course, I had to unlearn everything when I dared to demonstrate my new-found cooking skills to the best cook in our family (my father’s sister Baby) but more on that story when you read the chapter on okras. As time flew by, I kept honing my cooking skills.
After moving abroad in the early noughties, one day I found myself standing alone by the hob, reminiscing like my grandparents probably would have after emigrating from Sindh to Jodhpur. I would often stand by the hob thinking about my family and the familiar colourful sights of fresh vegetables and fruits sold on carts by street vendors in Mumbai, fashionably referred to in the West as “fresh markets”. Visits to the fish markets in Mumbai involved buying fish by looking into its eyes. I’d be reminded of aromas wafting from the kitchen as I reached home after a long day’s work. It was at a time like this, thousands of miles away from home, that I developed an appreciation for the people who produced delicious food day in and day out despite all the hard work it involved. People I took for granted like my sister-in-law, aunts, and parents who cooked for me out of love, and which reflected in their food.
The realisation (late nevertheless) dawned upon me that if I wanted to eat homemade food, I had to cook it myself; besides shopping for ingredients, including fresh fish, meat and vegetables; teaching myself to clean, gut, descale and slice fish, and chop meat and poultry to suit Sindhi recipes (all those years of visits to Mumbai’s fresh markets and keen observation certainly came in handy). Soon, I followed suit entertaining friends for dinner. And the feedback I’d get ran along the lines of “Why does the food taste so fresh, herby and completely different to the usual standard fare at Anglo-British curry houses?” My response was, “We are from Sindh, a region that is now in Pakistan thanks to the Partition. There are not many ‘Sindhi’ restaurants anywhere except a few small ones that were set up as a means to earn a living by the refugee Sindhis, and now most are virtually extinct.” Of course, no one knew what I was talking about – they had never heard of Sindh or the Partition of India for that matter, despite being British, because it’s a subject that’s never taught in school in the UK.
The sad part is that even in the subcontinent there are many who have never met a Sindhi, let alone know where Sindh is, or even have an idea about what our cuisine is. Imagine my shock when my husband’s family – who had never come across a Sindhi before – told me, “We don’t count Sindhis as anything significant, you don’t have a state of your own.”
If you are a Sindhi reading this book, I’m sure that this is a dilemma you would’ve faced – a sense of identity of who you are being questioned, or a discomfiture in where you belong. For most of us, a sense of belonging is always tied to something physical, like a piece of land. But for the Sindhi diaspora in India that land does not exist because it is now part of a country regarded as the enemy. Not so long ago, there were many motions and debates to remove and replace the word Sindh (with NE or Kashmir) from the Indian national anthem because it was no longer a part of India.
I believe that the refugee Sindhis suffered from an “impostor syndrome”, which led them to develop a chameleon-like trait to quickly adapt and blend in. Hence, wherever they settled in India, South America, Southeast Asia or Spain, they’d absorb the local culture, learn the local language and speak it more fluently than the locals. This dynamism to adapt to changing circumstances is a kind of survival mechanism, a trait that became embedded in their DNA over centuries, to deal with the many conquerors and occupiers that passed their way. In an urgency to resurrect their lives, they sacrificed the very cultural markers that identified them as Sindhi: their language, syncretic belief systems, attire, and love of meat.
While I too faced this struggle in school, often being labelled a “Pakistani”, I have always been very comfortable in my Sindhi skin. I credit my family for that – they never whitewashed our origins by claiming to be from some part of mainland India, always spoke in Sindhi to each other and us, cooked typical Sindhi fare replete with meat, and never lost any opportunity to highlight the uniqueness of Sindhi culture and our contribution to Indian society by way of our commercial acumen and enterprise. The one statement that was often repeated at home, and which all Sindhis would identify with was, “You will never find a Sindhi beggar.”
My friends encouraged me to put Sindhi food on the world map; it was a story that had to be told. So in 2016, I gave up on my financial services career, and started hosting supper clubs. It was going to be a daunting task, especially since I hailed from India, but with roots in a region that’s a part of Pakistan. Besides, how do you present the regional diversity of the subcontinent in a country that brands all food from the subcontinent as curry? It felt Trumpian almost – like fake news in the food world.
When I hosted my first supper club in London in 2016, one of the guests was a third-generation British Indian from Goa. Over the course of our conversation – besides enjoying the food and offering effusive praise – he told me that the reason for signing up was because his grandfather worked for the British Rail in Sindh and this was his way of reliving his past and connecting with him, and then went on to pick my brains about the recipes. I had absolutely no clue then about this part of our history, or that Goans from the southwestern corner of India had found their way up to Sindh to build the rail network. My foodie brain immediately made a connection – our love of their Portugueseinfluenced bread pao, and the sour mangosteen fruit called “kokum”, indigenous to the Western ghats of India, which is a key ingredient in several Sindhi lentil soups and stews. I thought to myself, “How many more such stories were waiting to be uncovered?”
That encounter at the supper club firmly sowed the seeds for this book, and rather than making it another anodyne account of recipes, I wanted to go into the very heart of the journey of what we ate why we ate, and take people with me through Sindh’s history, and its influence on our food. But no cookbook would have been complete without a trip to my ancestral homeland of Sindh, uncovering the treasures of its ancient past, and speaking to my Sindhi brethren to uncover family recipes, which are unheard of outside the four walls of their home, and not to be found in any restaurant. Certainly, this experience has been an eye-opener and the best part of putting this book together.
The most heartening part of foraying into the world of food has been the wonderful people I have come across. And despite the bad press that social media gets, the people who love food are a different breed; more than half of my followers are from Sindh and the words of encouragement and comments I usually get are that it’s so nice to see someone celebrating Sindhi food and culture. They tell me that no one in Pakistan today would even know what Sindhi food is, that my posts remind them of their mother’s cooking, and my food reminds them of home – “nowadays no one cooks like that in Sindh; this is the food of times gone by.”
The most serendipitous day for me – and for this book – was when I crossed paths with an angel called Priha Sayed. She started following me on Instagram and commented on a post saying “You always hashtag Sindh. Are you from Sindh and have you ever been to Sindh?” I told her that my family was from Sindh and I hoped to visit one day to research my book. At least that was the dream.
The next thing I knew she offered to help organise the trip and also sponsor my visa. Call it fate, destiny or luck, because, within a year’s time, the Pakistan government relaxed visa rules for Indian-origin British citizens. And about six months later I was planning my itinerary with Priha. My visa was issued in mid-February 2020 with a six-month validity. Wanting to avoid the excruciating summers of the subcontinent that start after April, I booked to leave around a week later, completely undeterred by the fact that the coronavirus pandemic was spreading around us.
For my travels, I followed the path of our beloved fish delicacy – the pallah fish, or the hilsa as it’s commonly known. Legend has it that it starts its annual pilgrimage at the mouth of the Indus near Thatta in southern Sindh, travelling up against the current to meet its murshid (Sindhi for spiritual guide), the Sufi saint Khwaja Khizr, whose shrine is in the middle of the Indus river island in the northern Sindh town of Rohri. Even though I had to cut my trip short by two days to return home before the worldwide lockdown, it’s still my most memorable journey. Call it providence, good fortune, or what was written in the stars – it’s as though the entire universe came together so my trip and my book could take shape.
I hope this book not only evokes a sense of pride in Sindhis across faiths and nations, but also inspires them to cook home food for themselves and their friends, besides making Sindhi food accessible to everyone.
Excerpted with permission from Sindh: Sindhi Recipes and Stories from a Forgotten Land, Sapna Ajwani, HarperCollins India.
