Every Sunday, we went to my grandparents’ house in Rajendra Nagar for dinner. First the house was a red-brick one with a courtyard in Old Rajendra Nagar; later, a bigger plot in New Rajendra Nagar. In both neighbourhoods, there was a flourishing neighbourhood dhaba called Bittu’s or Pappu’s, which served chicken curry, mutton curry, rotis, black ma-ki-dal, gobi-aloo and a ‘mixed vegetable’ preparation that changed from day to day.
The rotis were my job, my father’s and mine. We would walk down with my cousin to the dhaba and order the rotis for dinner. If it was very cold, as a great indulgence, we would drive down and wait inside my parents’ Maruti. But I liked to stand, sweaty, right next to the tandoor to watch the roti man at work.
If I stood on tiptoe, I could see the red flame inside the tandoor and the air pockets rising in the rotis, which flaked and cracked when touched. The roti man had three assistants, each ganglier than the last, who would lay out huge sheets of wholewheat dough, and cut and roll them into balls. They would then dust them with dry flour, flatten them, whirl them once or twice around in their floured hands, and hand them over to the artiste. He would lower the dough to the inner wall of the tandoor, which was covered in iron mounds on the inside, where the dry heat would blister and cook the bread. He always knew when the rotis were ready to be fished out with his hooked iron rod; if you ordered enough rotis, they would give you a plastic bag of raw red onions and some of the dal fry—‘dal fly’ as my father referred to it—free.
The neighbours would be out for their dinners, too: the officious lady from a few streets down who ran everyone’s lives, the local beat cops, my grandmother’s Arya Samaj cronies, and the next block’s Balraj Kohli uncle who, every Sunday, treated himself to a fiery meat curry and one chilled bottle of beer. Men came to eat under the naked bulbs suspended from the rafters; women came to pick up food to take home. As they waited, people would fall into backslapping, into handshaking, into gossip.
Rajendra Nagar was one of Delhi’s Partition refugee colonies, hurriedly created after 1947 to accommodate the millions of displaced people pouring into independent India. In Delhi, these neighbourhoods were named after Hindu Congress leaders: Rajendra Nagar, Patel Nagar, Tilak Nagar and Lajpat Nagar. Over time, the accents of its inhabitants mellowed ‘Rajendra Nagar’ down to the more rounded, affectionate ‘Rajinder Nagar’, just as Connaught Place became ‘Knaat Place’, and residential colonies all across South Delhi became ‘c’lonies’.
Rajinder Nagar was, without doubt, a Punjabi c’lony. Punjabi villages and towns had always had common tandoors for baking bread; women would prepare the dough at home and then take it to the communal oven to cook. So tandoors sprang up in Rajinder Nagar too. In the afternoons or early evenings, my grandmother would make atta at home and take it to the tandoorwala who sat down the street, relying on the households of the neighbouring lanes for business. He had no counter, no tables and chairs, no awning—just five bricks and a clay oven.
The Rajinder Nagar house didn’t originally belong to my dada and dadi. My paternal grandfather was from Pind Dadan Khan, in the arduous Potohar Plateau region of West Punjab, and his family had moved to Rawalpindi and he to Lahore. My grandmother’s family, though, originally from Fatehgarh Churian in East Punjab, had lived in a village that fell across the new border, now in Pakistan. They came in 1947, like many other Partition refugees, on the trains from West Punjab carrying whatever they could salvage. My grandmother’s brother wangled a job exchange as a government clerk in Delhi, and this came with a flat in Panchkuian Road, to the west of the city then. For a few months, seventy people squeezed into its three rooms, waiting to find work and somewhere to go. My grandfather, who’d lived in university accommodation in Lahore, wasn’t eligible for any kind of house allotment. Still, in 1947, they counted themselves lucky. He was a teacher and he managed to find work, first in Rohtak, then in Ajmer, then in Dehradun. Others languished in refugee camps for years.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Professor Aziz, my grandfather’s colleague at Government College, Lahore had told him. ‘In a little while you can have a permanent position here. I don’t know why you’re going off to God-knows-where. All this will pass.’
Most people were of the same mind. No one thought the border was about to become impermeable. My mother’s mother locked her treasures and books in her school desk when she left Lahore; she didn’t know she wouldn’t be back for the new term in July. My grandfather journeyed back in September 1947 to track down his niece in a tuberculosis asylum.
Not understanding the danger they were in, his sister Channo Devi and her husband refused to leave Murree, where they owned a curio shop; eventually, in September 1947 they were sent to an army-run refugee camp in Rawalpindi, and in October, lifted out to India on a DC3 Dakota flight. Legend has it that Channo tried to persuade the soldiers to allow her to bring her prized tandoor with her on the plane.
In the early 1950s, land and houses were allotted to the refugees according to what they could prove they’d left behind; several old hierarchies were thus recreated. In Rajinder Nagar, the residents were mostly people with the same Punjabi middle-class background, often linked in a loose way to the reformist Arya Samaj movement, so friendships formed fast. Channo Devi’s husband received a ninety-square-yard plot as compensation, three rooms set around a courtyard. This was the house that she would leave to her brother some decades later.
The Partition refugees scraped a living out of small patri shops, hardware stores, taxis and phatphatiyas. Some people, like those of my family, became teachers, medical orderlies or joined the army; they became dry cleaners or restaurateurs, or opened textbook shops and ice-cream factories.
Others set up eateries. Some of these were restaurants like Moti Mahal and Chonas, but more often, they were dhabas. With low overheads and slim profit margins, the dhaba owners didn’t have a lot of utensils. They concentrated on their tandoors: rotis toasted to a crackle, and whole chickens skewered and grilled in their red depths. There would be an assortment of pickles, and ‘mukka wala pyaaz’, a whole onion unmercifully smashed with a closed fist to release its flavours. Sometimes there were chicken tikkas, or seekh kebabs, or tawa-fried meat, like keema or kaleji. The remains of the fire were used to slow-cook whole black gram or sabut urad dal overnight, which gave the black lentils, the famous ‘ma-ki-dal’, its distinct, creamy, broken-down flavour in time for the next day (the swirls of cream that you see in restaurants turn it into ‘dal makhani’, but these were not part of the original recipe). A recognizable dhaba repertoire bloomed along the arterial roads of the new colonies, along the highways of the new India, and anywhere anyone could set up five bricks and an oven and sweat their way to a loyal clientele.
‘Today, when Dilliwalas are a minority in their own city, it saddens me to see butter chicken, dal makhani and other roadside fares take over as delicacies,’ wrote a peevish Sadia Dehlvi in a newspaper article in 2010. Butter chicken, the most famous issue of this era, is a restaurant dish, invented, so the probably apocryphal story has it, by Kundan Lal Gujral, the owner of Moti Mahal restaurant, in order to rescue some dried-out tandoori chicken. Punjabi ma-ki-dal is real dhaba fare, born out of necessity and enterprise. But both are products of the pragmatism and drive that, in the 1890s, led groups of Punjabi labourers to migrate to Canada, Kenya and California to better their lives (several of the Punjabis in California married their fellow agricultural labourers, who were Mexican—an unexpected but obviously rajma-based coming together of hearts). These same qualities helped the new arrivals thrive in post-Independence Delhi.
Still, growing up in Delhi in the late 1990s, Punjabiyat seemed something to be embarrassed about. ‘The only culture Punjabis have is agriculture,’ went the Delhi joke, a caricature that consigned to the dust of another place all Punjab’s poets, scholars, singers, artists and musicians. Punjabis were vulgar, dairy-swilling, glitter-loving yokels and, as Delhi historian Narayani Gupta sniffed in her Delhi between the Two Empires, contemporary Delhi was becoming a place where ‘Tilak Nagars and Nehru Roads proliferate, and hardly anyone knows of the poetry of Mir and Zauq, the humour of Ghalib, the quality of life that Chandni Chowk once symbolized.’
I tried to dissociate myself from the caricature. It irritated me that everyone in my family said ‘p’ronthi’ instead of what I understood to be the correct Hindi ‘parantha’, and ‘lassan’ for what my friends from Delhi or UP called ‘lehsoon’. Even now, I always pointedly say ‘parantha’.
I didn’t really think of myself as Punjabi anyway. My parents, having lived so long in Assam and Meghalaya, spoke Assamese between themselves, and to me. I couldn’t understand any Punjabi, and I preferred rice to rotis. If my friends returned in the summer to families and ancestral homes here and there across India, I had Assam, all the leafy expanse of the tea estates around Dibrugarh, the unreal green of the paddy fields near Jorhat, the orchid-hung trees of Manas, the buttery early sun of Guwahati, the shifting islets of Majuli; I had the Brahmaputra, the angriest, most beautiful river in the world. I didn’t feel dispossessed. When anyone at school asked me where I came from, I said, ‘Assam.’ Weaned on stubby joha rice like any good Assamese baby, and dipped at thirty days old into the raging Brahmaputra for luck, I didn’t know where else I could be from.
‘Jis Lahore nahi vekhya, woh janmya hi nahi’, goes the Punjabi saying. Those who have not seen Lahore, have not lived. Both sets of my grandparents, who came to India from Multan, from Lahore and from Rawalpindi, spoke of Lahore as if they’d lost a lodestar. Since Ranjit Singh’s reign, Lahore, the capital of the region, had been the glory, the touchstone and the beating heart of Punjab, its hub of culture and politics. It must have been hard for anyone to imagine that this Delhi, this city that was both ruin and upstart, could take the place of a living Lahore.
I didn’t think seriously about being Punjabi until the early 2000s, when travel between India and Pakistan suddenly opened up. My family trickled over the border one by one (my father, visiting for the World Cup, was accosted by strangers in cricket stadiums inviting him over for dinner; it took months to exorcise the memory of so much good-humoured gosht). When I went on a university trip to Lahore, I was expecting not only hospitality, but also a sort of homecoming. I wanted very much to find the house on Omkar Road where my family had lived, to parachute into an old Punjab that belonged to my grandparents, that I would now never see, a Punjab of planned towns like Sargodha and organic muddles like Lahore, the now-unmoored syncretic culture of travelling mirasi singers and trilingual scholars, the old worlds of Multan, Murree, Sialkot, Gujrat, Rawalpindi.
When I got there though, in 2006, it seemed more like the Amritsar we’d just crossed: a chaotic small town, equal parts middle-class swank and medieval confusion. Like Delhi and most Indian cities, its heritage is badly preserved, and its charms lie hidden beneath the modern cityscape.
I tried to squint to see if I could find a wormhole somehow, a window into what might have been my city. I thought that if I could, at long last, manifest in Lahore, something of Lahore might well manifest in me. There were Oberois and Sanans and Sardanas and Mongias somewhere in Pakistan, but I couldn’t find them. (There was, if I had only known it, my father said later, a famous Oberoi right there in Lahore, a Muslim mafia kingpin.) When I told people about my family in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Multan, and they tried to speak to me in Saraiki or in Punjabi, I was a stranger again. I was Punjabi, but I wasn’t from either of the Punjabs that remained. I had lost something, but I wasn’t sure what had replaced it. I was out of joint.
Certain things are inherited. My grandfather was an exigent, uncompromising person. He worked hard, supported his four children and his brother’s children. He was a well-read, intelligent man, a Fulbright scholar, an English teacher who wrote short stories in Hindi and translated Premchand into Urdu. He had no time for ‘khaki-shorts-walas’, or for organized religion either. Our family dinners were punctuated with stories, awful pun contests and borderline racist jokes, mostly about Punjabis themselves: their accents, their bumptiousness, their hirsuteness, their denseness. (Until I was ten, I thought that the Akali Dal was a kind of lentil, ‘a kali dal’.)
My father told me that when his father received a small inheritance from his sister, he set up a library instead of building a house. When he died, we found out that he had, for years, stretched his resources to sponsor the education of two unknown schoolboys. His last present to me was a copy of Jude the Obscure, which he left for me in the bookshelf, among his collection of Urdu, English and Hindi novels. These were what I was fed on.
Punjabi food is meant for those with an appetite. It is not a delicate cuisine, but a muscular, generous, backslapping one. It differs vastly from region to region: the aloo-bukhara koftas of Peshawar stuffed with plums from the hill orchards nearby; the stir-fried tawa meats of Amritsar; the Lahori seekh kebabs and besan-thickened kadhi; the khaam khatai kebabs of Patiala; saag-meat, or sarson-da-saag and makki-di-roti; the heavy, onion-laced biryanis; and the lighter kabuli chana pulaos. All of it is generous in portion and flavour; in its bastardized restaurant form, it can be nothing more than a delivery vehicle for cholesterol and the precursor to a nap on a manji.
But in Punjabi, even the most elaborate meal is called ‘dal-roti’, or just ‘roti’. And there are always rotis: tandoori rotis, chapatis, paranthas, missi rotis, makki rotis, kulchas, bhaturas, puris, khasta rotis and khameeri naans. We ate them with pale kabuli chana dal with spinach or lauki in it, or small black garbanzo chanas, pink multani masoor dal or green urad dal, or kadhai-cooked chicken or dry keema.
Kanji was made every winter in my nani’s house, with long inky black carrots, dark and mineral in taste, fermented in big pots in the sun. Peeling them stained your hands reddish-purple, and the sour, pungent smell lingered in the jars long after. Sweet red carrots were for gajar ka halwa, layered with almonds and crumbles of khoya. But I couldn’t stomach either: what I liked best were the brown, crunchy edges of milk cake, sugar, milk and cardamom slowly cooked until solid, and my grandmother’s suji halwa, like a gurdwara’s wheat-based karha parshad, but lighter, fluffier and thicker.
My grandfather hated rajma, the beloved Punjabi staple. ‘Rajma has no flavour of its own,’ he would say, ‘it’s all that tomato masala that gives it a taste.’ My father doesn’t like rajma either, and I have internalized their dislikes, just as I acquired my father’s horror of bananas, the result of a childhood at a boarding school where breakfast was mouldy bananas. I picture a Sunday lunch that may or may not have happened: rajma in the centre, quartered pink onions, methi, rotis and rice, and the three of us in a row at the dining table, sulking at our plates.
What my dada liked best were tandoori rotis. My dadi considered them too thick and heavy, something vaguely rustic that the northerners of the punishing Potohar liked, with their rough-and-rude culture. She preferred the thinner paranthas, which she thought were more refined. They were in agreement about rice. ‘Khichdi?’ they would ask solicitously when someone had an upset stomach, but otherwise, rice was a food for babies or sick people, decidedly inferior to a good piece of roti.
Towards the end of his life, my grandfather remained unbent towards chapatis, but still, a roti meant a tandoori roti, not a phulka or a naan made from refined flour. ‘Chopad ke le aao,’ he’d say, a soft pat of homemade white butter in the centre, the roti scrunched up in a bundle. At the end of the meal, he might have asked for ‘ikk rukhhi’, which was just a roti with no butter and no accompaniments, only the bread.
Sometimes in Paris, where I live now, the young men who sell fake watches and Eiffel Tower key chains along the boulevards try to speak to me in Punjabi, recognizing in my features something from home. It’s a thickened, theth village Punjabi, which is beyond my rudimentary Delhi phrases, gleaned mostly from songs and Bollywood dialogue. They share something with my grandparents though: the enterprising, resilient spirit of the Punjabis who crossed the Radcliffe Line in either direction, and who were met with derision by the inhabitants of the cities they arrived in, sometimes even by the people who sheltered them. (Both my grandmothers, if they read this, would be alarmed to learn they hold anything in common with these gold-chain-wearing, iPhone-flashing, sneakered guys in hoodies.)
I think about my dadi’s dark-gold suji halwa, the only halwa I really like. When my father was a child, special occasions were marked by jalebis; by the time I was growing up, birthday cakes were indispensable, but even today I associate big days, both happy and unhappy, with suji halwa.
Last year I asked her for the recipe, and tried to recreate it in Paris. One katori of suji and one of desi ghee, roasted slowly on the fire till brown, one tablespoon besan, sugar, saffron, water and raisins. I had never cooked with desi ghee in my life, so I had to enlist my mother’s help. Both genetically incapable of following a recipe, we looked at the sugar content advised, reduced it, and ended up with a kind of pale diet version. When I told my grandmother, an I-could-have-told-you-that expression appeared on her face, and she just giggled.
I don’t go much to Rajinder Nagar any more since my grandmother moved house, but I know the dhaba and its attendant world have long since vanished, replaced by malls and multiplexes and plate-glass Punjabi baroque homes with Doric columns and Swiss chalet roofs. Perhaps the skyrocketing rents have driven Bittu out, perhaps he has moved up to a Swiss chalet too.
There’s another Partition refugee colony in Delhi, farther south, built where there was once only scrubland: Lajpat Nagar. Since the early nineties, this chaotic, bustling neighbourhood, mostly Punjabi, has played host to an influx of Afghans and Iraqis, Tibetans and Turks, refugees, students and people needing medical treatment, who quickly took over rooms and flats in the homes of the original inhabitants. First one, then another Afghani bakery sprang up in the neighbourhood. They produce massive flat loaves of Afghani bread every day from a huge earthen oven on a platform. These snowshoe naans are hand-marked with a pattern of dimples when the dough is still wet. Every evening, the Afghans from the surrounding lanes queue up for their freshly baked bread. Sometimes I’d buy a naan on my way back from work, and eat it with kebabs from the Iranian restaurant a few lanes down.
In Kamla Nagar near Delhi University, a few years ago, I saw another tandoor. Chicken and veggie momos were being rubbed with an orange tandoori spice mix and a little chilli-garlic paste, then roasted in the clay tandoor in a Chinjabi restaurant. Parts of the glutinous white-flour skin blistered and puckered black while the inside remained a sturdy, juicy momo. You can see tandoori momos all over Delhi now, like an irreverent culinary metaphor sprung from its elbow-rubbing mix of displaced communities.
Delhi is a prickly, overflowing, unkind city that doesn’t give up its secrets easily. But it expands to accommodate everyone who comes, and it no longer belongs to one people or another. People who were once looked upon as usurpers have become the new brokers of power, everyone inching up towards privilege, generation by generation, and new outsiders arrive, to be stared at and then taken in, traditions and all. The city doesn’t buckle, but swells each year with all of them, always acquiring new layers.
I don’t know what I inherited from Punjab. But I understand better now about appetite, and how bombast can signify the desire to stand on solid ground that will not suddenly shift from under your feet. The pugnacity of Delhi Punjabis didn’t preclude injury or nostalgia or regret. Their neighbourhoods were sometimes enclaves of orthodoxy and conservatism and of pragmatic acceptance as well. If they were conspicuous in their appetites, all show and glitter and violence, it was perhaps bravado, like a counter-spell against the future. And if Punjabis transformed the city, it changed and sustained them too, both accumulating new traits rather than mourning what was lost.
Your history bears gifts. 1947 made migration a necessity for my grandparents, people who had never travelled very far before, but who acclimatized themselved to all sorts of places thereafter: Ajmer, Dehradun, Ranchi, Tawang, Goa, the Andamans and Shillong. Channo Devi, sans tandoor, opened a shop in Mussoorie. In their twenties, my parents chose to live in the remote, troubled Assam of the 1980s; they possessed something that allowed them to adapt to difficult lives too. I think of my father’s mother, cooking on angeethis all those years in Ranchi, in Ajmer, in Dehradun. I think of my mother’s mother, carrying her crockery strapped on the back of a mule up to Tawang. I think about my twenty-three-year-old mother in Assam, scouring Barpeta district for eggs, when the whole town was on fire, to make a birthday cake for my father, a cake she baked on an outdoor fire in a steel pateela.
I’m anchored in Delhi in a way that perhaps neither my grandparents nor my parents are. I inherited it: Delhi, the city that kept open house through everything, absorbed all these stories, nourished my family and soaked up their food. Delhi, the place that allows all sorts of people to belong, even while retaining the fiction that they are from somewhere else. In my tiny Paris flat, I cook suji halwa from one grandma’s recipe, and biryani from my other grandmother’s instructions. I try to replicate my mother’s signature meal, the weekly standard of my growing-up years: green Thai curry, raw papaya salad and chicken satay. Where you’re from is complex, but I inherited the assurance that you can carry your home anywhere; all places will feed you and take you in.