Breaking bread as friends
Ali AHMED ASLAM, the Pakistani-Scottish chef who is credited with inventing the famed chicken tikka masala (CTM), died in England recently. I have fond memories of dining at his renowned Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow’s West End.
Though I am a vegetarian, I’d always recommend my Indian and Pakistani friends, residing and studying in England, to visit Ali’s restaurant in Scotland and try his signature dish, CTM. It is Britain’s second-most popular dish, close on the heels of Chinese stir fries. The Pahlavi adage ‘Usta zeen mun abil fiz ma’anda (One learns the lessons of life on a dining table)’ dawned on me at Shish Mahal, where I met a number of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi diners, as Britain has a sizeable diaspora from the subcontinent. All the so-called ethnic and nationalistic differences get dissolved when you meet the people of these countries in the western hemisphere.
At Shish Mahal, I met a number of Pakistanis who never spewed venom against India. Nor did we ever discuss religion and politics. Shish Mahal has an impressive menu that offers vegetarian delicacies from North India and Frontier and Punjab provinces of Pakistan. There I met Pakistani patrons who relished vegetarian cuisine and had never touched meat in their lifetime. Just imagine: You’re from Pakistan, living in the western world, yet you refrain from having non-vegetarian food! This was a pleasant surprise, nay a sort of an awakening, because the general notion is that a Muslim cannot live without meat.
I took my English friend to Shish Mahal and treated her to a sumptuous CTM with naan and ordered Peshawari shorba aloo with kulche for myself. I didn’t feel that I was away from the subcontinent. Since I’ve visited Pakistan a number of times and have travelled across the length and breadth of that country, I’ve always been able to relate to it in a warm and friendly manner. Pakistani citizens, too, have reciprocated wholeheartedly.
We curse one another when we’re in India, but all this bad blood disappears once you are in a different country. There, a Pakistani will spontaneously call you bhaijaan, whereas, the same person may dub you dushman-e-jaan when he’s in Pakistan and you are in India. The bonding with people of the subcontinent over food at Ali’s Shish Mahal shall remain etched in my memory.
