AUTHOR’S NOTE

dear reader, i would like to thank you for still being here, and it is at this point that i am going to get some movement into this exposition, but i would like to remind you, that when this becomes too much, you can at any point jump to the final recipe of the Greatest Biryani, and have a feast before you return to the narrative later, but now, the sweep that i will bring into this next part is the kind of movement that shows what a great piece of writing this is, and after all, it is true that naturally, much of my inspiration and knowledge stems from the life that i have lived and the stories that i have heard, but they are not me, the author, as i exist only in these little notes that i write to you personally, to connect with you, but i do promise to talk about myself a bit later.

first, after spending the wee hours typing in the chilled city library in düsseldorf, as it was sweltering hot outside, i took a break on the rooftop and had my lunch — a tiffin of last nights bhindi sabzi (simple vegetable dry curry made with okra, spices, onion and tomatoes) with some zeera waaley chaawal (cumin infused steamed rice) and podeena raita (mint yoghurt), and while i ate my favourite vegetables, i got glares from some of the people around me who were not as comfortable with the strange flavours and aromas originating from my tiffin box, and ’that is no food for a public place’, one insidious looking german girl with strikingly purple dyed hair and the tattoo of a japanese-looking manga dragon crouching over her right shoulder remarked at me, but dear reader, luckily, it was in rapid imperceptible german so i did not entirely understand it until much later, when the words and sentence structure dawned upon me, because german is a difficult language you see, and the speed with which the locals spit it out, makes it an even harder language to understand, but i have been learning german and can say i am pretty good at it for someone at an intermediate level, so when i did understand her, i was quite offended, and i shot some stark looks her way, which was all i could muster the courage to do, because everywhere in the world, i feel like i am still perhaps the inferior colonised, but then i chuckled and thought, why not come back inside and narrate it all to you, tell you about it and then maybe you can tell me what i could or should have done in this situation, so maybe next time, i would be more prepared, but dear reader, you would have done the same in my place, wouldn’t you?

allow me to go a bit off track and tell you about my dream, dear reader because it is strangely ironic given the moment, but it is to open a kiosk of my very own along the banks of the river rhine in düsseldorf, a city that i moved to a year ago and have now accumulated much too many physical objects of emotional value in my little apartment with my husband that i think would be a hassle to move anywhere again with — but yes, a tiny little kiosk, selling some gloriously scrumptious homemade steaming biryani to really bring us all together, because, dear reader, even the insidious looking german girl with strikingly purple dyed hair and the tattoo of a japanese-looking manga dragon crouching over her right shoulder, would be in awe after having my Greatest Biryani.

Ever since the greatest migration of 1947, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have had deep-rooted mutual antipathy that has led to numerous wars and an inconclusive amount of budget spent on all military fronts dedicated to fortifying the adjoining borders and carrying out inconclusive secret service missions to crumble the power of the enemy state. The citizens remain crippled by the narratives built around the partition that are consistently stoked by the higher authorities for their ends — all in all, often unaware of all that they have in common and the ineffectualness of the borders enclosing either side until they meet each other in foreign lands...

Commonalities, except the argument as to who owns the Greatest Biryani. Is it Indian? Is it Bangladeshi? Is it Pakistani? It goes deeper therein. Is it from Karachi? Is it from Lahore? Is it from Lucknow? Is it from Hyderabad? The last of which is the most ironic because a Hyderabad exists in both India and Pakistan, as are many places that share the same name.

But whilst the origins and copyrights of the Greatest Biryani may be disputed, the love for it remains constant, prevailing most in regions where the Mughal Empire had an indelible presence. With the 1947 partition, and the mass migration of people to Karachi, the various variations of the Greatest Biryani travelled across the subcontinent to come together in the hustle and bustle of the new capital city and gave rise to many many many and many more versions.

biryani, the victor of the war, my grandfather and his friends would say, as they joked around their hookahs, an essence of the collective memory, state discourse, and family histories, the delicacy that managed to survive the turmoil of war, and even managed to evolve, bringing people together in an oddly satisfying way when common ground could not otherwise be found, and the single dish that continues to be imagined and reimagined consistently across borders and even within the same nation, and the purposefully perpetuated, the one food with the highest stocks, the most ordered, the most desired, the most fun to make — well, the last one reserved for me, especially, dear reader, will you come try mine someday, dear reader?

Karachi was the first capital of Pakistan post-independence, and hence was, and still is, a hotspot for all migrants, the Muhajirs (migrants). The city had a thriving history, from a tiny prehistoric fishing village around the coastal islands to one of the most important ports of the region and a truly diverse business hub during the British Raj with Africans, Arabs, Armenians, Goans, Jews, Lebanese, Malays, Konkani, Kuchhi and Zoroastrians (Parsee) businessmen alike. Post-partition, the city continued to expand like a beating heart to accommodate a river of internal and external migrants, and to date, remains a complex area of all the ethnicities, religions and even languages of the entire subcontinent — people who got left behind post-partition, people who had been there for centuries and others who came in search of a new life.

Within Karachi are well-defined residential areas that are Urdu-speaking, Pashtun, Sindhi, Saraiki, Hazari, Punjabi, Bengali, Persian, English, Gujrati, Malabar and Balochi, alongside areas based on religion, such as the Parsi Colony, Christian and Hindu neighbourhoods. New migrant residents named different areas of Karachi based on where they had come from, such as the Delhi Colony, Bangalore Colony and Hyderabad Colony. The ever-growing Afghan and Bengali migrant populations in this city maintained their areas, plus Burmese, Nepalese, some Sri Lankan communities, and an enterprising Chinese community mostly made up of the Chinese that migrated to Karachi during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. The famous Hippie Trail of the 1970s brought in young western men and women rebelling against the social constraints of their societies, some of whom stayed back where they felt fit. 

Every time one walks along the streets of Karachi, one can discover a new temple, church or mosque, a new neighbourhood, and a new minority with their food kiosks. Karachi has more hidden in its alleyways and corners than any formal statistical platform could ever identify. And of course, every nook has a biryani kiosk, an entrepreneurial hidden spot, each claiming to be better than the one before.

Anyone who has had biryani in Karachi would confidently lay this claim: if there is one place where the culinary genius reigns, it is the city of Karachi. The muhajir brought it here as migrants from different parts of India, but eventually, it took on a life of its own, shedding its fidelity to the sort of haughty refinement and conventions of regional recipes that may continue to define it across the border. Every street-corner stall dedicates its days and nights to specialising and perfecting its self-proclaimed unique recipe. Yet, with its overgrowing numbers of vendors in the bustling metropolis of Karachi alone, it is supposedly impossible to find a kiosk or restaurant selling this dish without a throng of people waiting in line for the glory being scooped out of the steaming degh (cauldron).

AUTHOR’S NOTE

it is this enigma of the Greatest Biryani that i, with this exposition, aim at to confront, dear reader, if not elucidate, and the premise, that it is the utmost street food of karachi today because it is affordable for the common man, and ridiculously flavourful, and it can truly be eaten on the go without separate bread or curry and truly brings everyone together on street corner benches, fancy restaurant tables and home kitchens alike.

the Greatest Biryani, like the city itself, is notoriously misunderstood, dear reader, as even locally, it is cooked, plated and served in an infinite variety, and just as there is no one, essential form of the biryani, there is no one history to this widely loved culinary masterpiece, it is a contradiction, and it is layered and flecked with all the flavours and identities of the subcontinent, and is that not an ’ordered disorder’, which is what the french academic laurent gayer claimed karachi to be, and a ’confluence of exhausted geographies’ was another group of artistic thinkers trying to rethink and reimagine representations of the vast city, but although the biryani of karachi presents some striking similarities with the general biryanis of the now divided indian subcontinent and arabian penninsula, as far as the normalization of exception is concerned, my understanding after 34 years of eating and cooking biryani, dear reader, is that this ordered disorder is more expansive and refers to the complex ecology that the ingredients of the dish, like the city inhabitants, co-produce in the course of its interactions, because order or disorder, the city of karachi to its natives is just that, the only city worth anything, and the ideal place dear reader, to dig into a degh of biryani, and to reveal layers upon layers of rice and meat and spices, and scoop it all up almost like one is scooping up the ethnic, social and cultural formations of the entire subcontinent that makes up this one grand glorious city.

my frenzied city of Karachi, dear reader is a race to the top of the skies, as high as it is dense, an exception that is itself, and an enigma for even where it seems modern and striking on the outside, it is a juicy jazzy interior, clad in mirrors to reflect the world around it, and bricks to show that it is rebellious and irreverent but welcoming to all, and eager to see and learn and teach, and brilliantly animated with anticipation, nervousness, mad drivers, streams of immigrants, stray dogs and cats and people, and dear reader, it is indeed a reflection of a city born out of and still home to, tensions as diverse as free thinking and liberal, the religious and the pagan, of fertile land and sandy terrains, swamps and forests, and with the many other misconceptions of the british that we decided to own for our silly selves, and in a city whose history and identity shifts with every new generation of settlers, the people live their everyday lives with traces of english in their vocabulary even if they cannot otherwise speak or understand the language, with their own identities and palates of biryani, dear reader, and the Greatest Biryani tends to remind us of the colonial folly of viewing the east as a series of distinct and religiously defined factions, because this is where we all come together, dear reader, even if it is to compete over whose is the best, and whether it should be eaten with potatoes or not, dear reader, because potatoes, unlike bygone times, are now much cheaper and easily available and if i am entirely honest, potatoes are a must in my Greatest Biryani, because they soak in the spices and absorb flavour like nothing else, dear reader, and are such a joy in texture in the mix of so much else happening within the dish, and it is this biryani, dear reader, that to me feels like more of an identity than any colonial power would have me to believe.