NEW URDU WRITINGS : FROM INDIA & PAKISTAN by Rakhshanda Jalil

Author:Rakhshanda Jalil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789383260379
Published: 2014-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Vanilla Crumble

ASIF FARRUKHI

Certain tastes are so closely woven into a particular moment that to remember that moment is to experience that very special taste once again. Like childhood, birthdays, and Arnawaz’s cake! To remember one is to recall all three. How would I know where one begins and the other ends!

Keeping track of the passing years means adding up all the birthdays. Birthdays (in childhood, obviously, otherwise what’s one more year as you grow older; why should another milestone be the cause of such happiness and excitement?) with balloons, flags, paper hats, friends and relatives. And then in front of all of them blowing out the candles on that cake, which no one could have made, except Arnawaz.

Our acquaintance with Arnawaz was in connection with our children’s birthdays and was limited to the ordering of the birthday cake. Which is why I should perhaps consider her departure as only a small sorrow in the relentless destruction of this city. Did I not say it was limited to the special taste of the birthday cake?

But to get to Arnawaz and her cake was no easy matter. Prior to that was the trawl through innumerable bakeries and the bitter experience of cakes of an assortment of colours, appearances and tastes. It wasn’t that we make any fancy arrangements for Natasha and Anusha. Otherwise at Qidwai sahib’s house, on such occasions they have a magic show (in which the magician wears a black coat and hat from which he takes out a real, live rabbit and throws it among the children); a show with a pinafore-and-frock-clad bear and monkey, and other such amazing acts. On their first and second birthdays we did go all out with big celebrations. But those were the days of Abba Mian and he got the whole clan together for sheermal and qorma from Dilli Ka Muslim Hotel. For him only a sheermal-qorma dinner was a proper function. After that the functions were limited to the children only. But the thing is, no matter on how small a scale the function might be, the cake has to be right — not too sweet, nor too bland; neither too pink nor absolutely colourless; not too small and not large to the extent of being in bad taste. A cake that is just right is no simple matter!

Certainly there were dozens of bakeries in our own neighbourhood and they must have had hundreds of cakes growing stale and dusty on frosted glass shelves, with flies swarming over their raw, floury icing. ‘You’ll definitely get cholera from eating them!’ Mother had instilled in me a fear of eating stuff from the bazaar from my childhood.

In the beginning for one or two years we bought cakes from Hollywood Bakery, which belonged to an Irani and had white tiles on the walls and netting on the cupboards. After the first couple of times, however, you got the impression that you were chewing leather gilded with sugar. Whoever gets established starts giving short shrift in no time, Tabassum would say getting cross just hearing this bakery wallah’s name.

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