Eating

Friday night and we're having a cheese-tasting do. I've just got back from a village where the science of geology meets the art of cheese-making with a rock of metamorphic cheese. Place it in water, I was told by the man who sold it to me, and you'll get cheese-spread. Well it's not laughing cow but it sure is cheese, strong too. By morning it's dried out and is a rock again.
We've also got something from Karachi. We thought from the label, 'Karachi Butter', that it was indeed going to be butter but on smelling it, it transpires to be a ripe white stilton. So that's Christmas sorted.
Finally my friend has brought me some Tesco Mild. And oh how mild it is.

Whether something's from Tesco or from town it's 'foreign' to many of my neighbours here. Local food is what comes from the garden, and only local, desi, will do, I am told by the matriarch of a neighbour as she pours lassi into steel cups. "The thing is," she explains, "you don't know what they put in them cartons. It could be donkey's milk. Or dog's." I splutter on the sour milk. "No offence," she adds.
"And eggs - foreign chickens [in the small cages at the bottom of the track, ie, in town] eat only plain rice. I feed mine like my own children, with a little sabzi, little rice, little dal and a fresh roti - and such nice eggs we are getting." As if ready spiced on this curry-rich diet, the yolks of their eggs are bright orange. Fried up with more masala, seven of them feed a family of twice that number. Steel saucers of this scrambled-egg curry are placed on top of a carpet of rotis, spread across a sheet on the floor. We tear of bits nearest to us.
Every Thursday in this home is a mini-Eid and eggs will not do. Something must die in memory of the sacrifice. So we have chunks of goat (from the butcher's field this morning, its insides steaming in the cold morning air, I wonder) cooked in rice which Ammi-ji personally apportions. If honour is in anyway proportional to size of piece, I am honoured indeed, as is the favoured youngest son, but four-years-old, eating the portion of a grown man, sitting between mummy and daddy, looking in all regards just like a grown-man, except for his tiny size, with the serious expression of one on whom a weight of responsibility has fallen. His older brothers, sporting mustaches and capes, hunch in corners, glowering, watching TV gangsters so that the whole occasion is accompanied by sounds of gunfire. Oh, that his father may never give him a coat of many colours, and, if he has dreams, that he may never tell of them to his brethren.
I am in the bosom of family, feasting on meat in memory of Abraham.
The mantou man makes food into a different spiritual experience. He stands, silent as a mandarin, amidst the to-ing and fro-ing of town. Indeed, he is from China, Kashgar, but is angry with his government and has come here. He smiles seraphically at my request for six of his momos, (dim-sung, mantou, cholesterol dumplings, they go by different names) places his hand on the lid of his huge silver steamer and invokes God: "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most kind..." Then, with the flourish of a Parisian cartoon waiter, he lifts the lid and traces an arc through the air. He was right to pray, because we are transported into another realm where, in the billows of steam, nothing is as it seems. His arms remain aloft, as he shields his eyes from the heat -and visions too? Fortified by prayer, he defies the heat to count out seven pieces, one for luck. He wraps them in newspaper, bungs them in a bag and bob's your uncle we're back in the bazaar. He compliments me on my Urdu and I compliment him on his as his own language is one he calls Toorqi. We've both come a long way to be here, not least through this cloud.
While my neighbours are rooted in this place and suspicious of foreign food, I am not, but more like one who dreams, and it is often food that roots me, grounds me.
I try to locate myself on maps and get lost for the mountains and the jangle of political boundaries. What can such a place be like, so remote? I taste and know.
Mantou tells me I'm halfway to Tibet. Pomegranates stain my fingers with a juice fresh from Kabul. Early Mughals sang of the almonds from here, still nostalgic for their Central Asian home. I shell some on my doorstep and eating, sympathise.
A thin voiced azan threads its way into my waking dreams and disorients me nearly everytime. How good it is then to sink my teeth into the fatness of a chapli kebab. Here I stand, I can be nowhere else.
Twilight, and all is murky mauve. Then I see it: a golden crown half circling the sky. Peaks high enough catch the sunlight, long since fled west from us mortals in the valley, blaze. As if in another time zone, another zone altogether, I simply don't know if I really am in the Himalayas. I eat yak and the cloud of unknowing lifts.