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The God Of Fried Things... Or Beefing Over Chicken |
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One unique Peshawar specialty survives the Afghan invasion. It is the Chappal Kebab, which the Pushtuns of course simply call kebab. Why do the people outside the NWFP call it so? "You know chappal?" Shamim Shahid rhetorically asked. "Yes, it is like the bottom of a chappal." How delectable could that possibly be - a mutton preparation shaped like the bottom of a sandal?  Mohammed Ilyas Khan and I one day went in search of Chappal Kebab. We were hungry but work beckoned, so we piled into his jeep - a late 1950s Army contraption that had somehow reached his possession five or six years ago. We had to postpone the hunt for food till we had watched an anti-US protest by Pakistan's extremist Sunni group, the Sipah-e-Sahaba. These are the people who run into mosques and gun down Shias, followers of Islam's other major sect. Some of its bigger murderers have fled Pakistan and taken refuge under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Naturally we wanted to go and see them. My tummy rumbled during the speeches predicting a rerun of what happened to the Soviets in Aghanistan, and a fiery and horrible demise of General Musharraf. And when they set a life-size cloth-and-straw likeness of George Bush aflame, I cheered up - things were drawing to a climax. The puppet been created with such minimal barest creativity that it could have been anyone who was burning in effigy; nonetheless the foreign cameras clicked like Geiger counters near a Pakistani nuke. A policeman yawned as he lowered the cock of his tear-gas shooter, our signal that the time to eat had come. As we drove out of the old city and through Sadar Bazar, Ilyas quieted. He looked here and there as he drove, but something was bugging him. Our jeep headed into the cantonment: obviously the army knew something about sandals. We passed one ramshackle dhaba after another, but all we saw of the mud huts were the shuttered planks and the empty vast pans. We bounced over the railway tracks but to no avail - all the kebab places were closed. "Oh!" Ilyas groaned. "Today's Tuesday." "Tuesdays and Wednesdays have been declared meatless days in Peshawar," Ilyas explained. The Muslims' beef is that they want their own beef, but not on Tuesdays and Wednesdays if they are Pushtuns. Those days I had to eat chicken - and each time I was served 'chicken handi': cooked in lots of tomatoes in an oil-base with plenty of onions and spices. And each time the portions were ogre-size. Even when I ate in my room, while composing copy, there would be enough handi for at least three persons. The Naan, baked Afghan-style, is also mammoth, but my hosts would still be aghast when I protested against a third piece. Presumably, the Pathans are voracious. No wonder they are of the biggest build in the sub-continent. We are what we eat, and in corollary, we make others eat what we think they are. Thus, the Americans dropped packets of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches upon the starving Afghans, a brainstorm by the hearts-minds-and-stomachs department. The logic was clear - the Afghans were starving, they couldn't get any food aid because Pakistan sealed its border, and so anyone giving the Pushtuns food would obviously generate goodwill. Unless, of course, they dropped 34,500 packets on an urban center like Kabul, where the population, even after bombing and desertion and death and drought, was still in the millions. That would make 34,500 packets enough, wouldn't it? Still, food is food. Imagine the excited faces of those Afghans who have only known Naan and an occasional morsel of meat, impatiently opening the packet and finding a strange-looking, and stranger-smelling peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. You might as well distribute pickled bamboo shoots among Detroit's homeless. And the PBJ was stone cold, too. Is this what an American victory would mean? Better to sell these packets and buy a few Naan for the family. But who was going to buy them? Hopefully they would keep till the foreign media circus arrived in town. But if I ever got to Kabul, I wasn't going to eat a PBJ sandwich. I wasn't going to go there without having a Chappal kebab either. And so one day I did, ordering it at the Hotel Serenity just before starting my daily dispatch. What arrived was a flat and oval greasy mass. Though it was shaped something like a steak (the way clouds are shaped like different states), it was not a slab of meat that had been cooked, but rather a mass of finely chopped, ground and marinated mutton. It was subtle, it was chewy, and it was heavy. Two pieces had been served, and after the first one I was exhausted. Sheer greed forced me upon the second kebab, and halfway through I had to stop. I lay on the bed, feeling like a large bomb about to dropped on Afghanistan (and probably I would soon become just as lethal). Though I loved meat, I could not eat as much as those who had girded their loins for battle. Perhaps there was a message in this for me, I thought as I clutched my abdomen, begging for mercy from the God of Fried Things. Maybe I was not meant to rule the world. RECENTLY ON JAAL: Kabhi Mushy, Kabhi Rough The Worst Of 2001 Omni-Laden The New ISI Chief Is A Pathan!! Osama And Veerappan The US Strikes Out Bush Talks Tough TN Wants A New CEO Code Red And The Blue Book Sucking Up To Musharraf The Tamasha In Tamil Nadu The Agra Assignment Going Ape Over Kashmir Bad Dream Factory Ballot Boxing Borderline Patriotism Bill Clinton's Hidden Agenda The Tapes: Replay The Naked Truth About Sinha's Dream Budget Give Us This Day Our Daily Disaster A Dip Into The Kumbh Hype Hype Hurray The A 2 Z Of Y2K What's Behind Bush? 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