Delhi's Kebabs: The Taste of Memory
illustration: Kübra Su Yıldırım
“Like a taco?” an American editor asked in a comment, as I wrote a blurb about the seekh-kebab roll, a food I had grown up eating: a cylindrical charred kebab placed inside a roti and eaten faster than it is cooked. I looked at the question, not knowing what to say, mostly because I have never eaten a taco. “Like a…” and I stopped, what was a seekh kebab roll like? What was the allegory I could give for it to suddenly transition to being palatable to Americans? “Kind of like a burger, but in a roti, a burger in the way that it is bread outside and meat inside - but not really a burger, you know?” I wrote back, hesitant, staring at my answer, absolute purposeful gibberish. The seekh kebab roll was a food that I couldn’t dissect; I was physically unable to slide it into the usual allegories— “like a sandwich” or “a kind of crepe”. The seekh kebab roll exists somewhat synchronously to the way I do. What did somebody call a food they ate so often that it almost didn’t taste like anything anymore, except memory and instinct?
If I must decode it, it is a kebab, inside a roomali roti - which translates literally to handkerchief, a roti so thin it flaps in the wind like a roomal. It is usually served with a mountain of onions doused in a pudina, or mint chutney. There is nothing else to really tell about the kebab. It can be delicious, sometimes it isn’t. I have had my share of undercooked kebabs and rotis that break in the middle. The kebab is not a food that fits into sentimental superlatives used by New York Times-esque standards for non-Western foods; perhaps the grandest thing about the seekh kebab is that it is the simplest and even most universal of combinations — a balance between meat and bread. The only real thing to really say is that it takes around 10 seconds to eat a seekh kebab roll. And this is a fact.
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Delhi’s kebab culture comes from modern-day Turkey, Iraq and Iran, from where Sultans and those that fought in their armies brought food when they built the Indian capital. Estimates say that kebabs were first grilled by migrants in Delhi during the Sultanate that began with the emperor Qutb-ud-din-Aibek in the 13th century. This is what is being referred to whenever Delhi is called a mix of culinary influences. A conglomeration of borrowed techniques that led to Delhi’s most beloved foods – kebabs that have left smells on walls; biryanis set with nuts and large naans that hang on spiky iron rods. Since these foods are always linked to an imagined and formative past, tracing the kebab’s transnational lineage proves a more important fact – that meat on grills is a food that can adapt to populations anywhere.
Even though the first kebabs are not dated to a precise origin, they became most celebrated and documented during Delhi’s time as a Mughal capital, when it was ruled by Persian-speaking emperors from Central Asia. The best known of these are Akbar and his more audacious, and beloved grandson Shahjahan. The Shahs were men of expensive tastes; Shahjahan, in particular, was known to be besotted with meat on the grill. Legend (and gossip) says that he threw dawats (reception) for hundreds in which he charred thousands of goats and flooded his canals with rose water so his guests would be dressed in overpowering scents during each minute in his home. One of Shahjahan’s favourite kebabs was the “gurak kebab” — in which a whole chicken was stuffed with minced meat and cooked in yoghurt and saffron. Another kebab that was popularized through the Mughal kitchen is the “Shami kebab”, which came from “Bilad-al-Sham'', or the old name for Syria, made from minced meat, ground chickpeas and eggs for binding into a thick disc.
Even as most of the fuss is made about kingly kebabs, the dish in no way belongs to the royal courts. The kebab has been a way in which different districts, cities, warring brothers distinguish their recipes from one another. In Rampur, the “gola kebab”: a round fistful of minced meat whose secret recipe is the way many from the city distance themselves from the more illustrious Kingdom of Oudh, today Lucknow. In Lucknow, meanwhile, a soft kebab called the Tunday was first made for a toothless nawab (prince) — made with large quantities of ghee and beef-fat so it needed no chewing, and the kebab named after the one-handed man, or “Tunda” in local slang, who invented it. The Reshmi kebab, today a Delhi favourite, instructs that pieces of chicken must be marinated in cream and grilled so they are finally as soft as “resham” or silk. There are also more straightforward kebabs — take the Bihari kebab in which strips of beef are laden on hot coals; or the Chapli Kebab: a Pakistani flat kebab that is named after a slipper, and is the kebab of my dreams. It is in the family of humbler kebabs in which the seekh kebab belongs, it doesn’t “melt in the mouth” or come doused in saffron. It is cooked with coriander, and the meat remains chewy and firm. Its appeal lies in its regularity and simplicity to cook and slide into a roti.
While kebabs differ in their legacies and audiences, they hold a singular truth — a kebab is always born from a tandoor. It is the charring that is important; the flames within the tandoor determine how well the meat is cooked. Where there are tandoors, there are those that handle them – kebabis or kebabchis – who sit in the flaming spirit of the grill for almost 10 hours a day. It takes a large amount of training and a certain amount of madness to become a kebabi, to stick one’s hand inside flaming coals to pull out food is no job for the ordinary mortal. It is these men who carry legacies forward more resolutely than the kings around whom India’s histories will bedeck with titles. A burning hot tandoor is the reason why a kebab grilled in a home-oven will not taste the same. One may perfect a recipe but a kebab eaten from an aged tandoor tastes different, like the city itself.
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I grew up in the East of Delhi, a place often referred to as “Jamna Paar” or “Across the Yamuna”, pointing to the physicality of neighbourhoods like mine that lie on one side of the large river that flows from the mountains into Delhi and the regions around it. The river was a roaring presence and a water source for the city. But today, it lies flat from pollution and overpopulation. Much of East Delhi was built in the 1980s on one side of the river, designed by architects inspired by Soviet-style housing blocks that could incorporate the city’s growing middle classes. East Delhi is a newer stretch of the city, teeming with close-knit building complexes, the one I grew up is a set of grey, concrete buildings with small balconies, and ramps that connect one building to another – these are not beautiful, but solemn, and convenient, and somewhat interesting in their ingenuity to use space and light so it reaches the 700 people who live in the building.
When I was growing up, I was resentful of these complexes — this wasn’t a home in which birds perched on branches and native trees threw ripe fruits at children who ran barefooted in their gardens as they did in other peoples' gardens in Central Delhi, where I was sent to school by my father when I was twelve years old. These were instead places where we would watch as the boys got into fights— I remember eating molten chocolate from frizzy golden paper, watching as they returned, bragging about the wounds on their head to one another and to me, as I longed to be one of them: brazen and rubbing shoulders with other shouting teenagers, venting some of the anger that had started to grow inside me. I remember overhearing that the neighbourhood where I grew up was a place of unsophistication, there was a violence embedded within us that I would hear people talk about with disdain. “Will you get home safe?” I was asked on days I left school premises late evenings. “I hope so” I would say, buying into the way that these others saw my neighbourhood, practising a detachment from it that would define much of my young life. I would feel both comforted and confused whenever I crossed the large, silent river on a bridge leading me to a different kind of life.
Today, the apartment complexes like the one I grew up in have become gated colonies, conclaves that have climbed up the class ladder. The residents have accumulated wealth (and bias) in the last three decades. However, the neighbourhood’s reputation for violence remains inscrutably in place. The persistence of crime and the absence of polite etiquette keeps Jamnapaar locked outside from acceptable narratives of the city. When Delhi’s “tehzeeb” or culture is spoken about, it refers to its administrative lawns, its Persian gardens, its old bookshops in the centre, its crumbling tombs and learned kings who wore magnificent textiles with exotic birds perched on one palm. But the neighbourhoods that make the capital’s peripheries are not the ones set in books. Jamnaapar is left out of lofty histories, instead used as a way to signify distance, segregated from the rest of the city. The idea remains: Delhi’s East, like its other peripheries (North-East, home to working-class Muslims; West Delhi, home to Punjabis from Peshawar and Rawalpindi in Pakistan) contains no narrative of consequence. These are graceless places, unworthy of history.
I have often thought about this, about how to hold an alliance with my city even though its most popular appeals exclude the neighbourhood I grew up in. My family is made up of Tamil speakers who immigrated almost a century ago to what lies now in Pakistan. I have no heavy bearings of “roots”, I have no heritage bound by tradition to pass on (nor do I want one.) I know I am from Delhi not because I fit sleekly into it through language or lineage; but because like Delhi, I change moods quickly. I shape-shift from being a person into being a complete monster – often unable to pull myself from spells of anger and self-imposed darkness. I see how battling its toxic masculinity has led to toxicity within me. I notice how I sit comfortably in spaces of prodding chaos but relent to reward myself with comfort or praise. I identify with the city not with ease but with a certain amount of resentment. I have immense love for it, but it is not a simple one. To me, Delhi presents itself as an identity not only in rosy symbols but in its entire temperamental deformity. I know I am from Delhi when of the ways my edges intersect with those of others. I understand that I may be from the city in my appetite for friction, when I stay up whole nights worrying about my friends as they drive around the city’s madness.
Even as Delhi culture remains codified, kebabs escape this. Ending up in every corner of the city, being accessible to everyone — in beef kebabs outside Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, and tucked away in lanes in the city’s East. On stalls at winter weddings where the meat is mounted in the middle of a plate with hasty sides of dal, or other vegetarian dishes as a guise of politeness. Last summer, when I sat eating kebabs in Nizamuddin, an old neighbourhood I had the same conundrum. I had driven across two highways to participate in Delhi’s best food-culture. The walls were covered with Persian tiles and photographs of working-class Muslim communities. Nizamuddin was often eulogised for its artistry and proximity to Delhi’s poets but neglected by all when it comes to tactical civic development. I wondered why this metropolis that defies stereotypes and goes back and forth in time is so often subject to definitive frames. I wondered about “real Delhi.” The city was growing into twice its size every ten years, and how codifying the culture of a place expanding so quickly and uncontrollably was nothing short of impossible.
Halim Saab, the old man who owned the shop where I sat, handed me a strip of shami kebabs, fanned himself near the tandoor, read an Urdu newspaper as he poured chutney on my plate and shouted at his staff not to let rotis dry up. He told me how Dilliwaalas had “garam-khoon” or “hot-blood”, which he suspected was because of sitting next to the tandoors for so long, even in the summer heat. The city is known for a volatility that is disliked by those outside it and is accepted by those that live in it. Mir Taqi Mir, one of Delhi’s poets once wrote about it, saying how “Dil wa Dilli dono agar hain kharab; par kuch lutf us ujde ghar me bhi hain” calling the city “kharab” or destroyed, but also saying how pleasures and lutf or comforts remained in its “ruined house.” Like Mir, Dilliwaalas find solace in the city’s tumult. We often talk about how we are cursed people, our hearts broken and souls scattered across the city’s tormenting corners. We laugh about “gaali may pyaar” (in insult there is love), or how in Delhi’s language, using metaphors is a way to navigate our way through our city. Halim saab’s garam-khoon was one of these symbols of the city, painting it in a complexity missing from how it was phrased in Westernised modes that polarise antiquity and modernity. “Tum may bhi hai, dikhta hai'' he said to me, unsmiling, noting my quick temper, as I rummaged for coins in my pockets. “I can see it in you too.”
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My favorite seekh kebab roll in Delhi is Mohammad Ilyas Meat Shop, a butcher in Central Delhi close to where I went to school. MI Meat, as it is fondly called, is run by two brothers — both large, commanding men who still size up regulars and order their staff around through a mirror in front of their desk and a large microphone. I often ate at the shop when I was at university, I would arrive in the middle of the day, and one of the brothers would grumble at me, just as the shop was opening, asking how I was here so often, didn’t I have anywhere else to be? I would nod, tell him I didn’t, and park my small, blue Maruti Suzuki near his shop and wait for it to open.
I would sit outside the shop and watch the neighbourhood changing from afternoon slumber to the evening. Kids would come out to fly kites, and boys would walk around playing Punjabi music on loudspeakers that they perched on their shoulders as they strutted about, shouting for their friends from under windows. “Neechay aa na, chutiye!” they would scream, until hoarse with affection. “Come on downstairs, asshole!” Fights would break out now and then between people who refused to pay the cigarette vendor. Large, rich men in larger cars would arrive to do errands, bully locals and fight with one another about parking space. I would eat my kebab roll and watch the spectacles unfold, glare at the men who lingered their eyes on me and listen to young women walking past, giggling to one another about a secret.
Not long ago, I drove to MI Meat after a spell of rain brought out unusually blue skies and clouds ran everywhere as if in a frenzied hurry. A rainbow stuck out of place in the horizon, as people drove around in reckless confusion. This was a city of bad moods and brown skies, what had anyone done to deserve clear blues? As I parked near the shop, the staff shouted greetings at me asking customary questions, and for my opinions on the Coronavirus that soon escalated into an argument among themselves. As I watched the boys, I realized I had not been outside East Delhi in months, being locked inside my parents home I had begun to eat kebabs in Jamnapaar, across the river, far away from where I would usually eat them.
As the boys bickered, one of the owner brothers walked out and nodded to me in Salaam, asking how I was. I summed up the courage to tell him this thought, telling him how I found kebabs in East Delhi. “Yahan jaisay nahin” I said, cautiously. “Not like yours, of course, but they were good, nonetheless.” He hummed in acknowledgement, not looking up from his bills but speaking to me directly. “Kyun nahin?” he said to me. “But why not? Kids put pieces of seekh kebab on pizzas these days.” He recounted more ways that the kebab manifested in ridiculous but tempting fusions. Kebab chaat, in which different kinds of kebabs were plunged together in a mix, a needless dish that made me cringe as he described it. He spoke of kebab patties, in which a seekh kebab was set inside flaky puff pastry, a chai-time staple in the city and my sister’s favourite snack. His matter-of-factness surprised me, I expected pride from the man that made and supplied some of the best grilled-meat in the city. “Jo hai, woh hai” he said. “It is what it is.” As he readied himself to open his shop, he shouted orders at the boys, whose bickering had turned to whispers. The tandoor flared up, meat was set on long skewers and mounts of dough for roomali rotis emerged from their fridge. The seekh kebab roll was on its way.