Locked Down in Paradise

She may be a Delhiite, but after eight months in the Old City of Srinagar, Marryam H Reshii – leading restaurant critic and food writer – could well call herself a resident of her lockdown location. There’s something about being locked down in paradise, she says, and you’ll find out here

Text: Marryam H Reshii

After having lived for most of my life in Delhi, and telling everybody whom I meet that I am from the capital, I wonder if it is time to declare that I am a ‘native’ of Srinagar, Kashmir. I might be laughed at, because, after all, the sum total of my present stay in the Valley has been a mere eight months, but I am sure of it: my heart belongs here. Of course, I have lived, off and on, in Srinagar ever since I got married to my husband of 30 years, but Kashmir was our holiday home, visited with (then) tiny tots during school summer vacations.

It was happenstance that brought Hafeez and me to Srinagar, precisely three days before the national lockdown was declared. I still remember turning to our son and telling him that I would be back in three or four days! Eight months later, we are still in this lovely land, watching the seasons turn. In my parents-in-law’s house in the Old City, we followed local tradition to a T. Here, in our own suburban cottage, we use a mix of local and big city habits. In Delhi, there is nothing that is not available on Amazon, from atta and coffee to books and cosmetics. In Srinagar, many online sellers do not deliver to large parts of the city. When the lockdown first shuddered into effect, we had no tea leaves or wholewheat flour. As rice eaters, like most of the Kashmir Valley, we did not even have a belan and chakla to make chappatis! We never thought we would ever need one, ever. However, one visit to the local bread-baker that each and every single locality all over Kashmir has, taught us otherwise. No bakers, no bread. There’s a lockdown, don’t you know!

Almost all over the Old City, houses are two, three or four storeys high, but the ground floor is commonly occupied by a shop. It might belong to the family that owns the house or it might be rented out, but the most ingenious thing about the majority of the shops is that there are two entrances. One from the front and the other, an unobtrusive one, from a side lane or from inside the house of the owners. Now that there has been unrest in the Valley for three decades – more or less continuously since 1990 – most shops in the Old City that sell groceries maintain the two-door system. One for the public, and to ‘show’ the arm of the law that it is closed; the other to supply close neighbours with necessities like butter and tea leaves. Add that to another traditional household habit: that of buying household supplies like spices and washing soap by the month. Our dad, during his lifetime, used to overdo it and buy double quantities of salt, tea and cooking oil and get a scolding from mum who used to rue the unnecessary spending. But the upshot was that never once did our large 10-member family ever run out of necessities mid-month. Our little storeroom still bursts with tins full of badi elaichi and more toothpaste than the whole family could go through in six months.

The first fortnight of lockdown was a mad scramble through the back-lanes of our suburban colony, for atta. There was no need for a belan once Hafeez fashioned a roller from a curtain rod! What even his ingenuity baulked at, was to get our garden going with tomatoes and collard greens, because we would have to buy a few truckloads of nutrient-rich topsoil and invite prospective carriers of the dreaded virus into our premises. We were thus forced to go to our lovely local market, where growers themselves sell the produce of their land. Srinagar spoils you for choice in the matter of vegetables and fruits. The tiniest, sweetest, most flavourful strawberries, straight from heaven, bright golden peaches with purple blush marks, pears that just had to be touched gently for juice to squirt on your clothes, golden plums, cherries of three varieties: makhmali, mishri and double (velveteen, sweet and large respectively). The vegetables, too, ranged from the strictly locally plucked wild greens like dandelion (handh in Kashmiri), sorrel (obuj), lissa (amaranth) and mallow (sochal). All have high nutritive value, are within the reach of the common man and are easy and fuss-free to cook. We, in the city of Srinagar, are rather spoiled for choice and have our own distinctive ideas of what constitutes a good meal, so wild greens are eschewed in favour of kohlrabi; any vegetable of the gourd family is hurriedly bypassed in favour of carrots and green peas, and the sight of aubergines is met with disdainful smirks. However, Kashmir-grown sponge gourd is almost sweet to taste and cooked in reduced cow milk (the milkman visits every morning, with cans of milk that is barely an hour old), it is a gourmet delight.

Within three months, our little two-member household had managed, by hook or by crook, to acquire most of the necessities of life. The sector that has opened up and is currently burgeoning is the supermarket. For several years, there was just one in the city. Called Pick N Choose, it started just as militancy was ending and many residents of the city would go in just to see what kind of shopkeeper was foolhardy enough to have floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows facing a busy main road! However, as the saying goes, nothing succeeds like success, and today, the Pick N Choose formula has ‘inspired’ many others, in surprising parts of the city. Not all followers can be leaders, however, and the idea of stocking cookies and tea cakes made by local bakeries is a wonderful one, to avoid driving around town for hours: everything is under one roof, including Marmite and sweet soy from Singapore. One factor for the popularity of the supermarket is the boredom that a lockdown induces; the other is that supermarkets are where canned wazwan can be bought. Ahadsons, a Delhi-based family of wazas, had come up with a genius idea a few years ago, that of packaging wazwan preparations in cans. Ristas, gushtabas, lahabi kebabs and seekh kebabs can be purchased in cans and stored till you have unexpected guests. Many households in the city depend on this nifty convenience.

The other sector that has boomed during the lockdown is, rather unexpectedly, the food and beverage sector. Sanah Jeelani of Ziggy’s Cupcakes had started experimenting with icing cupcakes after she returned to Kashmir after a spell at the university in Middlesex, UK. So proud was she of her entirely self-taught creations, that she uploaded the occasional picture on Instagram where they received encouraging traction. However, it was once the lockdown kicked in that she began to receive regular orders for her cupcakes. She wonders aloud, “Was it something attractive and colourful to look at in these grim times? Was it the fact that you could nibble at a few bites instead of having a whole cake that needed to be finished?” While she cannot be happier that her art is receiving such appreciation in a conservative city like Srinagar, she is rather nonplussed at all the attention her confections have received. Without a day’s training or attending online classes, Ziggy seems to embody the artistry that is inherent in Kashmir. At one point it was the carpet weaving and the papier-mâché painting; today, it is icing bite-sized cupcakes.

The other restaurant that has left everyone astonished is the Srinagar outpost of Middle Eastern brand, PappaRoti. Says young entrepreneur, Sanjar Dev, “I had no idea that of all things on our menu, Americano and espresso coffee would be the hottest selling beverages,” and he has a point. When I was married and came to our Old City home for the first time, what astonished my new family was that I never drank tea. They had never encountered anyone previously, with such an idiosyncrasy and it was the talk of the entire Reshii clan. And now, a QSR opens and the bright young things that throng it cannot get enough coffee. But then, when I was newly married, it was unheard of, more or less, for respectable people to go outside their house to eat. Today’s restaurant-goers, who constitute a large tribe in Srinagar, cannot get enough kebsa, the rice and meat/chicken dish from Saudi Arabia, or shawarma. Let it be said that kebsa is being served in the Valley for the very first time! So, one may conclude that the notoriously conservative tastes of residents of Kashmir are finally undergoing a change.

On the minus side, there’s a pandemic raging on; now that winter is here, electricity comes and goes; mutton has suddenly gone off the market, despite being an inalienable part of the diet here; our cellphones have been ‘blessed’ with 2G for over a year now; but when you hear the impenetrable silence at night, feel the fresh icy breeze blowing on your face and watch as a scarlet chinar leaf falls to the ground with the softest sigh, you too will want to belong to this blessed land, no matter where you have been brought up.