Memory is unreliable. It seeks others to fill its gaps. These mnemonic devices can sometimes be fallible. Because people/persons have shared vulnerabilities. This is where public record can make the fallible faithful. I learnt this from the memoir writer Sorayya Khan, who uses such records to check the veracity of hers. In the early pages of ‘We take our Cities with Us’, she remembers an incident from her late teens where her own recollection had been at odds with live newscast on radio. My marginalia notes this stitching of memories together to connect old to new. Layers of sediment. Truth making.

My memory of the 1999 eclipse is cemented by that of my parents. Mama says it was just past Greenwich and Baba says that the coach had parked up, along with other coaches. The passengers had gotten off to witness the eclipse and that we had most likely borrowed glasses. I turn to public records and discover that free glasses had been distributed so it is possible that we had been given them by the National Express. I also find the date and time of the eclipse. It took place on a Wednesday on August 11 starting at 9:58AM with its maximum at 11:13AM. The total eclipse lasted for 2 minutes and 36 seconds.

**

I watch the partial eclipse on a hot evening on August 12, 2026 in the company of a friend and many others who have gathered on Parliament Hill. There are picnic hampers and blankets. Bicycles lying in the sun. Couples, young and old. Children. Most have glasses. There are some colanders. We are all oriented to a certain direction in the sky. Some of us have used a compass and others have just followed the direction of the crowd. At the peak of the eclipse, it looks as if we are all at the cinema with 3D glasses, transfixed by what is happening in the sky. At first contact, it looks like the moon has bitten the sun, like an apple that has been cut in the shape of a bite. As the moon orbits over the sun, the edges of the disc distort, light flaring from the sides. The shade of sunlight shifts, not warm but somewhat metallic. And the air becomes cooler.The first contact of the eclipse is at 6:17PM with the peak at 7:12PM. By this point, the sun has started to dip between a copse of trees. The people sitting behind me are seeing their first eclipse and are spell bound. We swap our glasses because they have different tints. There is a round of applause at the point when most of the sun is covered by the moon.

JS captures the eclipse in a timelapse. A record of the moment for later years. I have voice notes as a future soundtrack. We speak about our memories of the 1999 eclipse and how we first learnt about them in encyclopaedias. We had French and British print versions, until he brought up Encarta. It turns out we both had spent hours exploring the content on it. Two different countries on different continents. One way of learning.

***

In July, VN and I see the ‘The Sun and the Moon - Art Inspired by the Celestial’ at the Saatchi Gallery. Amidst the many beautiful pieces of art and photography is a phototransparency of the eclipse seen in May 1919. A dark circle, made even sharper by the corona of the sun, sits in the centre of a black rectangle. The sun’s corona is usually obscured by its own light, but is made visible in an eclipse when the moon blocks it. I am struck by the image because it remains largely unaltered by the passage of time. An eclipse then is like an eclipse now. I see it as a reassurance. As consistency and constancy in uncertain times.

The announcement of a hosepipe ban in my borough prompts the memory of a drought experienced in childhood. It was from the 1990s, in the early years of living in Islamabad, when both parents had set up their businesses and so home was home and an office too. I remember it being a full house and Mama fills the blanks in my memory. We had extended family staying with us and a recalcitrant and selfish domestic help called Sufi.

I call my parents to update this memory, to add the experience of the adults. I remember the bucket and tub baths and can visualise clearly the bathroom in Dado’s room. There was a blue bucket with a mug that slotted easily onto the rim. I preferred this to the yellow tub whose circumference led to the water cooling quickly. The hot water came from a kettle and there was a practised ratio so that it was the right temperature. I was never one for cold showers.

I wanted to know how we came to have water because my older self understands that the water tankers that brought water to us did not come on schedule. Baba tells me that if a tanker was spotted on the road, he would drive in front of it to flag it down, the request for water made possible only with a generous tip. Eventually, Mama discovered that a tanker could be directed to the house by attending the local CDA office, and that this was best done at 4AM when the queues were manageable. It was easier for her to do this because the ladies’ line, which was considerably shorter. Mama asks me if I remember how we all queued up in the morning to brush our teeth with the trickle of water that came from the CDA.

This I do not remember.

What I do remember is that the house was full and baths came in buckets. I remember too the ire when my parents discovered that Sufi had been having luxurious running showers in the morning, after the tanker had filled the water tank at the base of the house. I remember how often the lid of the tank was lifted, and how once in a while potassium permanganate was added to it to purify the water.

***

There is a common refrain in mid-life — the desire to edit life so that it better fits who we have become or are becoming. It is the space that my friends and I are in, and on some days we call each other to speak about the urge to burn, throw or purge things. In this month, when wildfires have ravaged large parts of the world, I am ashamed when I use the word burn. The recognition of insensitivity arrives moments after it slips from my tongue and I realise that language too has to catch up with a future in which climate change is not abstract. It is one of many signs that habits are slower to shift than reality.

I think of the word burn — a verb capable of several meanings. Burn as damage. Burn as flame. Burn as energy. Burn as longing and desire. Burn as record. I wonder when this burning growing more ferocious each year will become the dry tinder that sparks into the momentum of wanting not just different, but better.

Art then is the meaning of what happens when it is consumed.

Rothko in Florence is an invitation into ways of seeing and reminds me instantly of the opening sentence in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. ‘Seeing comes before words.’ I think too about how seeing is shaped by the words of others. Rothko, for instance, left his work untitled and had little desire for classification or connection with movements. He felt keenly and was interested in emotions, especially those beyond accessible expression. He painted large pictures for intimacy because scale allowed those seeing it to locate themselves in, around or inside it. He saw his art as a vessel for emotions and chose to leave it untitled so that it remained open to interpretation. His words, which appear on the slim pamphlet for the exhibition state ‘A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.’

There were things he was prescriptive about like the conditions for creating the context for the experience. Rothko had precise instructions for wall colours, lighting, the distance from the ground and ceiling and the installation of his artworks, put together for the Whitechapel Art Gallery for his first retrospective in Britain in 1961, which are still used to this day. He was of the view that too white a wall fights against pictures, and that lighting should illuminate the whole. His instructions were framed to allow as little distortion of meaning as possible.This curation has a way of making the colour or colours in his work have multiple lives and personalities. That shift in tones shifts the dial of my emotions. I move through a range of these as I walk through the rooms. What stays with me is a constant feeling of a lump in my throat — the kind that is a precursor to tears. There is a quiet beauty, a majesty to the colours and what they evoke, and I feel the most movement in the fields that are a mix of greens and blues. The Browns over Dark offer the experience of sight adjusting to darkness, the shapes deepening in tone the longer I look at them. I love a mix of pastel greys the colour of doves, and of course the reds and yellows that remind me of sunsets.

Postscript — A Finnish digital creative and product designer, Joonas Virtanen, has given Rothko’s art a new form by using his works to capture the feeling of the weather. I am sitting with the balcony door wide open, a fan carrying a light breeze. This is the first night in a week when the mercury has dropped below twenty degrees celsius in London. I have discovered through these two heatwaves that heat itself ramps up emotions, stirring them at the slightest provocation, dialling up their intensity. No 14, 1960 a mix of rust and blue captures the mood and feeling of the night.

VN and I have this in common – planning trips around exhibits. It is how I had come to the Anslem Kiefer in Milan in March, and she to Marie Antoinette and Cartier in London last year. Soon, we will see Tracey Emin’s A Second Life at the Tate and The Sun and Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial at the Saatchi Gallery together. There is subtext to this – about art being more reliable than men. We were both married. And then not. I admire her for her tenacity, for her ability to put herself out there for the kind of love that she wants and needs. I imagine she was the child who learnt how to ride a bicycle by keeping on it even after falling and with scraped knees. I was the one who held onto the training wheels, needing tough love because I was unable to trust my balance. That doubt runs deep.

The late train also messed with lunch because I had missed last orders at Trattoria Sostanza. The cafe at the Palazzo Strozzi had nothing left either. I was feeling rather sorry for myself when VN suggested Cibrèo Caffè inside the Helvetia & Bristol. On the 2.30 - 7.00pm menu are a number of classics none of which are Florentine. And that is how I find myself eating an Organic Buffalo Mozzarella from Battipaglia and Tomato Salad.

It is audacious both in preparation and presentation, arriving at the table in what resembles a soup bowl. A whole tomato, topped and tailed with what can only be described as a crown of mozzarella. There is extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar and a bread basket. I carve the tomato, bite into it and discover that it has the flavour of Joy Sullivan’s poem ‘Tomatoes’. It is a poem rich with appetite for this summer fruit which when it is good is extraordinary. Sullivan compares it to long awaited love and ends with ‘Our mouths are full of tomatoes. // We are so busy // being small and hungry and alive.’

I eat slowly with reading, writing, observing and eavesdropping. The latter made easy by the presence of Americans who rarely moderate their volume. Is this what it means to romanticise yourself? The privilege of eating something assembled by the hands of another. The possibility of a chance encounter, of meeting someone new. Of discovering something about myself that would not be possible in everydayness. Eating with intention rather than swiftly, standing at the breakfast counter in my kitchen. A table for one has many different propositions.

Different ways of seeing are common to both art and food. I have been to Florence before, and on the train from Milan, I recognise buildings and signboards last seen from the window of a moving car on road trips with my ex-husband. I am surprised to find these lodged in memory, because the marriage itself is far gone. An irrefutable fact whose reality escapes me. I have no memory of the man I fucked or who fucked me. It was the element of marriage that I had thought would insinuate itself into the body and memory. I had hoped for forgetfulness but had been unconvinced by it. But then it arrives and it feels prosaic.

I ate another dreamy tomato salad the day after, seated at the bar at Trattoria Della Gloria. It is on the menu as ‘Tomatoes salad & Fig Leaf Oil’ – an accurate description that says little about its taste. It is essentially tomato three ways – datterini split in halves, candy sweet; chunks of a fleshier one which the chef says has been blanched and peeled, softer and more giving. And a third cured with salt that has a firm bite. They come together in a perfect mix of textures and flavour. Salt is a running theme, used to draw liquid and tighten the flesh. It appears again in a salad of trumpet zucchini, peaches and salva cheese. And a panna cotta with cherries treated the same. The creamy dessert has a sharpness which turns out to be lavender.

The woman who I have shared the bar counter with is fascinating, so we spend the evening talking about art, relationships and career pivots. The depth of our conversation makes me ask if she would be willing to share dessert which is how we come to split the panna cotta. We dip our spoons into it, alternating between bites and wrestling with a cherry so that we have equal halves.

The trio who run the place join in from time to time telling us about the story of how the place came to be. What they are trying to achieve with the menu. The challenge of training and teaching staff. We speak about politics, especially how food has turned into identity politics. Take pasta for instance. It always conjures up Italy, yet, Tunisians have the kind of love for it that makes them the second largest consumers in the world. We touch on the myth of the nonna, marrying it with reality. The way romanticising food and nurture obscures the anger, drudgery and labour that is domesticity. We are the last to leave and find ourselves at a bar along the canal, sipping negronis and wondering out loud where we see ourselves five years from now.

I stayed with friends and when I arrived at their home, there was on the table a welcome message framed with poppies made from crepe paper. VC had shown me around Mexico City’s markets and as we walked through Mercado de Jamaica, she told me about Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) where flowers are aplenty, natural and crafted both, as people gather to celebrate the ones they have lost.

Flowers are so often a thing of beauty but they are by their nature temporal. They bud, bloom and disappear, and it makes sense then that they are used this way. The real ones echoing the cycle of life and death, and the handmade ones a symbol of remembrance.

I smell the air. It is the scent of the earth, parched and dry, receiving rain. Petrichor. An unromantic-sounding word for what really is a mood. A feeling. An entire scene. Experience. Memory.

The word was coined by Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenville Thomas, combining the Greek words petra (stone) and ichor (the ethereal fluid that is the blood of Greek gods). I smell this on the way to listen to Annahstasia perform at Islington Assembly Hall. Her music and voice have a poetic melancholy that evokes the same feeling as listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Iqbal Bano and Reshma. It is music suited to this weather. When I emerge from the tube at Highbury and Islington, the rain falls in fat, furious droplets, like angry tears.

Petrichor and this kind of stormy rain tie together two lands — Pakistan and England that are both home. And not. Because I have known for a while now that home is not a place, but a feeling.

There are other ways with time. Scheduling it — how as a single person it is worth knowing about school holidays and big ticket events that lead to surge pricing. And then there is the war. On Al-Jazeera the US-Israeli war is counted in days, and the days will soon turn into months. I wonder what this kind of counting does to our minds.

I think of the experience of people like me. Children with passports of privilege and precarity. Our citizenship suspect even when we contribute to economy and society. I think of the boxes I am meant to fill — to help with unknown measures of improvement at best, profiling at worst. I think too of relative freedoms. London, with all its hardness and expense, was the place where I first came to be at home in myself. It is where I grew up and where I am still growing. The place that makes whole my mixed heritage. That taught me the meaning of chosen family — of building a village and in doing so exposing the myths of colour I grew up with. The sharpest of which was that Western cultures do not care about their friends and family. I had always lived with nuance and London made that space a permanent home.

In 2007, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo was commissioned to produce work for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern as part of the Unilever Series. The work was called Shibboleth. It had a profound impact on me. I had just returned to London after two years in Islamabad following graduation. I had, and still have, a love that borders on ferocious and feral for public spaces — parks, museums, libraries and public transport. A love rooted in how transformative these spaces are, especially for girls and women. And the lived experience that these are not easily accessible in Pakistan.

It was two years after the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and this fracture and crack that ran the length of the Turbine Hall — a vast, cavernous space with impossibly high ceilings made me think of the epicentre of the earthquake. I lay on the floor, running my hands along the edges of the work. Feeling its texture. Imagining whether this was what the earth looked like in Kashmir — fissure and faultline. It is only now, in writing this, that I understand the title.

Shibboleth, in Biblical history, references how the Ephraimites were identified by the Gileadites when attempting to flee across the River Jordan. Their dialect did not include the sh sound, and those unable to pronounce the word were captured and executed. The Cambridge Dictionary gives two meanings: a belief or custom now out of currency because it is either unimportant or incorrect; and a word, phrase or custom that expresses membership of a particular group. Shibboleth, as Tate writes, is a token of power — ‘the power to judge, reject and kill’.

Art means different things to different people, and its beauty lies in its capacity to hold all meaning — public and private, individual and collective, mirror and window. At the time, my experience of the work was annexed by the experience of the earthquake, its aftermath and my own questions about belonging. It had not occurred to me to think about the artist’s own conceptualisation. Salcedo said of Shibboleth that it represents borders, the experience of immigrants, segregation and racial hatred — in particular, the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. The work was so compelling that it has always remained in easy reach of memory. What strikes me now is its closeness to the present. Its painful accuracy. That crack and fissure was at its deepest merely two feet, but 167 metres long — something about that length conspired to make it seem deeper and more treacherous than it was.

Shibboleth connects past, present and future. And in that sense I find myself questioning the utility of time. If it is a continuum, will it ever allow us to step outside its logic and craft something new — to reorient away from a history that has so often determined the future? I am tired of the idea that time is repetition. That what came before will necessarily come again. In physics, time is motion and memory. What captured my mind is quantum physics, which examines directionality and shows that its equations run equally well in reverse. Time, then, moves both ways. Rovelli, in the opening pages of The Order of Time says that much of what we think we know about time is false. If past, present and future are not fixed, might understanding time differently surface other histories — configurations that work for more of humanity rather than fewer?

El Brellin

I love slowly braised red meats, tender and falling from the bone, and if I am honest, it is the European braises — beef cheeks in red wine with polenta, osso bucco with risotto and short ribs that gave me an appreciation of Pakistani specialties like nihari and aloo gosht. I connect these dots at El Brellin, where I work my way through the classic osso bucco and risotto milanese. The rice plumped with stock, ladle by ladle, which it absorbs slowly before being finished with parmesan. Risotto Milanese is a glorious shade of saffron and if that was not decadent enough, there is the lusciousness of the marrow from the osso bucco. I eat slowly and with pleasure.

There is an American family seated next to me, their loudness and accents are what give them away. And a party of ten — couples who have been there a while, judging from the state of the table, crowded with dishes. By the time I start eating, the plates have been cleared making way for dessert and digestifs. There is a group of four women who seem familiar to the waiter, and then a mother and daughter who turn up halfway through. The mother looks at me with a stare that has the invasive curiosity of a desi auntie who has caught a young woman on a date.

I am one of two solo diners. The other, also a woman, with turquoise braids, cat-patterned bottoms, a comic print shirt and a waist bag. She is at a comfortable distance but I know that she too has had the osso bucco, because I had watched her being served. She uses her mobile phone as companion. Of all the details, what stands out most is the time she spent picking her teeth with a dental floss toothpick she takes from her bag. She was thorough and diligent, took her time and made no effort to conceal what she was doing. I would like to believe that my observation of her was surreptitious. I know for certain that she was unaware of my watch simply because of the angle she was at. I was so taken by her behaviour that I broke my own pact of a phone-free dinner to scribble a note that can only be described as questioning culinary colonisation and dining etiquette. I had been taught that toothpicking in public was ideally avoided, and if needed, should be swift and with one’s hand over the mouth. And yet, here I was in the presence of a diner who took her time and with the kind of pick that one used in the privacy of the bathroom.

I realise then that this calls into play a broader set of mores. One of the reasons I did not like nihari when I was younger was to do with the way it looked and how it was eaten. The cut of meat was such that the bone often needed to be tapped on the plate to release the marrow. There was a rim of oil floating on the surface, which often dripped in the hands of a clumsy eater as it was scooped with naan. I have written about marrow, cutlery and the politics of how we eat.

Osteria Conchetta

On the night before I leave Milan, I have dinner at Osteria Conchetta. I was after another Milanese classic, cotoletta, but had to amend my plans in favour of pasta as the size of the cotoletta was simply too much for me on my own. I had the tagliatelle with veal ragù, which arrived at the table with a steel collar. It is lifted to reveal a tangle of fresh pasta, a layer of ragù and a mousse of grana padano with a squiggle of beef jus. It was delicious. The tiramisu was less successful — too determined a set and ladyfingers that were not soft enough. I have not met a tiramisu that meets the bar of IM’s nonna, or for that matter IM’s tiramisu itself.

Osteria Conchetta is clearly a place for locals. The owner works the dining room and stops to speak with most everyone. His demeanour suggests a kind of familiarity that comes with being a regular. He spends most of his evening with a couple seated near me, waving and gesticulating alongside speech that comes thick and fast. He attempts the same with me but we are both hampered by our lack of a common language. I appreciate the sentiment.

I am at a small table right next to the kitchen, in a tight corner with a party of six next to me. Their chairs are so close that we find ourselves in a form of Jenga at the slightest movement. I am in the line of sight of the wait staff, ever present, ready to carry the dishes that appear at the counter. And while they do their best to look away, I feel exposed, which has the odd effect of making me eat and drink faster than I had intended. The floor beneath me is glass and through it, I can see the wine cellar.

Rita

Sandwiched in the middle is dinner at Rita, with the realisation that a bar is perhaps the most perfect place for a solo dinner. Like aperitivo which opens the appetite, a capable bartender is schooled in people and will propose and curate an experience that feels unique, even when you know that it is from a well-seasoned playbook. The bar is like theatre — it meets you where you are and depending on your mood will take you places. It is a place of observing and observation. A masterclass in interaction — in understanding what is spoken and what remains silent. Of charm and being charmed.

I am perched on the edge of the peninsula with a view of one of the mixologists and right next to where the owner Edoardo Nono stands. It is fascinating to watch him work his staff and customers. I am made to feel very welcome, with occasional chats with Edoardo and the mixologist who serves me. The cocktail menu honours Milanese design and I pick a Bloody Mary with a Japanese bent — horseradish trading places with wasabi, yuzu and a mix of sake and gin as its building blocks, a square of nori resting on the edge. What I love most is Sou Ellen, Rita’s version of the Negroni, barrel aged and with Chinotto citrus. I love the soundtrack of the space too — conversation, music and the sound of clinking ice and cocktails being mixed.

Somewhere along the evening I find myself further along the bar so that a trio can sit together. I end up next to someone there on their own, and a curiosity about what he is reading becomes the opening sequence for a conversation about culture, reading and relationships. I eat Vitello Tonnato, Piedmontese surf and turf. Thinly sliced veal with a creamy tuna sauce and briny capers.

I am reminded of Leslie Jamison’s essay from the early pandemic about missing the bodies of strangers. She writes that when we lose the ability to move among strangers we lose not just company, but relief from solipsism — the reminder that there are countless other ways to be alive, to be lonely, to hope and seek joy, besides our own particular way. There is something about dining at a bar that offers the right mix of alone togetherness — being with strangers while feeling belonging. That kind of feeling opens the door to possibility, to discovering something that could not have been known had it not been for the experience.

I do not edit myself when I am amidst strangers. The instinct to make myself palatable is strongest when I am in Pakistan or in places where there are brown people. I experience colour as constraint, an instinct for self-preservation, since acceptance and belonging were never within reach when I was growing up. At Rita, none of that applies. I love people watching and can spend hours doing it. My memory no longer works as it once did — I have forgotten the title of the book and the author that prompted the conversation that evening, but I recall that it was about ordinary things, written in note form. Some things lodge and others slip. The bar teaches me this about myself.

The older I get, the less religion makes sense. There is too much violence in it and places of worship — mosques, churches, temples — are steeped in suffering, guilt and dogma. Museums are my Mecca1. They are fully flawed. An expression of humanity — beauty, desire, contradiction, theft and plunder, exposure and education. They lend themselves to critique and criticism in the way that places of worship do not. These cabinets of curiosity call in wonder, excitement, anger, grief and despair. I think too of structures of stone, marble and mason, before machines. All that creativity and endeavour.

At Milan’s Palazzo Reale, Anselm Kiefer’s Le Alchimiste takes residence in the Sala delle Cariatidi2 (Hall of the Caryatids). The space wears visible wounds — scars from the allied bombings which destroyed the Palazzo. The forty caryatids that support the hall were never restored. In the faceless and mutilated figures, Kiefer recognised the fate of many women who have been erased from history. And so, in Le Alchimiste, he restores to the canon thirty-eight women who lived mainly between the late Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century, honoured for their contributions to alchemical practices such as distillation and sublimation, practices capable of transforming base metals into gold. These were women knowledgeable in the natural cycles of life who today would be classified as physicians, herbalists and astrologers. The scale of the canvases is such that they swallow the capaciousness of the hall. Each woman is independent, her name lettered in gold, but structurally the work unfolds as an interlinked sequence, much like an artist’s book in accordion fold.

The women are of Western tradition and I wonder whether Kiefer had purposely considered a defined topography — a narrow frame to concentrate his work — or whether this was a lack of curiosity for other parts of the world, a form of privileging the West. I think of how tightly bound the memory of the Second World War is with a specific kind of violence — a horror that has come to be seen as the apex of cruelty, and has been used to diminish all that has come after. A taxonomy of genocide and ethnic cleansing benchmarked to the past. I walk through the Sala delle Cariatidi inhaling the smell of oil paint, admiring scale, leaning into texture and pattern, noticing how colour shifts in dialogue with the colours of the hall.

The absence of white and a multiplicity of shades, so often absent in museums and galleries, brought back the furore around Pantone’s colour of the year. Cloud Dancer, described by Pantone as an ethereal white offering calm in a frenetic world, sparked a backlash from artists and creatives. At best it expressed a lack of creativity; at worst it fed directly into the white nationalism and supremacy of now. In The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra dedicates an entire chapter to the colour line. It reminds me too of the way Gaza broke the art world.

The women in Kiefer’s works do not have fully defined features but their bodies are unmistakable, their names appearing in gold. The works are a feast of colour and technique. Flora and fauna project outwards in places, and everywhere the darks speak to the forces that destroy and destruct. Gold appears liberally, reaching toward the light — speaking to how science, knowledge and creation move forward.

Are these my European sensibilities, wrought by mixed heritage — and fraught for their colonialist leanings that favour cutlery? An arsenal of forks, knives and spoons, because eating with one’s hands was seen as uncivilised.

The dastarkhawn/دسترخوان and the tablecloth are both fabric. But they tell different stories. Table linen — pale, pastel, often white. Virginal. A revelation of all. A form of policing. Dastarkhawn — busy, patterned and brightly coloured, concealing turmeric stains and oil. Forgiving. My half-and-half Mama forever despairing of family who wiped salaan hands on white napkins, or the pale coloured cloth that she lined the roti chabi with.

At a decidedly European dinner table I find myself explaining how I do not know which box to tick when it comes to ethnicity. Is my quarter Polish enough of a mix for mixed White and Asian, especially since it is lesser white.¹ I explain myself as a Pantone shade, a shade I call ‘palatable brown’. As racially ambiguous with my brown heritage tied up in a name.

I am neither. Both. And more.

¹ The word slave has its roots in the word Slav — the name for Slavic peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. During the early medieval period, Slavic peoples were captured in large numbers by Western Europeans and Muslims and sold into bondage, making their ethnicity synonymous with the generic word for enslaved people. The Arabic saqaliba follows the same root.

I thread these images with others from years ago. One from a flat highway flanked by desert and marked by saguaro standing like sentries. Six lanes. Three on each side with traffic flowing at ease. And then, a trailer appears, casually riding alongside our car, carrying on it an entire clapboard house. The house was travelling interstate in the way that families travel with all their belongings. The shadow of the house was smaller than its size, an expression of time of day and angle at which light meets structure. A reminder that there is more to an object than meets the eye.

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise:

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes

– Langston Hughes

These were the Arizona years, when the family was split between three countries and continents. Mama and Baba between Islamabad and Scottsdale. My brother transitioning to college in Tempe. I was in London, studying law and spending the holiday season between Islamabad and Scottsdale. A house moving on a trailer was the ultimate expression of possibility, that one could both carry and make a home anywhere.

This was years before I understood the difference between a house and a home. That realisation would come in 2018 when I walked into 31/11-A after Babcia and Daddy died. That home – the address of which featured as fixed and permanent on our identification documents – was suddenly a house. It had been made home by presence. And unlike the American clapboard structure, it was brick and mortar, easier to rubble than raise and move. It was also the post 9/11 years when the war on terror had begun. Time would reveal the restraints and constraints of it – on how it would destroy, displace and circumscribe the ways of home making. It was no different from other wars, but there was a subtlety: the myth of a more open, more plural, more global world. Colonisation and empire shape shift – the work of surfacing them and of creating and imagining new futures never ends.

I am learning the rhythms of my new house and home, which I moved into in January. The way the floorboards creak when the heating comes on. The fridge sighs at intervals. I watch the way light moves through the rooms, though it is scarce right now — cloud has long kept the sun and moon in purdah1. The wind has a different ferocity here, which forces me to keep the window closed at night.

There is another truth — that it is hard to feel at home in a world on fire and when your own body is hostile too. The beginnings of reverse puberty. A different kind of acquaintance with the language of hormones and how they shape the way I am with myself and with others. I am finding it difficult to moderate my emotions. Anger is always rage. The sadness feels overwhelming and incapacitating. I lose purchase over my words, forgetting them mid-sentence. One of my worst fears, leaving the hob on, happens. I am puzzled by a clicking sound in the kitchen and eventually realise that it is the sound of the coil on the electric cooker. I miss my induction cooker dearly and am thankful it is not gas. But as a consequence of this, I am seized by anxiety when I go out one evening, convinced that I have left it on again. And I wonder, too, how much of this is circumstance versus biology. The estate next to me is coming down steadily. The noise apparent in brief spurts. Each week the gap widens, debris on the ground, blue sky above. As I walk past it I think of the families displaced by gentrification. The space will be swallowed by girders and glass. I watch the news, unable to comprehend it and am left with images of airstrikes and people fleeing. This mixes with grainier images from the Gulf War in the nineties when we had just moved to Islamabad and the twenty-four-hour news cycle on CNN had come to sit side by side with BBC World News.

I always wish to be on a boat.

Then, maybe, no more fighting

about land.

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Sometimes There Is a Day

1

Purdah: from the Persian/Urdu پرده, meaning curtain or veil. It is both religious and cultural — referring to the practice of seclusion and modesty in Muslim cultures. It can be physical segregation of the sexes and/or clothing that covers the body and face. In politics, it refers to the period before an election during which civil servants and public bodies are restricted from making announcements or policy decisions — a different kind of enforced silence. Here, both.

It is hope.

I will never forget the first time I came across mimosa. It was in February 2024, on one of those bleak February days when the astronomical fact of the days getting longer was hard to evidence and I was unable to separate the greyness outside from the blues I was feeling. I had walked the Haringey ladder countless times, sometimes cutting across Haringey Passage and at others slipping up and down the rungs of the ladder that are the streets off Green Lanes. I had said to VN that the mimosa is like finding sunlight on a late evening that is dark like the night. It made me feel that the light was shifting with the move towards the spring equinox.

I have – every year since – looked for the mimosa and have found it cascading over the walls of houses in many of the streets around North London. I experience it as luminosity, as scent. As a heady experience that makes me stop and stare and stand.

Mimosa was also my first ever cocktail. Heavy on alcohol, judicious on the citrus juice — the orange of it catching the colour of the flower that gives it its name. It was at a late afternoon party at ZH’s home. It was the year 2004 when I had returned to Islamabad after my undergraduate studies in London. It was the post-9/11 world — a few years into the American invasion of Afghanistan and the beginnings of the period when the capital city began to experience the terrorism that had been rife in other parts of the country. I had spent my university years dry and then, it was the return to the land of the pure and sanctimonious where I came to the joys of drinking. Just enough to loosen the limbs and lubricate conversation. To temper self-consciousness.

I think of those years now, when violence and death were as consistent as the work day and parties at the weekend. I think about the deep deep resentment that I felt not just about the war but also the acceptance and resignation, the inevitability of invasion. I have felt that feeling many times since. I feel the same today but with a rage that is amplified.

The mimosa finds me in this state, full of poetry. Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” jostling with Darwish’s “The wars will end and the leaders will shake hands, and that old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son, and that girl will wait for her beloved husband, and the children will wait for their heroic father, I do not know who sold the homeland but I know who paid the price” and Naomi Shihab Nye’s “You Are Your Own State Department”.

I have no words and too many words at once.

There is a skyline of buildings now that was barely there in the nineties. Kites swirl in the sky, circling garbage—flotsam and jetsam of a population that grows and grows, swelling the ranks of citizenry, stretching the city well beyond the limits I had known.

My nephew S and I walk through Brompton Cemetery.

It is grey and overcast, and while the clouds have held their moisture, we decided that the pushchair with its rain cover was a better choice than S’s bicycle. I slip off the main walkway onto the slimmer paths between the graves. The paving on these is not as smooth, and S says very clearly, “Meena, this is very loud.” I explain the mechanics to S, and luckily we soon find ourselves on a smoother surface, which speaks for itself.

There is a cacophony of sounds: birdsong, planes flying overhead, a volley of barks that are the hallmark of little dogs, a crow. S has something to say for all of these. The birdsong leads to the exclamation of “wow,” with all its awe intact. The plane is too loud. S is curious about dogs, so long as they are at a safe distance.

I picked a snowdrop for S. He holds it in his little palm with care, saying that he wants to take it to his mother. I ask him what the flower smells like and he says it is nice. But then, when I ask him if I can smell it, he gives me a smile and says, “Meena, it does not smell.” He loves cars and trucks and buses, but is decidedly against the council waste collection truck, which is too loud. He sees a volcanic orange Mini and says in the most determined manner that it looks like him. A vintage black Rolls-Royce, so beautifully kept and polished that it reflects S like a mirror, leads to a question about why it is so big. And I get a serious telling-off for having crossed a road when the man was red.

S is four now, and each day brings new words and longer sentences. It feels as if he is growing too fast, and so perhaps my most favourite conversation is this: when I ask S if he is a big boy, he looks right at me and says, “Meena, I am a smaller boy.”

An omelette is a blank canvas for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. At its simplest and most frugal, a briefly whisked mixture of egg seasoned with salt and pepper is poured into a well-buttered hot pan, nudged with a spatula to make soft gentle curds, and then left to set until just cooked. The centre should remain tender. It can be made substantial for lunch or dinner by way of fillings. Almost every country has its version, from the crêpe-like French one to thick Italian frittatas akin to crust-less quiche or the intensely herbaceous baked Iranian kuku. A desi omelette is the sub-continental version.

Eggs and I used to have a complicated relationship. When I was younger I disliked yolks (especially soft-boiled or sunny side-up). Mama, on the other hand, saw them as essential nutrition and insisted that both my brother and I have one for breakfast. I can remember the dread of a soft-boiled egg as if it were yesterday. Mama would bring them to the table in their shells, nested in an egg cup with buttered toast on the side. I would sit and watch the egg warily, hoping that the need to get to school on time would do away with breakfast. That, of course, was wishful thinking as Mama would make sure that I would eat before leaving. I loved all manner of omelettes, pancakes, and baked goods, though, since the yolks in these were camouflaged.

A desi omelette always recalls specific memories. There were summer trips to Nathia Gali when we stayed at Green’s Hotel. Mama would twist daisy stems to make crowns for my friend RAK, her sister, and I. Often the clouds would sit low in the valley, obscuring vision and leaving dew like dampness when you walked through them. We would start the day on omelette and paratha along with milky sweet tea. Then there were the trips to Lahore for my cousins’ weddings. We would stay at my Phoopo’s house where breakfast was served in instalments depending on when guests would wake up. The omelette would be accompanied with milk bread from Rahat Bakery that had been toasted in a frying pan with a little oil. I did not like the slightly sweet and oily texture and would seek out naan from the night before. Desi omelette is also a reminder of Sehri, the pre-dawn meal during Ramazan. In our Nazimuddin Road house, we had a cook called Sufi whose omelette-making skills were far from satisfactory. I dreaded the sehris where he had to resort to making eggs.

Desi omelette and khagina (spiced scrambled eggs) were a steadfast favourite. We would eat them for weekend brunch and during my teenage years I made a habit of having one with hot roti at least once a week for dinner. Rasheed, our then office boy-cum-cook, used to make these with alarming efficiency, sometimes adding a few slices of Adam’s cheddar cheese. He used oil well beyond the measure required to lubricate the pan, over which we had a number of disagreements. It was only years later when I read Elizabeth David’s recipe for omelette with fine herbs that I realised how futile my arguments with Rasheed had been; ‘As everybody knows, there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect omelette: your own.’

You will need — three tablespoons sunflower oil, a small tomato, a shallot or half a small onion, four eggs, fresh green chilli, one tablespoon cumin seeds, salt to taste, a teaspoon turmeric and red chilli flakes, plenty of roughly chopped coriander and a few slices of cheddar cheese.

The French, who are well known for their omelettes, serve them ‘baveuse’—that is, when they are still slightly runny in the middle. Pakistanis generally prefer their eggs well done. My omelette lies between the two, as I think frying for too long toughens the egg, but that a runny constitution does not suit a desi omelette. This recipe works best with a nine-inch frying pan (non-stick or a well-worn skillet).

Halve the tomato and de-seed it, then chop into a fine dice. Finely dice the onion as well.

Slit the chilli lengthwise and then chop into fine rings. Remove the roots from the coriander and chop finely. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat, then add the chopped tomato and onion. Let this fry gently until soft. The masala should reduce and is done when any moisture from it has evaporated. This will take around ten minutes.

In the meantime, whisk the eggs until well combined. Then add the spices along with the chilli and whisk to disperse evenly. Keep the chopped coriander handy, as you will need to add it in quick succession to the pan.

Turn up the heat and allow the pan to get very hot. Pour in the egg mixture, sprinkle over the coriander, and stir the contents of the pan briefly so that the masala swirls through the egg mixture. Turn the heat down to medium-low and use a spatula to nudge the still uncooked egg mix, making sure that it is evenly distributed.

When the surface looks almost dry, fold the omelette in half, plate it up, and serve it with hot naan.

It had been one of those crisp, cold days. There were traces of Jack Frost’s handiwork everywhere. Cold windows and warm houses make a bokeh of Christmas lights. The sky is intensely blue. There is a science to this clarity of colour because Rayleigh Scattering, the phenomenon that explains the dispersal of light off air, has fewer things to interfere with the way it travels. This is because the air is colder, drier, and less polluted in the winter. Winter light sharpens cityscapes. Houses like the stencils that Mama and I used to cut out with a blade. She was exacting, and there were many times when I had to redo curves to make sure that there were no disruptions in the line. I love the architecture of trees. A revelation of shapes—teardrop, round, weeping, lung-esque.

I had walked through Clissold Park to Top Cuvée, in search of something with bubbles to toast the end of the year. Something to go with the sumac trout, radicchio, fennel and blood orange salad, and bulgur that I was cooking for myself. I tell the gentleman who serves me what I am cooking and that I am celebrating the last New Year’s Eve in this home. The mortgage, which survived the marriage, had finally come to a close with the sale of the flat in mid-December. In the spirit of the season, we share a glass of Biancospino Lambrusco from the vineyards of Vitivinicola Fangareggi before I walk away with a bottle. Other people come in and out of the shop, and one of the regulars takes the same bottle as a gift for the dinner they are off to.

At home, I pop open the bottle and notice that the cork has a bunch of grapes stamped on it. I put out a glass bowl of spicy crayfish chips, a moreish flavour that AP introduced me to, with much peril to my waistline. I accidentally brown the butter when toasting the bulgur and vermicelli, which makes it all the better. I tear radicchio, add segments of blood oranges, and then toss it in the juice from the skin. There are fennel fronds to rifle through. The trout is seared skin-side down with sumac to finish. Dessert comes past midnight. An ice-cream sundae with vanilla ice cream and the leftover chocolate cookies that I had made with the last bar of Mexican coffee chocolate and sea salt. I have made a version of this dinner many times this year. But this was the first solo.

It was the perfect end to the year.

Daddy was responsible for carving the roast chicken with an electric knife before it was brought to the table. He would head to the kitchen to do this after the soup plates had been cleared. Other elements of the main course would appear in the meantime—squares of firm white fish shallow-fried in a crumb coat, red cabbage cooked with apples, cauliflower under a blanket of béchamel coloured in patches from the heat of the broiler, and mizeria—a salad of thinly sliced salted and squeezed cucumber dressed with sour cream and dill. There were mashed potatoes and steamed peas and carrots, too. Babcia’s roast chicken was the main event and was always perfect: the skin bronzed crisp and the meat tender.

Dinner ended with Christmas pudding and a succession of cakes and sweet things. I have not forgotten the magic of flambéed pudding, brandy evaporating in a halo of blue that disappears into the dark surface. We ate thin slices of the pudding with custard of a variable consistency. Made with Rafhan custard powder and subject to the whims of the cook, it was sometimes lumpy and thick, and slim or watery with a decidedly cornstarch-like flavour at others.

There was makowiec too, a Polish cake made of yeasted dough with a swirl of poppy seed paste. Daddy would make several of these, adding an almond paste version along the way when the local poppy seeds got too gritty and sandy. These desserts came to replace Mrs. Cross’ Christmas fruitcake, which suffered rather heavily from dryness—a consequence of having been insufficiently fed with brandy. It would arrive at the table wrapped in layers of coloured and transparent cellophane, red and a burnt yellow, and once unwrapped, was stored in a plastic cake box.

Christmas Day featured leftovers that had been repurposed. The rarebits were my favourite, made from roast chicken that had been carefully stripped from the carcass with plenty of cheddar cheese. The toast, a rich brown-butter colour from the sear of an old sandwich maker, had a mold that merely crimped the edges to seal the filling. It was the lack of interference with the filling that was the charm. It had to be eaten carefully, as the molten cheese would be hot enough to scald the tongue. Sometimes, Babcia would make chicken in white sauce, folding the leftover roast into it with a can of button mushrooms. This was always served with steamed rice.

London had been home for just over a decade by then, and I had increasingly found myself getting the winter blues around December. I felt resentment for December. Its arrival every year, unbidden and unasked for, sent me into despair and fury. In Winter Without You, poet Sarah Kay captures my feelings with such eloquence: “It is December, and nobody asked if I was ready.” The Almanac shifted this for me. In its pages, I discovered rites and rituals that had been observed for millennia. They were religious and pagan, rooted in specific traditions and celebrated around the world.

The solstices and equinoxes held my imagination. The word solstice is Latinate, combining sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), describing the sun as being in a position that seems motionless, leading to the longest day or longest night. Equinox is Latinate too, with roots that denote equality and night (nox). I discovered the Persian ‘Shab-e-Yalda’, when Mithra, the angel of light, was said to be born. The longest and darkest night is seen out with storytelling, poetry, and food with loved ones—a triumph of love, knowledge, and wisdom over evil. And Lohri, a midwinter festival celebrating longer days with bonfires, feasting, and folk songs.

In cities, it is electricity that comes into its element. All throughout December, buildings are strung with jewels of light. The simplest are bulbs on live wire, wrapped around buildings, lining their edges, or shaped like bows as in Covent Garden; the more complex are strands of light woven into creations like the angels on Regent Street. They shine bright against ink-blue or stormy grey skies. In the windows of houses and flats are trees of different shapes and sizes—chubby and flared at the base with a silhouette that points to being natural, perfectly conical, or sparse and modern. What they share is brightness: fairy lights, warm white, steady or twinkling, or multicoloured. In Soho, the handiwork of children from the Soho Parish School in Great Windmill Street has been turned into Christmas lights for five years running.

Over time, I have accumulated my own practices. I love walking through Central London to take in the Christmas lights at night, but also on cold, bright sunny days, because the daylight reveals their architecture. I have added sound baths to mark the shift of seasons and the ritual of playing Christmas classics while doing up the tree. There are mince pies from my neighbourhood favourites, Dusty Knuckle and Fink’s, and poems about the solstice. I find myself noticing the length and depth of shadows, both inside and outside. This year, SM shared a modern version of the folk tradition of Rauhnächte, so I lit a candle and sat down to hand write thirteen wishes. These were folded and placed in a jar. A wish is picked at random each day and burnt or shred until only one remains on new year’s day. This wish is a North Star for the year. Next year, I will get flash and seed paper because I like the idea of burning some and planting others.