My first ever visit to South Asia proved foundational for my gastronomic worldview. This was in Pakistan when I stayed there for ten months in the mid-1990s. My culinary exploits in the country’s northwest were not only formative for my tastes but also my general outlook on life. In those days, like many teenagers and twenty-somethings, I possessed a prodigious appetite but conservative taste buds. The trips took me to a realm far from the loathed mushy peas and loved Yorkshire pudding of my northern English childhood.
The debut trip to South Asia was in my year off before university in 1993−1994. I spent this so-called gap year teaching English in Mardan and Peshawar, in the region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province or NWFP).
First, I briefly taught at Fazlehaq College in Mardan. About ten years before my arrival the College had been established by General Fazle Haq, President Zia-ul-Haq’s right-hand man in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Not long afterwards, like President Zia before him, Fazle Haq would be murdered in mysterious circumstances. The school he left behind was modelled on a British public school, and many of its (all-male) pupils came from army families. Aged just seventeen when I arrived and something of a hippie, I felt out of place at this august institution, with its bore cannon on display and Rudyard Kipling’s bombastic poem ‘If’ proudly inscribed on a playground wall. Believing in the colonial ideology that linked spicy food with stagnation and self-indulgence, this boarding school’s authorities served up dreadful, unspiced and oily meals. The boys and those of us benighted teachers who lived on site were gifted lumps of gristly meat swimming in an orange ghee, with only a pinch of haldi to redeem the blandness.
Partly due to a sense of malnourishment, I shifted – or, what is closer to the truth, fled – to Islamia Public High School in Peshawar’s University Town after just a short time in Mardan. Islamia was a day school with much lower fees and a more diverse student body than Fazlehaq College. About a third of the pupils were Afghan. As refugees, some of the Afghans were substantially older than their Pakistani classmates. They knew only Pashto, Dari or Farsi, and so had to catch up with their Urdu. One young man was just shy of six feet tall, with a ratty moustache, acne, and the awkwardness typical of his age group. The poor thing had to almost fold himself in two to get under the desk in the nine- and ten-year-olds’ class to which he was allocated. Some pupils were so impoverished that three siblings would share a single pencil – or at least that’s what they told this young and naive English teacher. It may just have been an excuse to get out of class. ‘Miss, brother; Miss, pencil’ became a common refrain even among kids I suspected didn’t have a sibling in the school.
Despite having lost their homes, the Afghans brought with them a love of food. When I was occasionally invited to the homes of girls from the school, I would sit with their families on bolsters on the takht or raised platform, eating the savouriest, crustiest yet fluffiest naans. These breads were used to soak up delicately spiced dishes of aubergine with yoghurt and various aromatic meats. I also have hazy memories of comforting plates of qeema with potatoes and peas.
To my relief, our school in Peshawar also taught girls and had no military regalia. I stayed on for the best part of a year, living with the headmaster – a dry, twinkling Punjabi – and his family. His brother, a youth not much older than me, vacated his bedroom for me and, without complaint, spent the whole year sleeping on a charpoi on the roof. I joined him and two servants up there for a few nights during the summer, when the heat seemed to radiate up through my bedframe, but the choking air did little to help me sleep.
The only thing to cheer me up in the furnace-like environment of a Peshawari summer was the richly sybaritic Chaunsa mangoes we would sometimes have for a treat, juice dripping down our forearms as we ate. Guavas were a slower burn for me. I was underwhelmed the first time I ate one, as it wasn’t yet ripe and I didn’t know what to make of the chewy pip-like seeds inside. Over time, though, I came to prize this strange fruit, and these days I regularly seek them out in the British-Asian grocery shops of my city in northern England.
The family food in Peshawar was exquisite and cooked with much love; a door was opened to my own passion for South Asian Muslim cuisine. My favourite dish was daal makhani, a Punjabi delicacy that made its way to our dining table at least once a fortnight, studded with occasional gems of fried garlic cloves. The headteacher’s wife made this with a perfect blend of spices and heat, raising the luxury level through generous quantities of butter and cream. Less instant gratification came from karela, bitter gourd, which is notorious for being an acquired taste. With its gnarly appearance, bitterness and unusual crunch, I described karela in letters home as ‘like eating a crocodile.’ In those days I ate meat, so as well as karela stuffed with mince, I was also an aficionado of biryani. The dish was more of a treat than a staple in this household, but the layers of rice, tender chicken and occasional bursts of cardamom were like nothing I had ever tasted before.
There were two culinary misadventures. Both happened during Ramzan when I decided to fast along with my host family. I revelled in the sense of community after our feat of abstinence as we would take iftar in the twilit garden, starting with dates just like the Prophet was said to have done. From there we would enjoy a wide range of curries, rice dishes and breads, plus a few fried dishes like pakoras or french fries. A few hours later, at around half past nine, we would squeeze in a light meal prior to bedtime and then an early rise for sehri, the pre-dawn meal before another long day of fasting.
One night I was in the kitchen heating up some leftovers for us to pick at before retiring. I did this by candlelight, due to one of Pakistan’s many load-shedding power outages. Turning to get a spoon for testing if the food was hot enough, my dupatta dipped in the naked flame of one of the candles. It was winter and over my shalwar kameez I was wearing a thick sweater from Saddar bazaar. Being young, I had opted for the cheapest jumper to be found in the market. It was flammable and instantly combusted, burning some of my curly hair with it. Shocked and not knowing what I was doing, I flung the jumper off and stamped out the flames. I was unhurt. What seemed more important at the time was that my hair was long and I could afford to lose a few inches when it came to trimming the singed ends. Reflecting on this accident many years later, I think of the many ‘bride burnings’ or ‘dowry deaths’ that scar the subcontinent every year. These are attributed to young wives catching their dupattas alight while cooking when in fact they are perpetrated by their families in anger over dowry shortfalls.
The other mishap was no accident. After class one day, two fifteen-year-old Afghan girls offered up a small fruit that resembled a crab apple for me to try. This was nothing unusual, for the strong hospitality ethos in this northwest region meant that both Afghan and Pakistani students liked to bring in nuts and fruits for their teachers. I did wonder why they were exchanging looks and struggling to suppress giggles but took a bite anyway and politely praised the tart produce. They then burst into open laughter, having tricked this Ramzan novice into breaking my fast. I am still irritated that this cruel ruse meant I didn’t quite complete the thirty days without food or drink from dusk till dawn. I hope for God’s forgiveness.
During this Pakistani sojourn and in the aftermath of a few stomach upsets, I developed a nostalgia for Heinz baked beans from the UK. For those blithely unfamiliar, these are orange in colour: mushy legumes made of haricots soaked in a sugary tomato sauce. Despite the sheer imagination and chutzpah of the dishes I sampled in Peshawar, I sometimes longed for the foods of my childhood. When I got home and opened my first post-Pakistan tin, though, it was a sad disappointment.
Before long I found myself in England frying onions, garlic, ginger, haldi and garam masala to create a tarka for my beans. How could I be content with orange processed food after eating crocodile-like vegetables, chillies to make me cry, or spiritually treacherous crab apples? It was then that I knew the subcontinent had forever changed my taste buds – and me – for the better.
Claire Chambers is a Professor of Global Literature at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. This memoir was first published in 2023 in her co-edited book Forgotten Foods. It is published here with the permission of the author who has also provided the accompanying photographs.