Excerpt From 'On Air' by Maniza Naqvi

Pizza's Us Inc.

One lone light blinked on the panel.
‘And we’re back. Caller, are you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Beautiful night.’
‘Sure, if you say so.’
‘Have you noticed how at this time the pavement, the roads, glisten?’ I sounded cheerful.
‘No.’
‘Well, they do, go outside and check.’
‘Are you telling me that you’re going to ignore the garbage and filth on the streets of this city and instead tell me that they shine?’
‘Well, they do shine and the streets are not dirty!’
‘They don’t shine and they are dirty. It’s our nature to keep our streets dirty.’
‘Our nature? What are you talking about?’
‘Just what I said. It’s our nature to keep our streets, everything outside our own home, dirty. Even our greatest poet, Iqbal, couldn’t help but say “Utha ker paihnk do bahar gallee mein, naee tehzeeb key andeh hain gandeh…Fling them out into the street, these eggs of modernity are rotten.” So you see the streets here cannot shine!’
I laughed, ‘Well, rotten eggs or not, they do!’
‘Why should they?’
‘That’s easy, there’s gold and silver buried underneath these streets.’
‘What?’
‘Magical gold and silver.’
‘Huh? In these dirty streets, you’re talking about gold and silver and shining?’
‘See, you’re just stuck on rotten eggs, and there you go, being cynical again!’
‘You should be careful what you say on the air, you know, there may be people listening who take things very literally. We don’t like interpretations here, do we? Remember the last caller,’ he reminded me.
‘Well, they should take me seriously. Do you think that’s why the KDA and the KMC and the KFC keep digging up the roads?’
‘KFC?’
‘Whoops, sorry, they’re the chicken wallahs! Sorry, so many fast food chains! Who was it that said wake up, you have nothing to lose but these chains?’
‘I don’t think he was referring to fast food.’
‘NO! Really?’
‘Okay, so what’s the real story?’
‘Story?’
‘I don’t buy the nuclear tests or the missiles.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s too grandiose!’
‘Well, I’m a grandiose kind of a person. So, how would you prefer me to die?’
‘Something heroic.’
‘I thought I killed me pretty heroically the last two times. But okay, I can try something else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, then. I was a fighter, I fought the good fight.’ I suggested.
‘Oh!’ A fighter! I like that!’
I smiled and continued, ‘But this time the fight was against the Great American Franchise, the huge global corporation of Pizza’s Us Inc., when it decided to take over the food market in our country.’
‘What?’ he protested.

‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘just listen. It, Pizza’s Us Inc., marked us on its corporate maps. Our demography and incomes were just right for its marketing gurus, and down they swooped on us. Pizza’s Us bit hard into the food market in our city, tearing off a huge chunk of it and swallowing it up: the road-side food stalls were in danger of disappearing entirely, the tikka, sikh kebab, shami kebab, bihari kebab, chapli kebab wallahs; student ki biryani, bombay biryani, the romali rotis, sheermaals, parathas, naan, and puri wallahs; the bhail puri, pani puri, and chaat wallahs, the gurda kepura, tun a tun, karhai gosht and chicken karhai wallahs, the haleem and nihari wallahs, the baihja and chanp wallahs, halwa puri, ras malai, rabri, kulfi, lassi and doodh pista wallahs. Everyone was losing their businesses as the great Corporation moved in with its army of operations managers and its arsenal of advertisements showing beautiful happy people eating its thin crusts and thick crusts; double cheese, onions, peppers, mushrooms, anchovies, and olive toppings. At first, no one really thought much of it, because everyone knew that cheese wouldn’t cut it for very long for us tikka kebab and pani puri eaters. And soon Pizza’s Us discovered this too. But it was too big; too mighty; too strong to be overpowered by the vote of the palate. So it simply decided to define pizzas more broadly. After careful planning, it launched a powerful attack, and at its counters it started to offer tikkas and kebabs and all the rest of the sidewalk fare. All it had to do was a little market research, a little industrial espionage, a bit of head hunting, and soon it had all the recipes. It sent out its feelers and then started to make fabulous offers to all the cooks in the city. Drained away all the knowledge, made mouthwatering deals with the masters of mouthwatering meals. All the major khansamas, the cooks at all the sidewalk cafés, succumbed to the lure of high salaries and bonuses and profit-sharings. And so, with one last collective wiping of the sweat of their brows into their boiling cauldrons of food at the sidewalk cafés, they headed for the chain’s personnel office. There they assembled under that one big corporate roof, not in front of ovens and barbecues, but in separate pastel-coloured, sound-proofed and air-conditioned cubicles. They were ushered to their cubicles to churn out the recipes for their karahi goshts and tun a tuns. And PU learned in a few hours all that we had learned in centuries, and took for granted. It absorbed all that food knowledge and copyrighted and managed it all. PU took the recipes and patented them and then secreted them and vaulted them. One cook was quoted in an advertisement as saying that this was a wonderful thing, because when Bundu Khan, the great patriarch and owner of the tikka-kebab restaurant, passed away, the secret ingredients to his specialities died with him. And it was true, we knew, because the sooji ka halwa and the kebabs never tasted as good as when Bundu Khan had been alive and present at his restaurant, supervising everything himself. Index cards at PU Inc., standardized rabri and sooji ka halwa. For example, under R you had romali roti, rasmalai, rabri, etc. Under rabri, if you punched it up at any kitchen in any of their outlets, up would pop this: First, boil two kilos of milk. Let it boil for some time, and then add two cups of khoya (first break up the khoya and mix it with a little milk into a paste). Let cook for a while. Remove crust from three to four pieces of white bread and add one and a half cups of sugar. Add bread to milk; cook until soft. Add green cardamoms. Remove from heat, add three beaten eggs. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Add dried fruits, pistachios and almonds. Add a few drops of rose essence when mixture cools. Now multiply this recipe one hundred thousand times or so!

Under S you had seekh kebab, shaami kebab, sooji ka halwa. So under sooji ka halwa, punch, punch, punch, search, search, search, and up would pop…’ I stopped and then asked, ‘Does anyone out there know the recipe for sooji?’ I paused and three lights went on. I pressed one ‘Yes caller, do you have the recipe?’

‘Yes,’ a man’s voice answered. ‘I think what you need to do is to soak some sooji in water, let’s say about half a kilo of sooji with about four cups of water, for about 20-25 minutes or until the sooji has soaked up the water and submerged.’

‘Yes,’ I said encouragingly, ‘I think you’re on the right track!’

‘Then I think what you need to do is to heat two cups of oil. Add two cups of sugar. When the sugar browns, but hasn’t solidified, add a little water and some green cardamoms. Then add sooji until it becomes thick and crispy, and begins to break apart. Add all the dried fruits—raisins, especially, are a must—almonds, shredded coconut. When the oil separates from the sooji, the halwa is ready!’

‘Yes indeed, that’s it! That was wonderful! Caller, I’m really impressed.’

Another light went on and I pressed the button.

‘Or H for haleem.’ It was him again.
‘Haleem?’ I repeated

‘Ah ha. What’s the matter, don’t you have the recipe?’ he asked.

‘I expect you mean kitchra, in which case K for kitchra,’ I replied. ‘Boil together half a kilo of channa, two thirds of a kilo of crushed wheat with husk, salt, turmeric, garam masala consisting of cloves, black peppercorns, large black cardamoms—four of them—and chopped ginger. Add aniseed, one tablespoon, and ten curry leaves when the mixture is half cooked. Then you’ll need a special teacup, chipped, which is what I’ve always used for measuring. And you boil separately one chipped teacup each of masoor, maash, and arhar, and half a chipped teacup moong, with some salt, turmeric, green chilli, and crushed ginger. In a separate pan, two kilos of beef, top round, half a kilo of soup bones, turmeric, half a teaspoon of red chilli according to taste, ginger cut in slices, a little garlic, not very much. Brown the meat in oil, add spices, then add one large chopped onion and eight teaspoons of coriander powder, add water and leave to cook until the meat is very soft and dry. Mash the dal mixture, then add the meat and cook very gently, Take two large onions and slice very finely, fry in one cup of oil. Add to the cooled mixture of dals and beef. Prepare garnishing to be served separately: chopped fresh coriander, more fried, finely sliced onions, sliced ginger, chopped green chillies, and yogurt.’

‘Very impressive. You must have been a cook, or made someone a good wife!’ he said.

‘Many things, yes, many things I was,’ I replied.

‘But tell me this: Kitchra haleem; haleem kitchra, what’s the difference?’ he asked.

‘What’s the difference? What’s the difference! Haleem is just a glorified dal,’ I said, making my voice shocked and affronted all at once, ‘cooked up in two hours’. Three, tops. Kitchra is a serious all-night production. Haleem is the goo of upstarts, cooked in pressure cookers and mashed in food processors and spooned up by upstartish Karachiites at dinners and morning coffee parties, served alongside Waldorf salads and karhai tikkas, cheese casseroles and kebabs.’

‘Well, excuse us for being upstarts, Madam!’

‘Kitchra stands alone, accompanied only by the fresh chopped coriander, ginger, green chillies, onions fried in oil, and yogurt that bursts open all the hours of cooked-in, tasteful goodness. It is to be savoured and appreciated, a dish painstakingly stirred through the night for hours and hours to allow all the spices to cook and blend together with the lentils and grains and meat. The high point in the taste is the almost dissolved meat, equal in weight to all the other ingredients, so that you can’t tell whether there was any meat at all. It is plain. It needs no accompanying embellishments, it is hardy. It is ponderous, it has, shall we say, gravitas. For some of us it is the symbol of the gruel which broke the fast of the starving and besieged family of the Prophet (PBUH) on the banks of the Euphrates fourteen hundred years ago. It signifies the tenth of Moharram.’

‘Wow, have it your way, kitchra! Sounds like sectarianism just took on a whole new dimension!’

‘It’s not sectarianism, it’s culture!’
‘I see.’
‘So you see?
‘How likely is it that the Prophet’s (PBUH) family ate an Agra original, or ate it that particular night?’
‘Yes, well, that’s another question entirely.’
‘Are you hungry?’

‘What do you think? Aren’t you? Anyway, I’ve digressed from my story. Cards, thousands upon thousands of index cards, and then tape recordings of these cards, and oh, it was endless, the technology of information and knowledge management. Anyway, on computer monitors, these newly recruited cooks, ‘food research and development managers’, supervised the production of their recipes in mega-ton quantities. And in turn their performance was monitored and evaluated and fed into a great big database. If you wanted a fly-free, street-sewage-smell-free environment to eat in, Pizza’s Us offered you air-conditioned, plastic-chaired environments, but if you did want the flies and the smells, well, they had those too, located wherever their market research pointed to.

And if that wasn’t responsive enough, Pizza’s Us was seriously considering distilling the atmosphere into essences that customers could purchase and take back home with them or to other countries and in the privacy of their own homes recreate the smells of a bazaar in Karachi. About a year after P.U. Inc. had arrived in the city, I started to receive callers at my house. Disgruntled thaila wallahs and chabri wallahs and Irani restaurant wallahs started to come by from one particular inner city locality. These people came to me pleading for help; they told me they would lose their livelihoods, they would be forced out of their businesses, and even if they wanted them there wouldn’t be jobs for them at the highly mechanized Pizza’s Us outlets. It wasn’t just the food vendors that came to me, the butchers, spices, atta, flour, sugar, and milk sellers came to my door, too. Then the pots, pans, cutlery, crockery, glassware sellers started appearing. Then sweepers and waiters and pot and dish washers came to me. “This is not the way we are used to doing things,” they complained. “In the past, when one of us started to do badly we would all decide to drop one item from our inventory and let the person who was doing badly be the only source for it, this was the rule followed by all the sellers. Now this P.U. Inc. wants to sell everything. It wants to be the sole source, the sole owner of everything. What are we supposed to do?” It was too late in many of the localities in the city, but in the large inner city areas of Kharadar, Mithadar, Ranchore Lines, and Burns Road, in this labyrinth of alleyways filled with food stalls and food shops in every nook and corner, it was still not too late. Rumour had it that Pizza’s Us was planning to open its biggest store yet in this locality. A mega-outlet that would feature all the specialities for which this area was known and for which people travelled across the city, braving crime and grime, to sit outside at the sidewalk cafés or in their cars and eat the wonderful, mouthwatering kormas, niharis, chanps, keema, kebabs, murg masalams, and maash ki dals and huge oversized naan, puris, and parathas. Pizza’s Us had figured out, through its elaborate market research—which, incidentally, now included in its team of researchers an historian and a cultural anthropologist—they had figured out that this inner-city area was the city’s social capital. It was the focal point and venue of all the city’s major festivals, be they religious or cultural. Hundreds of thousands of people descended upon this area night after night to pay homage at the brightly lit and decorated shrines of saints hidden away in its alleyways, and in the daytime the area was the heart of the city’s commodity markets and its main financial market. It was as alive in the day as it was at night. Naturally, where there was so much life, there had to be nourishment. The demographics spelt profit for P.U. Inc.’

The producer held up a sign: We’re sending somone round the corner for breakfast what do you want? Parathas, naans, nihari, magaz, kebabs, halwa. I nodded an emphatic yes to everything.

I continued, ‘And so I, along with my team of social organizers, all social activists, started to organize people street by street, tandoor by tandoor.’
‘You were a politician?’

‘Of course not! Not I. I was above that! I was a social worker.’

‘Let me guess. You had an NGO!’

‘You got it. I ran a small organization which provided information to people on issues which affected their lives. It was a citizen’s awareness organization. If a building with historical or cultural significance was about to be demolished unlawfully by a real estate developer, if tenants were about to be evicted without compensation, I was there with supporters to stop further action. If labour laws were being violated, women were being abused, or children incarcerated, I was there to fight for their rights. You get the picture? If there was an urban travesty, I was there to declare it so. I would organize communities, mobilize neighbourhoods, pass out pamphlets, hold night meetings, have stories placed in the daily newspapers, organize demonstrations, fight court battles, win stay orders from the authorities. I was great at getting the people out on the street and aware of the issues. I was great at letting people know what was about to happen and how it would affect them. You can imagine how many and what kind of people loved me, you can imagine the ones who hated me. The ones who loved me were many but individually quite powerless, owners of thailas and raeri carts or small commodity shops, tenants of buildings belonging to government welfare trusts. The ones who hated me were few but individually very, very powerful. I had stopped huge shopping plazas from rising, I had stopped construction of bypasses and overhead bridges and light rail transit schemes that would have ripped right through the centre of the old city. I had stopped and stopped and stopped. I had saved and saved and saved. And now it was time, in the eyes of that few that hated me so, that I be stopped It was pay-back time. This time I had taken on an enemy that would grind me up, chop me into tiny pieces, and fry me. I may have had the numbers on my side, but in power they were a tiny green pepper compared to a chilli pepper.’
‘You sound very hungry!’

‘Anyway, so naturally, when a bomb went off at one of the franchise outlets, they made up some story and linked it to me. Of course it was all nonsense, but I had been very vocal, so of course, they threw me in jail.’

‘You know this is absurd.’
‘It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.’
‘Okay, go on.’
‘I remember walking down the long dark corridor at the end of which was my tiny cell, where I would just sit, either on my cot or in the corner on the floor, looking up at the tiny window that allowed a slant of sunlight into my dim cell. I wore the standard issue, a greyish, tan coloured kurta shalwar with a white muslin dupatta.’
‘How do you know that’s the standard issue?’
‘Because its my story. I’m doing the costume design and grey and white becomes me. I couldn’t help but think, as I contemplated my predicament then, that this was the image I liked best of myself. That in this moment, here, I was at my best, standing up for the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the powerless, incarcerated for them.’
‘Frankly, I find it all very tiresome and self absorbed, this story.’
‘You want to talk about death,’ I said. ‘That’s pretty tiresome, don’t you think? And I’m talking about it. And this is it, my story.’
‘Go on…’
‘How’s the painting coming along?’ I changed the subject.
‘It’s got it’s shades of grey,’ he replied.
‘Fine. Finally, after languishing in prison for about a year, I was released. Just like that. One day, I was released. I’m not sure how it happened, maybe the authorities were being besieged by Amnesty International letters demanding my release. I don’t know. So, just like that, one day I was released. But then, just as I stepped out of the huge metal gate of the Central Jail, as I was moving towards my mother and my father who were waiting in the car for me about fifty yards away, I heard the metallic sound of one single gun shot. I fell, crumbling slowly down to the ground, shot through the heart…Who did this? We’ll never ever be able to pin the blame on anyone.’

I paused for a moment. Then I said, ‘Are you there or are you overcome with emotion?’

Silence.
After another moment he spoke up ‘That’s how you died?’
‘Uh huh. Did you like the nice touch I gave to the ending with the background music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?’
‘May I say something?’
‘Please do!’
‘You are truly strange.’
‘Thank you. That’s why I’m a ghost.’