Beverages

In the worst of the Punjabi summer, when the afternoon air in Lahore feels like it has been poured out of a tandoor, my grandmother had one prescription she trusted above fans, above shade, above everything: a tall glass of gond katira. The crystals went into water the night before, plain and unpromising as gravel, …

In our house, two seasons announced themselves the same way: a steel jug of thandai appeared in the refrigerator door. It came for Ramadan evenings, when it was the first cold thing to pass our lips after maghrib, and it came back in the first cruel week of May, when the afternoons turned white with …

On our iftar table, the mint lemonade recipe had a sound: the blender roaring to life about ten minutes before the azaan, while the dates were being arranged and the pakoras were still draining. My mother made it in a big glass pitcher, violently green, with a cap of pale froth and mint leaves whirled …

I met my first borhani recipe the honest way — not in a kitchen, but three plates deep into a Bengali friend’s wedding feast in Dhaka, when I was quietly losing the battle against the richness. The table was a glorious overload: biryani glistening with ghee, korma, roast chicken, more biryani. Then the waiters came …

Every Lahore summer has an hour, somewhere around seven in the evening, when the heat finally loosens its grip and the city pours into its cafés. In my college years that hour belonged to one drink: a tall, frothy cold coffee, ordered with friends already arguing about whose turn it was to pay. The cafés …

At noon in my dada’s village, work stopped for one glass. The men came in from the fields white with dust, and before food, before talk, there was sattu — a tall brass glass of it, pale and frothy, whisked up by whoever reached the kitchen first. Dada drank his savory, with lemon and a …

In the old bazaars of Lahore, summer had a color, and it was the pink of tarbooz sharbat. The sharbat stalls stood where the lanes narrowed — a mountain of watermelons stacked like green cannonballs, a steel tub of crushed ice, and glasses of that impossible pink being poured for rickshaw drivers, shoppers, and schoolboys …

The aam panna season at my nani’s house began the morning the first kairi cart rattled past the gate — sometime in early May, when the air already shimmered by ten o’clock and the mangoes in the bazaar were still hard, green, and gloriously unripe. Nani would thump each raw mango with her knuckle like …

Falsa season announces itself before you see it — a thin, reedy voice floating over the street wall in the worst heat of May: “Falsa le lo, thanda falsa.” My dadi bought from the same vendor every year, a kilo at a time, and the ritual never varied. Half the berries never survived the walk …

Every Lahori summer of my childhood had a soundtrack, and part of it was the shikanjvi cart man working the corner outside the bazaar — the clink of his steel jug, the scrape of ice, the squeak of lemons being halved on a board worn smooth as soap. For a few rupees he would squeeze, …