Ghalib, Nizamuddin and the remembrance of things past…

I wanted to share a story about a man whose name I don’t know.

I am part of a food WhatsApp group where the chef Madhav Dayal was expressing his anguish at how the last few years have taken a toll on Nizamuddin and the eateries there, how most of them are now closed or struggling to survive. He bemoaned how a priceless part of Delhi’s culinary heritage was dying while most of us professed lovers of food were doing nothing about it. 

To be honest, I don’t know what we can do about it sitting in Goa or Bangalore. I don’t know why the food of Nizamuddin has fallen on hard times, and without that knowledge and information, I lack the ability to diagnose the cause. I don’t know how to help in the recovery. But if I could I would, because my journey of discovering the world through food began in the narrow, crowded lanes of Nizamuddin.

I left Shillong in 1994 at age 16 to move to Delhi and study at the mass-production factory called Delhi Public School, Mathura Road. In our naïveté , my small town family felt that the big school in the big city would help me, the bright young boy from a distant hill station, fulfil my potential. I stayed at the school hostel… a place that could have inspired Lord of the Flies, just with more violence, bullying and sadism than Golding had the capacity to imagine. 

The story of my years in that horror house are for another day, in another place. But among the many causes of my terrible homesickness was the slop we were served for our meals. And while our meals were usually rice loaded with baking soda and watery dal, they were usually salvaged by the accompanying protein.. chicken bone with slivers of meat or the egg curry we got served six days a week. Tuesday nights however, were bereft of any redeeming qualities. For a long time, I believed that kadhi chawal was an inedible dish because the version we were served was acidic, sour and often half cooked. The thought of eating this every single Tuesday for two years was soul crushing and like any rational person, I started scrounging for alternatives. 

That is how I ended up spending every Tuesday night jumping from the walls of the school and walking past Humayun’s tomb towards the crowded streets around the Dargah of the Sufi saint Khwaja Nizamuddin Aulia. The place we always went to was called Ghalib, on an outer radial of that Byzantine locality, stepping past the beggars with their arms stretched out before unblinking eyes and the screaming naked children playing in muddy puddles, to a tiny room, its entrance obscured by the smoke rising from skewers of meat grilling over coal. 

The food at Ghalib was cheap enough to fit my meagre means but it was like nothing I had ever had. 4 coarse, meaty, spicy Sheekh kebabs. 16 pieces of chunky, juicy buffalo tikkas. 2 paper thin roomali rotis. And a plate full of onions doused in green chutney. All for less than twenty rupees. We slathered the rotis with the chutney, stuffed them with the onions and meat, rolled them into improvised burritos (not that I knew what a burrito was) and wept from heat and spice and joy. 

Ghalib was a gateway for me to discover food that I had never eaten before. I looked at the certificate of recommendation from ITC Maurya from the 70’s and felt as though I was eating the food of the rich and famous even if the environment was humble. I spoke with the gruff, unsmiling middle aged chacha who ran the place and the chotu, probably younger than me, who managed the fire and the skewers and learnt to bond over food. I explored the lanes of Nizamuddin searching for more discoveries like biryani and ended up stumbling across the Sufi singers in the Dargah long before the likes of Imtiaz Ali brought them into popular consciousness. As an Assamese Khasi boy from Shillong, the smells and sights of Nizammudin were as new and alien to me as a tea shop of pork offal and sticky rice dishes would have been to the chacha… but I found the experience of it exhilarating and addictive. For the first time, I realised that food wasn’t just a sensory experience that made me happy. It was also a portal through which I could discover worlds I didn’t know existed, worlds of infinite flavours and infinite possibilities. 

Eating at Ghalib became a ritual for me over the years, one that lasted until the mid-2000’s, long after I had moved out of Delhi. By then, life and work took over, my culinary horizons expanded and Ghalib became a place I went to every year or two. I still felt they were the best Sheekh kebabs and best buff tikkas I had ever tasted, but my world had changed. Thanks to people like Manish Mehrotra, Gresham Fernandes and Bawmra Jap, I was exposed to newer approaches to Indian food, to fine dining. My travels helped me to discover and learn more about food, and I ended up replicating those early days in Nizamuddin in different contexts… discovering cities from Tokyo to San Francisco through food. Along the way, I ended up being drawn into the world of food, occasionally writing about it, helping restauranter and chef friends build their businesses and brands, and eventually being invited to vote at food awards.

Which brings me to 2017 and the biggest night of the year for India’s food world. The Conde Nast Traveller Food Awards at the Lodhi Hotel in New Delhi. I flew in a day early and ate a memorable dinner at Indian Accent. Then I spent the next evening at the awards ceremony with Indian food’s best and brightest. Legends like AD Singh and Rahul Akerkar, young Turks like the Bombay Canteen crew, transformative figures like Riyaaz Amlani and Manu Chandra, power brokers like Radhika Misra. It was a night of celebration. The awards were followed by a feast… tables groaned with mountains of spectacular food, the drinks were flowing, the post party celebrations were being planned. I was surrounded by friends and it should have felt like a high point in my journey into the world of food.

But strangely I felt empty. Like something was missing. 

I don’t know why but I needed to leave, to get away from that celebration of the best in Indian food.

So I said my goodbyes, called my car and asked him to take me down the road to Nizamuddin, separated by a kilometre of road and centuries of affluence and privilege. I got out of my car and in my fancy suit, I walked those dirty lanes and went to Ghalib. The chacha was an old man now. The chotu had grown older, the paunch below his white kurta hinting at the softness that comes as one begins to age. But the food was as I remembered it, as magical and special as ever. And as I sat there alone, like the boy I used to be, I felt at peace, I felt happy and my heart felt soothed. 

At the end of the meal, I went to pay the food. The twenty rupee meal was now about a hundred and fifty. I looked into my wallet and all I had were credit cards and thousand rupee notes. Chacha didn’t have any change and nor did the neighbouring shops. People didn’t go to Nizammudin and spend thousand rupee notes. It didn’t have the rich tourists Jama Masjid did. So I told chacha that if he didn’t mind, I would call my car and get some change from the petrol pump nearby.

Chacha smiled. 

“Beta”, he said. “You’ve been coming here for twenty five years. Where will you go? You’ll come back someday. I’ll still be here. Pay it then”.

And so I left. And I understood for the first time what food really meant for me, that it wasn’t about the awards and the access and the industry. It was something simpler and purer. And that it was never about the man’s ego but about the boy’s heart and soul and the child’s sense of wonder. 

Today, chacha doesn’t sit there any more. He passed away a few years ago. Ghalib is shut. The fire doesn’t burn. The skewers lie empty, like medieval swords in a museum of relics from the past. 

But somewhere inside me, he still lives. In the memories. In the moments. And while these moments may be fleeting, the memories they leave behind are indelible, the brushstrokes through which we paint the tapestry of our lives.