There just isn’t enough sleep to be had during Ramadan. Given a choice, the best time to simply crash would be right after Iftar. But there’s the question of Taraweeh prayers, and by the time you are done with them, the hour of Sehri starts looming. C’mon, if you’ve got just about 3 hours to sleep and in the first hour after waking up, you have to prep a meal and have it, say Fajr prayers and then go to sleep again, there’s a very bleak possibility of those 3 hours of sleep actually showing up.
My strategy is simple. Stay up all night, have Sehri, and then go to sleep after Fajr. Or face the grand risk of missing Sehri and Fajr.
Today, Iftar was a cosy spread with a bunch of close friends. But I was happiest dunking into glass after glass of that halalest of halal cocktails, Hamdard Rooh Afza. Going by the popularity of the drink in Muslim households, specially during Ramadan, I don’t think it would be unlikely for people to be dreaming of rivers of Rooh Afza in heaven instead of the rivers of “wine” which have been promised. After all, what do we know of wine, eh? Ham toh dard ki dawa ke liye bhi Hamdard ke paas hi jaate hain!
In an unrelated chain of events, a few hours later, I found myself standing outside Hamdard Dawakhana near Chawri Bazar in Old Delhi. Ironically, right across where Hakeem Abdul Hameed would have spent years administering medicine to patients, is a corner which could stake claim to serve nothing else but disguised cardiac arrests on the menu. Beef shanks, cooked overnight in spices, meat tender to a dripping consistency, floating in mini rivulets of ghee further accentuated by adding warm butter: Nihari, that king of foods.
The lane leading upto that corner wore a deserted look in stark contrast to its daytime bustle: workers sleeping on hand carts after a hard day of manual labor, street dogs moving around in packs closely inspecting intruders on a territory they possessed only during those few hours of the night, street lamps together in the solidarity of a solitude which threw shadows that turned longest before disappearing. Then you spot a tungsten lamp, and then another, each with a small groups of people huddled together in the spirit of being conjoined by some kind of a secret clique. The clique of the Sehri eaters, which doesn’t believe in denying itself the pleasures of street food during the hours of dawn before commencing fast.
Manzur Nihari has been a favorite for a few years now since a close cousin brother introduced me to the only item on its menu. Three faux silverware dishes, around a foot in diameter and four inches deep, filled to the brim with nihari covered with a layer of half an inch of butter, were consumed with piping hot naans straight from the tandoor. Nihari isn’t the most visually appealing of foods, and visual appeal be damned: some of the trancegasmic experiences are achieved when you just dive in and get down and dirty, and so is the case with nihari. A total of maybe 9 minutes and 43 seconds would have been spent in one of the most fruitful pursuits of life, leaving all of us doused in buckets of sweat and sinuses which couldn’t have been clearer on the day we were born. If the description of what we felt like sounds familiar, consider that purely incidental. But then you get the drift of what nihari does to you.
The spirit of spreading cheer which is said to possess everyone hit us straight in the face when we asked for the bill. The owner flatly refused to accept a payment, which was obvious to us considering we were having Sehri. After much insistence, he finally relented and still ended up giving us a discount of almost a third of what the bill would’ve been.
Sirens went off soon, announcing the time for Fajr and the sound of Azaan in a multitude of accents and tones broke the stillness of dawn. As we made our way towards Jama Masjid, one of the street food vendors called out to seemingly incongruous “tourists” with long hair, beards, ill fitting jeans and cameras.
“Aaiye Sir, boliye. Chicken, Mutton, Kabab?” (“Tell me sir, Chicken, Mutton, Kabab?)
With a smug shrug of his shoulders, one of my friends just muttered under his breath as he passed the vendor: “Yaar, Azaan toh ho gayi hai na?” (“Buddy, but hasn’t Azaan already been said?” Meaning that the time for having food was over.)
I turned back to see and the guy had an expression of surprise which quickly turned into a smile as he kept looking at our backs.
The last echoes of the Azaan were beginning to fade. And a familiar riff came to my mind from long held memory.
“No Sleep Till…”
Brooklyn got pwned by Sehri. In a not so subtle display of gluttony by the Feastie Boys.