Eating Out

Kabab, Sharab, Shabab: Kebab-e-Bahar at the Hotel Taj Banjara, a ground level, open-airrestaurant, is ideally located by the lakeside. Kababs are its specialty. I like my kababswith a light wine, so does my companion, the Urdu poet Jameela Nishant. We write in thetradition of Omar Khayyam who praised boys and women serving wine. The kababs are lightlydone over an open rotisserie. Chicken, lamb and fish are available. (Five stars inHyderabad serve neither beef nor pork.) The last time I came here fish wasn’tavailable. There is nothing like grilled ‘murrel’ to complement wine andwine-servers in a make-believe paradise. Life then imitates literature or at leastvaliantly tries to. Dessert in Hyderabad is ‘Khobani’, meaning apricot: Stewedand topped by fresh cream. I should note that it is a worthy digestive for a worthy meal.For a post-prandial I settle for brandy (cognac and sherry being as hard to find asstrawberries in winter).

Some of the kababs had a touch of Avadh—a tribute toLucknow, a city to whose culture the Nizam’s city aspired. The boys serving thedinner are polite, good looking and relish wit in the customer. Hafiz says, “wine isnot his who drinks but his who pours.” I said as much the same in my book of poems HotelGolkonda. When I eat well my outlook on the world improves. I’ve utterlyimproper thoughts such as thinking this world as a good place. I could’ve written Yarana,which is about the deprivation of the human soul in a loveless world, only on a fullstomach. Jameela too shamelessly converted, if only for a few seconds. She works withMuslim women in the Old City, in Sultan Shahi. Jameela was in Bangalore presenting Parda,a play based on the poems of Sogra Ilumayun Mirza, the first woman to reject parda.I’ve resumed during my sabbatical a career as reviewer. So we talked about it and thefood. The evening surprise was my waiter offering cognac instead of local brandy. I tippedhim handsomely.