The circle of biryani

Reflections

I started writing a book in 2009, aiming to make it a non-fiction collection of recipes that would showcase to the world at large that Muslim food is more than just biryani.

My brother got excited when I shared the idea with him, and he wanted to co-write it with me. That, of course, lasted all of three days, I think, because we never could agree on anything right from the time we were kids, so I shoved him off the project unceremoniously.

Nevertheless, I squeezed out 9,000 words approximately and felt like I was ingesting slow poison. The words just didn’t come easily. How did people write non-fiction and not die of boredom themselves? So I shelved the idea reluctantly and moved on to writing other novels. Three books later (of which only one had been published by 2011), I decided I wanted to give it a go again. Only this time, I was going to make it fiction. I’d include the recipes, yes, but they were going to be hidden in the story. Feeling supremely pleased with myself, I wrote this book, which was a difficult book to write for many reasons. But it was still easier than the non-fiction one I’d attempted.

Fast forward to 2014, and More than Just Biryani, my book, was published, and I was thrilled to bits. It was my fourth published book by then. My excitement slightly began wavering when I found that the book was being stacked in the recipe section of bookstores. And then there were people who wanted to know why there were no recipes in it. Also, an irate biryani fan asked me, “What can possibly be more than biryani?”

I tried explaining and then decided to leave it be. How could I tell anyone that if I wanted to publish recipes, it would mean I’d actually have to try them out first? And that writing about food was so much more fun than actually cooking it.

My initial idea with the non-fiction book had been to showcase Muslim food apart from biryani. That was because I was fed up of people thinking that biryani was all there was to Muslim cuisine. And I mean Muslim cuisine very broadly, without delving into regional cuisine.

I’ve repeated this story often, that teachers expected to see biryani often in my lunch box, as if it was all we ate at home. (On a side note, there are a few people I know who will happily eat it every day, all day, but I’m not one of them.) When my son was learning to swim, his coach would call out to all the Muslim kids as ‘biryani mamu’, and would often berate them for not swimming properly by asking, “Aaj biryani nai khaya kya?”

It was all this prejudice that I was loftily trying to remove with my recipe book, which would feature food like kali mirch ka phaal, andey ka halwa and many other family favourites. But then, if you’ve had the chance to read More than Just Biryani, you’d realise that even though I’ve gone into much detail describing all these other dishes (lauz being a huge favourite among my readers), I’ve somehow made biryani the hero of the book, standing head and shoulders above every other dish. I’ve gone and exemplified it, instead of demystifying it.

I’ve wanted to shake off the shackles of this iconic dish for so long, and yet, I’ve often been introduced in literary circles as the biryani writer. I suppose biryani always wins.