So I was actually enjoying boiling basmati rice in milk to prepare kheer for dessert when Sohrab ambled in and made a beeline for a canister of cardamom, shoving three pods into his face before I could stop him.
“Dude,” I said by way of reprimand.
“What?”
“It’s super weird how much you like that stuff.”
“Everybody loves cardamom.”
That had not been my experience, but there’s no accounting for taste, I guess.
“How’s it going in here?” His hand slithered toward a plate of samosa filling with the speed of a venomous snake, but I pulled the potato mixture away in time.
“Back off,” I warned him.
Sohrab held up his hands in surrender. That was when I noticed that his eyes were a little red and he looked tired.
“You okay?”
“Yes. I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I was reading and lost track of time.”
“Reading? Sometimes, dude, I just don’t understand you.”
“I could say the same thing,” Sohrab said, looking pointedly at the stove. “How do you keep from eating while you’re cooking?”
I smiled and went back to stirring the milk.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I wanted to apologize for not hanging out with you and Zar the other day. I’m committed to that Quran class.”
“It’s cool. We understand. You were doing something important.”
Sohrab gave a serious nod. Can a nod be serious? It can when Sohrab does it, because everything is serious with him. He’s a serious nerd, a serious student, and a serious member of the Muslim Students’ Association, a social club organized around religion that has a presence in pretty much every major school, college, and university in the States.
I was technically a member. I’d gone to a couple of their pizza parties, but because Intezar thought the club was full of tools, we didn’t really hang out with them that much.
“What did you guys end up doing?” Sohrab asked.
“Not much. My mom called me home for a rishta meeting.”
“How’d that go?”
“The usual,” I told him.
“Not interesting?”
“Too interesting, actually.”
Sohrab grinned. “Well...I am glad you’re taking the meetings. We should look to find what is good for us in this world, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
My friend opened his mouth to speak. Then seemed to think better of it. When he eventually spoke, he said, “I was reading Al-Baqarah last night—”
“Wait. You were up late reading the Quran?”
“Of course. What did you imagine?”
“I don’t know. A novel or something.”
“What is the point of a novel?”
“To...have fun, I guess?”
Sohrab harrumphed—it sounded awfully like one of my dad’s grunts—and said, “Anyway, there is a part of that chapter where God says that sometimes you think you love something, but it isn’t good for you. And sometimes you don’t want something, but that thing ends up being best for you.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“I am just saying that you should keep taking the rishta meetings. You haven’t found what is best for you yet, even if you think you have.”
Was he talking about Kaval? No way. I was so careful to never let on that I liked his twin sister. We’d been friends forever. I didn’t want to make things weird between us.
I was caught so off guard by Sohrab’s advice that I almost missed his hand sneaking toward a plate of kababs. “Step away from the food, yaar. You know what? Get out of my kitchen.”
“It is actually my kitchen,” he reminded me.
That was a fair point, but I still scowled at him hard.
“Fine. I’ll see you at the party,” Sohrab said. “You’ll have fun. Your fan club is going to be there.”
Mrs. Sabsvari was known throughout the Bay Area for her amazing kofta korma. She told everyone the recipe for it was ancient, passed down to her from her great- grandmother in exchange for a promise that it would never be shared with anyone who did not also share her blood.
I’d actually come up with this particular recipe during an econ test. I’d been pretty sure my variation of the classic dish would turn into something special, but I hadn’t been able to try it out until Mrs. Kapadia had graded our papers and returned them a whole week later. I’d failed. Apparently, Mrs. Kapadia didn’t have much of a culinary imagination.
Still, I loved making the dish, especially because I got to use the Sabsvaris’ massive, exquisitely crafted Moroccan clay tagines. Humming and bopping along to the latest Spotify playlist Zar had sent me, I rolled out beef meatballs seasoned with cilantro, mint, green chilies, ground Kashmiri and red peppers, pureed roasted onions and all.
The soul of this salan was ground almonds and cashews, which added a beautiful texture and richness to the curry. Whistling, I whipped them together with yogurt, poppy seeds, coconut, and dry spices. Once I’d sautéed the yogurt mixture, I’d add cream and water, and then wrap up the prep by trusting the oven with a tagine full of everything I’d prepared, along with the beating hearts of pretty much all desi food: ginger and garlic.
I could tell it was going to be good before it was done. I loved that feeling, that certainty in the excellence of my own work, which I’d only ever found in a kitchen. Sure, I got a lot of attention for looking good, but the ability to create something beautiful was so much better because it was something I’d earned, not something that I’d just been given.
As awesome as the food can be, dawats still suck. Men sit in one part of the house and women sit in another. So while there are all these pretty, dressed-up girls near you, you don’t actually get to talk to them much. Instead, you get heavy uncles having heavy uncle conversations about religion and politics—international, federal, state, and mosque—and other stuff that no one cares about. The amount of information I’ve ignored about the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams from the seventies and eighties could fill the Internet.
Thankfully, if you’re young enough, you’re usually allowed to sneak off after a while to hang out with people your own age, so Zar, Sohrab, and I can chill. But it also means that we have to be around other guys, some of whom are totally uncles in training. Zar thinks that Sohrab is becoming one of them. It is the curse of brown boys everywhere. We either die young or we live long enough to see ourselves become uncles.
At least some of Sohrab’s cute cousins—my “fan club”— were invited to this dawat. They found all kinds of excuses to walk past where I was sitting to say hi, and then, as soon as they’d gone a few feet, they’d burst into whispers and giggles. Both Sohrab and Kaval thought they were ridiculous, and Zar was always irritated they didn’t want to talk to him.
“I like your shirt,” one of them said shyly when she stopped by. “Looks good on you.”
“Everything looks good on me,” I said with a grin.
She laughed and laughed.
As she drifted away, Sohrab rolled his eyes so hard that I was worried he’d hurt himself.
“What?” I asked. “I’m hilarious.”