I was going to do a semi-serious piece on my father, but here is something a bit more fun.
Let us go back to the mid eighties, to Manchester, where my cousins are living in the Old Trafford area. As young boys, they fight, they play, they tease their wee ickle baby sisters, and they are good Gujarati Muslims in that the boys are all memorising the Qur’an at their fathers’ mosque.
So, we go to visit our cousins in Manchester, and oh how fun they are. We eat very spicy food, and we eat very sugary desserts and we laugh at their very funny jokes.
One day, we challenge Faisal, who is in his early teens, and his brother, a couple of years older, to an eating competition. What is the biggest mouthful of food you can eat?
Imran starts, he is elder after all. He puts in a quarter of a chapatti, doused in curry, and chews, swallows, result! Faisal, takes a third of a chapatti, rolls it up, dips it in the sauce, puts in his mouth, chews, and swallows. Hurrah!
Imran takes half a roti. We cannot believe it. Half a roti. These are Aunty Hajrah rotis, proper thick and full of ghee, not for shirkers. Imran manages it. How is Faisal going to beat this?
Faisal takes an entire roti and stuffs it in his mouth, without method. His cheeks puff out, he can’t even close his mouth and we have the unenviable sight of roti, hanging out. He can’t chew he cant swallow, his entire jaw is in fact wedged open with roti.
We are laughing so hard tears are falling, and Faisal starts to laugh to, except he can’t because he is full of roti. We just hear a ‘huurgh huurgh’ which makes us laugh even harder.
Ten minutes later, somehow, he has managed to swallow a bit of the roti, and he can now close his mouth, he slowly starts chewing. This has ceased to be a brotherly competition and is now about basic survival - if Faisal was to choke, he would be an ex-Faisal. We are laughing, and pointing and screaming and laughing at his bulging cheeks. Soon, he is eroding this poor roti, and after a good few minutes, he has swallowed more of it. His chewing gets exponentially faster and we get more excited, he could actually do it.
Finally, his frenzied chewing demolishes the chapatti, and he swallows the last bite! We cheer! Mashallah! Faisal has eaten the roti! Faisal has eaten the roti!
Of course, every so often I put half a roti in my mouth and get strange looks from my fellow diners, but they don’t know why. Some things need regular rituals to pay homage to their greatness.
Tags: Chapatti, Curry, Roti