Competing Cooking Styles

Daddy had recently started his law business and money was tight, so on our return to Karachi, just a few months after my eighth birthday, we moved into the upstairs flat in Nani Mummy’s (my maternal grandmother’s) house. The flat was small and didn’t have a separate bedroom for me, so I slept behind a screen in my parents’ room, with no privacy and little room for my things.

My maternal grandparents had initially lived in Rawalpindi after partition in 1947, but moved to Karachi in the mid-1960s, when my Nana (maternal grandfather) took early retirement, after suffering a heart attack. Sadly, he didn’t get to enjoy his new home for long as he passed away a few years later, leaving Nani Mummy a young widow. With characteristic grace and strength, she shouldered the burden of running a massive house all on her own, and the responsibility of marrying off her stepchildren as well as my mother and her brother. During those years, she’d rented out parts of the house – but now we were back home, she was happy to fill it with family again.