His moveable feast
A rickshaw puller’s life as a cook
The smell is deliciously pungent. A slight scent of garlic also arises, as its cloves start being stir-fried in hissing oil. The curry, however, has been simmering in the blackened pot for some time already. It is late morning and Salman Khan is in his kitchen. Actually, the lungi-clad rickshaw puller has set up a makeshift wood-fired stove just next to Turkman Gate, one of the four surviving Mughal-era gateways to the Walled City.
He says he is preparing a mutton dish. Nothing unusual in that really. But what is odd is that Mr Khan is cooking at this hour of the day, when usually he would be busy plying his rickshaw inside the Walled City lanes.
“My friend got these goat pieces from a lady near the Amrood Walli Masjid,” he says, referring to a mosque not far from this spot. The woman warned, however, that the meat was a little old, a bit stale maybe. The friend, who too is a rickshaw puller, nevertheless took the meat, which was packed in a plastic bag. He had it tied to his rickshaw’s handle and carried on with work. “He called out on spotting me behind Delite Cinema, and shared half the meat with me.” They discussed the quality of the meat and unanimously agreed that cooking it quickly was the wise thing to do, lest it gets completely spoiled with the day’s increasing heat and humidity.
“So I came here, lit the fire and now I’m cooking it for myself,” says Mr Khan. The stove consists of a few pieces of wood shoved inside a tiny shelter of stones—all of this stuff he gathered from the footpath “yaha-vaha (here and there)”.
In his late 30s, Mr Khan lives with a few other rickshaw pullers on a footpath near the Red Fort. He says he sleeps on the passenger seat of his rickshaw and that he dines daily on roadside food stalls. But there are exceptions, of course, like this morning. Besides, very rarely he gets to eat mutton. “I always have dal chawal and subzi in the dhaba, near the Ramlila Maidan.” Sometimes he does treat himself to fried fish served in the carts that line the road facing New Delhi railway station, Ajmeri Gate side.
Mr Khan, whose family lives in the village in Bihar, says that nobody taught him to cook. “I learnt it on my own,” he says in a flat tone, as if this was no big deal. He picks up the red chilli powder pouch and empties it all into the pan. “The mutton subzi should be very spicy,” he mutters in a very low voice, as if explaining away this indulgence to himself alone.
The impromptu cook now covers the pot with a lid—it’s his thali actually—and stares silently at the fire. He admits that he keeps his plate and pan in the storage space inside his rickshaw’s passenger seat all the time. “This way you can cook wherever you want.” Meanwhile a handful of passers-by walk past him without noticing his cooking pot. A stray dog is asleep nearby. A few minutes later, Mr Khan lifts up the thali, peers enquiring into the pan, sniffs, looks thoughtful and declares, “it’s almost done.”
He sombrely says he will get some rotis from a dhaba nearby, and finish off half the curry right now. “I will save the rest for dinner, and have it with dal and rice in the dhaba tonight.”
The dish will travel with him during the day in his rickshaw, along with his customers.