OUR NEIGHBOURS, THE JAFFRIS

Our staple dinner, on the first night of the train journey from Delhi to Howrah, every summer vacation, from 1962 to ‘64, was shami kabab and parathas which Ma made with Jaffrey Aunty’s help. Jaffrey Aunty was our neighbour in Nizamuddin West, where their house was right next to ours. Jaffri Uncle worked in the Pak Embassy and was a very good looking, soft-spoken gentleman with the best of tehzeeb. Aunty was short and stout and an excellent cook and conversationalist. My father toured a lot and had to be out almost 15 days in a  month, and Aunty would be worried about my ma and I staying alone at night when Baba was away. My mother tried to convince her that we were used to it and that it made no difference to us, but she insisted on moving in most nights. She came, in her cotton sharara and dupatta, and carried her Holy Quran and her peekdan (spittoon) with her. Till late in the night she and Ma would chat about a whole lot of things, while I generally fell asleep somewhere in the middle of a  story of her childhood in Lahore. At 4 am in the morning, after her prayers, she would trudge home, the Quran in one hand, and the peekdaan in the other.

The Jaffri girls Rani and Sarvat were quite different, both in looks and temperament. Rani was exquisitely beautiful, extremely polite, and conscious of tehzeeb, and although only 16, seemed very mature and motherly. Sarvat had a chubby face like her mother and was a complete tomboy.  She and I were the same age and we shared a lot in common. We loved to play outside,in the lane in front of our house, and climb the amrud tree for kaccha amrud. They had a younger brother Farhan, who also played with us some evenings when he was not flying kites. The three of them studied in the madrasa inside the dargah, while I went to a convent school. They walked across and climbed a little hillock with a gap in the wall on it and reached their school in no time. I was dropped in our car, a journey which took around 20 minutes, way back in the Delhi of the 60s..  In the evenings I was allowed to play, only if I had completed my homework, while Rani and Sarvat barely had any school work. They occasionally recited the Quran by heart and read verses from the Holy Book, which I loved to listen to….. the whole experience was so lyrical, melodious, and uplifting.

I loved going over to their house, after we had played hide and seek and hopscotch, where Jaffry khala served us cool creamy milk with rooh afza  in tall brass tumblers. The Jaffris had no fridge, but it was considered normal and usual to send a bowl of ice cubes whenever they asked for it from over the wall separating the two houses. Their house, now that I think back, had very little furniture, just some charpais and a couple of chairs in the drawing-room. That room also had a framed picture of the holy Kaaba, and two photos, one of their late grandfather and one of the newly wedded Jaffri couple dressed in the usual wedding finery, with a gaudy wallpaper in the background.  Their utensils in the kitchen were not of steel , like ours, but largely brass and aluminum. They had a chulha with charcoal and a kerosene stove used for making the umpteen cups of doodhi chai  that they sipped in tiny porcelain cups in the chilly Delhi winters. And all through the day,the aroma of spicy mughlai khana would fill their house and ours. Almost every day we got an aluminium katori of keema kofta or bhuna gosht or even a platter of kebabs with a spicy green chutney and a meetha chawal that smelt of ghee and saffron.

My friendship with the two girls was so strong that I believed we were sisters. Being an only child then, I would quickly finish my school assignments  and run across to their place to play with them . On Sundays either they were in our house or I was in theirs. Rani who sometimes watched us play, from the gate, her head covered with her muslin dupatta, seemed to enchant and attract all passers by. Very often  I would find young men stopping and smiling at us as we played hopscotch on the road. I would wonder why  and we would make faces at them or take out our tongues behind their backs. Looking back now I realize that the young men were drawn to Rani whose lissome grace and exquisite features would hold them spellbound . There was a total lack of consciousness of her beauty in her and the rest of us were totally oblivious of looks, whether hers or ours. Jaffri Aunty often spoke about her sister’s son in Lahore, who she thought was an ideal match for Rani Apa.. The young man was  a graduate, no mean achievement in their family,and had a job of an overseer in a construction company in Riyadh.Ma was not at all impressed by the young man’s credentials and tried to dissuade Aunty from this rather banal match, but she would nod her head and wiping her face with her dupatta would tell ma that she would not get any better  or more suitable match for Rani.She did not think educating her daughters was a good idea, and told ma that she was an exception. My mother was a gold medallist and a University topper in Philosophy. She tried to reason with Jaffri Aunty that education empowered women and gave them the confidence and ability to stand on their own feet. Jaffri  Khala would nod her head, put yet another paan in her mouth and say ‘phir bhi to aap ghar mein hi rehti hain, itna padhne ke bavjud, shauhar ka hi sunte hain na….’     Yet ma did not give up and would try to reason with the two girls , when their mother was away.

Jaffri Khala’s culinary skills were beyond compare. She made the most delicious kebabs that I have ever had. She would count the sixteen whole masalas before boiling the keema and chana dal and measure the water, such that when the mixture was cooked the water would totally evaporate and yet not burn the keema. Everything was ‘andaze se’ and no ingredient was ever measured. Ma would watch her and make a mental note of the quantities and the cooking  time. Very soon she mastered the art of kabab making and Jaffri Aunty would gingerly put a piece in her mouth and say ‘Wah, lajawab bane hain. Bus thodi badi elaichi kum daliye agli baar’.

That’s how Ma became an expert in making kebabs and was entrusted with the task of making kebabs and paranthas every summer when we went to Kolkata for our summer vacations.  The trip had a charm of its own, for two to three families went together and every family would bring what they made best. So there was Chatterjee mashima’s luchi – aloor dum and Ganguly kakima’s fish chops. But every time Ma opened her steel dabba of shami kebabs, the oohs and aahs would resound in the compartment , where all of us kids would wait with steel plates waiting to be served. And then Ma would acknowledge her teacher Mrs Jaffri, without whose little tips, the kababs just would not taste so good.

We lived in that house in Nizamuddin for a couple of years and then decided to  move to a’ better’ one in East Nizamuddin. Both ma and Mrs jaffri hugged each other and wiped their tears with their sarees and dupattas. Sarvat and I were also heartbroken and I could not see the point of our shifting. And in the midst of our packing and her sending us biryani and gosht korma, and ma sending mustard fish and gur payesh, we suddenly got the news  that Mr Jaffri had been called back to Lahore. We were even more heartbroken that we would never meet again. West and east Nizamuddin were half a kilometer away but Lahore seemed at the other end of the world. Addresses were exchanged as well as farewell cards  Sarwat’s card with a red rose and the message ‘tujhe nahi bhoolungi. Tum bhi mujhe yaad rakhna’ still lies at  the bottom of my tied bundle of cards and letters.

Paramita Ray

National Advisory Board, AGA