The Paratha, Abu Dhabi and Migration A B HY U DAYA TYA GI
In the middle of Hamdan Street, I finally remembered that I had a paratha in my hand. It was still piping hot, so I took my first bite carefully. Suddenly, the road became dead silent. Cars stopped whizzing past me. Thursday night shoppers disappeared. For a brief moment, Abu Dhabi’s frantic urban life was reduced to me and my paratha. Over the next few days, I would have the pleasure of tasting several other delicious parathas in Abu Dhabi. Whether it was the simplicity of Al Saif’s plain parotta, the quirkiness of Paratha King’s Aloo Cheese Paratha or the chewy goodness offered by Tea Point Cafeteria, almost every variant of the “Abu Dhabi” paratha delighted me in its own particular way. But none of them evoked the same nostalgia as the humble aloo paratha offered by Come and Eat Cafeteria. The softness of the aloo and the pungency of the masala struck me. More importantly, the paratha looked, smelled and tasted like home. According to Mohan Bhatt, the owner of Come and Eat, their paratha was supposed to be reminiscent of Delhi’s famous “Paranthe wale Gali”- the narrow Old Delhi street known for its parathas (Bhatt). However, for me, the paratha took me back to another claustrophobic yet special lane: my mother’s kitchen. Behind each paratha and parotta I enjoyed is a similar story, stories of partition, discrimination, identity, migration, and most importantly, stories of people. For the paratha in Abu Dhabi has become representative of the migrant experience, in its invocation of nostalgia and familiarity, its role in identity formation and its inherent ambiguity, sparking discussions surrounding authenticity and class. At its most uncontroversial, the paratha is a form of South Asian unleavened flatbread. The vagueness and generality of this definition is necessary, considering the diversity of the dish and what it has to come to embody throughout the subcontinent. With regards to its origins, the common belief as articulated by Pakistani writer Bisma Tirmizi is that the flatbread “definitely originated in the northern part of the subcontinent” (Tirmizi).
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