You can take the Sindhi out of Sindh, but you can't take the dried fruits & nuts out of her larder

How dried fruits and nuts became a form of love language for Sindhis everywhere, including me

I’m a multilingual speaker of six languages and the language that I’m least fluent in is my native tongue, Sindhi. Through my food writing, I aim to explore the evolution of my family favourite recipes post-partition and to be taken back in time through stories from the Sindhi community on where our food really comes from. My Sindhi curry is more modern with tangy tomato notes than the traditionally dense chickpea flour base, and my Sindhi is, to be frank, Sindhi with a dash of Hindi. This is my attempt at reclaiming my culture.

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Are you even Sindhi if you don’t have a pre-disposed affinity to meat, dried fruits, dates and nuts? While there may be more discourse now about not reinforcing cultural stereotypes across the world, on an individual level we all still try to find ways to connect with our culture through said stereotypes, all while acknowledging their absurdity. I’m a Sindhi who doesn’t eat meat and that alone makes me stand apart from the stereotypical notion that people all over South Asia have of ravenous, carnivorous Sindhis. I get having to resort to eating meat in what is a predominantly sparse and mountainous landscape in the Indus valley (now located in Pakistan) when you couldn’t access staple vegetables that easily, but capitalism and colonialism have granted me good access to vegetables year-round. So, if meat is not my calling nor am I fluent in Sindhi, then must all my eggs fall in the dried fruits and nuts basket?

There are two traditions in my family that seem to be passed down genetically: the first is fighting over who pays the bill and the second is carrying kilos of packets bursting forth with cashews, almonds, raisins and dried figs when you go to see relatives. To Sindhis, dried fruits and nuts are the perfect present for every occasion – be it a baby shower or a wedding or even a present for your niece who topped her class and was secretly hoping you’d give her cash instead.

Image credit to Mehran B

At any given moment in time, my mum’s fridge is packed with nuts and dried fruits, and they even have an entire shelf dedicated to them at this point. Does this deter her mum, my grandmother, from bringing her more swathes of nuts? Not really. Nor does it prevent my mum from packing dry fruits into my suitcases, forcing 500 g packets of almonds and raisins to be soaked and eaten daily because their health benefits are unparalleled, and I will thank her when I’m older. I’ve never really thought of myself as a picky eater since I was a child but something I consistently disliked eating was dried fruits and nuts. The bitter crunch of walnuts, near-rancid almonds and overly sugary raisins conjure memories of being force-fed nuts at basically every family outing by nameless aunties.

Evidently, after seeing my mum pack so much of something I don’t want to eat, I tried to use the failed rebuttal of being old enough to choose what I want to eat and take with me 7000km away from home. My mum chose to meet me halfway and agreed to take out the cashews but made sure I kept the raisins in. After twenty plus years of not having questioned this in-built peer pressure of consuming dried fruits and nuts, I finally asked her why our family is nuts about nuts. In pre-partition India, Sindhis were majorly involved in the trade of dried fruits and nuts which made sense given that it was geographically ideal for the trade of dried fruits and nuts passing from Afghanistan. My great-grandfather came from an affluent family in Sindh and used to sell dried fruits and nuts before the partition and once India and Pakistan had gained independence, he had to migrate to New Delhi with nothing but the clothes on his back, all he could do to earn a living was become a humble banana seller.

Image credit to Fuzail Ahmed

Dried fruits and nuts represented a sense of luxury for freshly-immigrated Sindhis in post-partition India which is why they’re still a feature of all kinds of family celebrations where you bring out the best of everything for your guests – single malt whiskey, double-fried potatoes and dried fruits and nuts. My great-grandfather worked hard to build a capital for my grandmother and her siblings and after she got married, her mother stuffed her larders with dried fruits from northern India because my grandmother lived frugally in the 1970s as my grandfather tried to build his business in Mumbai. After my mum got married, my grandmother sent her away from Mumbai to Pune to start the next chapter of her life with some of Crawford Market’s finest almonds, cashews and pistachios. And so, the story continues with my mum shipping me good quality almonds from India because that’s what her mum did for her and that’s what she will always do for me. For some reason, they taste different now – the moreish salty taste of roasted almonds, the sharp zing of plump black raisins and the earthiness of walnuts.

It's funny how distance can make you appreciate the things you once took for granted without intending to. I’ve now always got a Ziploc bag on me that’s full of an assorted mix of raisins, almonds and figs for when hunger strikes at work or I’m travelling and in true Indian fashion I’m giving out a handful of almonds to my fellow travellers. If Nigella Lawson were Sindhi, then she’d be carrying some dried fruits along with Maldon salt and Colman’s mustard in her purse.

A week before I was leaving to come back to London, my father’s aunt with whom my interactions were fairly limited to greetings and small talk, offers to make me a box of majoon, a fudgy and incredibly nutty Sindhi confectionery that combines cashews, almonds, walnuts and pistachios brought together by dried evaporated milk solids called mawa. I recall majoon as being a staple of every winter morning breakfast while growing up where all the nuts come together in an Avenger-like fashion to fuel you with heat. I can still recall biting into stray cardamom seeds, taking extra effort to chomp down pieces of almonds so I don’t choke on them and washing off this perfunctory “treat” with a glass of chocolate-flavoured milk. I was so taken aback by my father’s aunt’s offer that I instantly replied with a polite yes, warmed at the thought that she would undertake the laborious process of making a small box of majoon for me.

Image credit to Alka Keswani

This sweet and nutty fudge is no one-pot wonder and requires blitzing up all the dried fruits with cardamom pods and then cooking the dried fruits and cardamom mix in some sugar and milk and topping it with off with the creamy, indulgent mawa that is the heart and soul of most Indian sweets (and one of the reasons why I could never be fully vegan). She may not be an aunt I spoke to on a regular basis, but she was incredibly keen to send me off to London with a little bit of heat. That’s when it hit me, my suitcase had become a vehicle of expression of love from different members of my community.

My father’s aunt was packing me a box a majoon while my grandmother was vacuum-packing her lime and gooseberry pickles and our neighbour was sending over homemade Indian snack mixes for me to munch on during my ten-hour flight. It serves as a reminder that even far apart I am always full of their love and their food. It isn’t until my mother tells me the history behind giving majoon to girls in the family that I tear up – it is a long-standing tradition to send girls back to their marital homes with crates of majoon to tide them over the winter and to remind them of home. It is gratifying to see that this tradition still upholds for the daughters of the family without marriage in the picture because I most certainly would not be sharing majoon with my spouse were I married. Nostalgia and distance have truly done the unthinkable, they have made me fall in love with dried fruits and nuts.