35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘I LIKE TOO MUCH THE PHFIT-PHFIT’
a full-size lithograph of George VI. I had not wanted half our meal;
we were bound by Dean’s tradition to order the five-course dinner:
mulligatawny, fish, roast lamb, curried beef and vegetables, and a
rather bizarre apple pie spiced with something that tasted like pinescented
disinfectant. The management of Dean’s prided itself on its
traditions. Many of the ‘bearers’ and other staff still there in 1976
had served under the Raj. Since then they had exhibited the
distinctive British qualities of inflexibility and punctuality, and, alas,
British notions of what constituted good food.
Later on we strolled into the old city, with cameras around our
necks and guidebooks conspicuously in our hands. The old serais
tucked along the base of the crumbling walls now mostly housed
aging cars; but the great caravans coming in from Bokhara,
Samarkand, Herat, Meshed and Kashgar had once unloaded their
cargoes of carpets, spices, weapons and beaten copperware there.
We stopped for qahwa in the Chowk Yad Ghar, the central square.
Qahwa means coffee in Arabic, which must have confused many
Arab travellers to Peshawar, where the word refers to the Pathans’
national drink, a light, delicate Chinese green tea. This is not what
you should order if you’re in a hurry.
An astoundingly wizened character with a Long John Silver
wooden leg first washed out a battered tin teapot with water drawn
from a samovar the size of a steam engine and flung a stream of
rust-coloured muck into the dusty street. Then he threw a fistful of
tea leaves into this pot, added about an inch of hot water, and swirled
the pot above his head with enormous grace and skill, repeating the
same process twice before filling it up with boiling water, shovelling
in a couple of ounces of battleship-grey sugar, and finally placing
the pot on top of glowing charcoal. When its contents began to boil,
he tossed a few cardamom pods into a wooden mortar and smashed
them with a gnarled pestle; he pulled the pot off the charcoal, sniffing
its contents with a nose like a puffin’s beak, contemplating it seriously
and, satisfied with it, tipping in the crushed spice. Back went the pot
on the charcoals again, to be removed a few minutes later, subjected
once more to the Nose’s opinion, and finally placed with two cups
on a tray, which was slapped down on our table with a flourish.
It almost shocked me to learn that the cost for all this
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