Feast As Communion: An Eid feast combines tenderness, silence and longing

NAGPUR IS WHERE I first understood Eid not as religion, but as atmosphere.

We lived in an apartment building where festivals belonged to everyone whether they originated in your faith or not. The city itself felt porous then, community-driven in a way Indian cities increasingly are not. During Eid, the roads around Cotton Market and Sitabuldi would begin changing days before the moon was sighted. Goats appeared everywhere. Beautiful baby goats with impossible eyes and soft ears that I desperately wanted to pet and befriend as a child.

I remember tugging at my mother’s arm, wanting to stop and play with them.

Later, as a teenager in Delhi, I would wander through Purani Delhi and Chandni Chowk with the legendary antiquarian Sardar Mahijit Singh Kaka, whose remarkable store Krishna helped bring India’s textile and jewellery past into modern consciousness. Before Eid, goats sat tethered outside homes, lovingly fed and fussed over. And Kaka, with his characteristic blunt tenderness, would quietly warn me, “Don’t get too attached.”

I understood what he meant.

Even now, Eid arrives to me first through smell. Sewaiyaan roasting in ghee. Qorma drifting through stairwells. Attar and monsoon dampness mingling in the evening air. White kurtas softened by humidity. Green bangles catching tubelight reflections. Urdu-rich greetings floating through markets.

Delhi, especially in South Extension where we later lived, often hid these worlds from us. The city could be oddly segregated without admitting it. Bombay, by contrast, still lets you see people living beside one another more visibly. Yet even there, communities remain layered and distinct. One notices Bohra neighbourhoods, Aga Khani enclaves, old Muslim quarters with their own aesthetics, foods and rhythms. Still, Bombay allows for encounter. You see the butchers preparing for Bakr-Eid, the bakeries stacked with sheer khurma ingredients, the streets reorganising themselves around celebration.

And always there was food.

Hassan uncle and Anjum auntie remain, in my memory, custodians of Eid itself. Whether in Nagpur or later Delhi, their home transformed during the festival. Their children Bushra and Asif, along with Samir, Seema and me, would disappear into games and laughter while trays of sevaiyaan, biryani and egg curry kept arriving from the kitchen.

We were Hindu vegetarians, but none of that seemed to matter. The point was never sameness. It was sharing.

The adults embodied an old-world nazakat,nafasat, tameez and tehzeeb that Urdu culture once offered India so naturally—grace as instinct rather than performance. A dish sent downstairs during Eid returned during Diwali carrying mithai.

Hospitality became a relay race between homes.

Years later in New York, my friend Salim taught me a biryani technique that felt almost philosophical. No elaborate layers. Just one shallow lagan where rice, saffron, herbs, stock and meat cooked together in a single plane. When inverted onto a platter, every grain emerged perfumed evenly, stained gold and amber, carrying the same fragrance.

That, to me, became Eid too. Not spectacle. Integration.

Even sheer khurma found its way into my cookbook American Masala as “holy vermicelli pudding,” because that is what it tasted like: sanctified comfort.

I think too of Sheer Qorma, where Faraz Arif Ansari uses a bowl of sheer khurma to reveal an entire family’s tenderness, silence and longing. Food becomes communion. As it so often does in India.

Perhaps that is why Eid endures so deeply even for those of us who did not grow up Muslim. Because its greatest offering was never simply the feast itself.

It was the invitation.

The open door. The extra plate. The insistence that joy becomes richer only when shared.