This Ghee Roast Is a Metaphor

THE MUTTON HAS been marinated. Bone-in cuts steeped in Kashmiri chilli, black pepper, ginger, garlic, coriander seeds, cumin, a splash of vinegar. It’s resting now. Soaking. Waiting. Like most things in this country—some of us wait in spice and oil, in cool steel bowls inside tiled kitchens. Some wait under tin roofs, over slow-burning cow dung, for the next rupee. For the next god. For rain.

The onions come next. Sliced fine, browned slow. A caramel choreography. Ten, twenty minutes until they turn from white to gold. It’s this part that teaches patience. The low flame of privilege. I can afford time. I can afford ghee.

And it’s ghee that makes this dish what it is.

Golden, glossy, unapologetically rich. Ghee doesn’t hide. It shines. It sticks. It demands reverence. But today, as it hisses and folds into the meat, I think of Munshi Premchand. Premchand, who never wrote about ghee. He wrote about hunger.

In ‘Kafan’, he showed us the rot of poverty, not with anger but with eerie calm. Ghisu and Madhav, father and son, letting their daughter-in-law die in childbirth while they sit outside, warming themselves by a fire. She screams inside. They talk of potatoes. And when she dies, they collect alms—not to buy a shroud, but to drink, to eat. Premchand doesn’t shout. He lets the reader feel the sickness bloom.

Today, here in Mumbai, I stir the roast. Thick now. Dark. The meat has  absorbed the spice, the ghee, the time. It’s ready to sear. The whole dish takes over an hour. How rare to have time to let something slowly become. And yet, in this same city, there are children who cannot afford a boiled egg.

Premchand saw this split in the fabric of the nation long before anyone called it “inequality.” He didn’t theorise. He told stories. And those stories told the truth. ‘Godan’ wasn’t about a cow—it was about dignity, how it is taken, borrowed, promised, stolen. “Jab gaon ka gareeb kisaan karz mein doobta hai, to sirf uska ghar nahin bikta—uska vishwas bikta hai (When a poor farmer sinks into debt, it’s not just his house he loses—it’s his faith in the world).”

We live now in high-rises and aspirations, with delivery apps and GDPs. Our cities shine like showroom kitchens. But Premchand’s India is not in the past. It is the pavement outside the gated complex. It is the school dropout who serves you water. It is the domestic worker with two phones but no savings.

The roast is ready. It glistens. It tempts. I plate it with white rice, a wedge of lime. The ghee has formed a halo around the meat.

And still, the scent brings discomfort. Because food, like literature, tells the truth. This ghee roast is a metaphor. Of how some things are cooked in care, while others are burnt to feed that care. Of how some bodies rest, and others are roasted by poverty, by caste, by silence.

In ‘Eidgah’, he gave us little Hamid, the orphan, who spends his only three paise not on sweets, but on a pair of tongs for his grandmother, so her hands don’t burn while making rotis. That’s the kind of richness we’ve forgotten to seek—the kind that thinks of others.

So what do we do now?

We eat, yes. But we eat mindfully. We enjoy, but we don’t forget. We remember that the slow-cooked luxury on our plates should be matched with slow, steady work in the world. To raise wages. To fund schools. To vote with conscience. To speak to our staff like family.

Because if Premchand roasted us, he did it in the hope that we’d awaken. That we’d flavour this nation not with ghee alone, but with grace. Not with pity, but with partnership. That we’d build not just homes, but a country where no one is left outside the kitchen.

Not everyone has to write like Premchand. But we can all live a little more like Hamid.

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