7 Books About the Messy Politics of Indian Meals

We were at Carter Road, fingers still sticky from the Belgian waffles we’d just demolished, when Bani admitted she’d been forbidden from drinking water at my house. “Because you’re a Muslim and eat meat,” she added guilelessly. Bani and I went to school together in Mumbai, and had been friends for nearly seven years at that point. When my parents couldn’t pick me up from a birthday party a few years earlier, hers had offered to take me in until I got a ride home. At lunch, when Bani needed someone to accompany her to the school gate, where she’d collect her lunch box from the dabbawala, she’d tilt her head at me, wiggle her fingers in a walking motion, and mouth, ‘Coming?’ It was Bani who introduced me to Retrica, the vintage-inspired camera app that was all the rage in middle school, and appeared in almost every selfie of mine thereafter.

So really, it should’ve stung—should’ve smarted—that someone I’d grown up with could even bear to nurse a thought so acrid, so casually cruel. But at thirteen, in the greenness of teenagehood, I took great pride instead in being the Muslim that could stomach an insult, proffer a critical remark with no hint of defensiveness, brag about never having kept a fast during Ramada...