Gracie had such a taste for hot desi khanna, home food. Naseema called it Hindu cooking. She would puff as she said it. Even she seemed to have forgotten how it had been before the insurgency , that time when there had been a constant exchange of food from Hindu to Muslim kitchens, house-to-house, undivided, the same spices simply applied in different ways. The Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim festival of foods had marked the quarters of the years of his boyhood, Eid-ul-Fitr chasing the year ahead of or behind Diwali, tied together by the exchange of flavours. He could remember how the hot sweets used to feel in his hands and how the syrup had burnt the palate of his mouth.