“At the Lahore Karhai” by Imtiaz Dharker portrays the nostalgia experienced by Indians

living outside their homeland. The poet

narrates the old memories from within her heart as she travels down
to the Lahore Karhai, Wembley, an Indian restaurant in the area. The fact that she calls it a
pilgrimage itself expresses how meaningful this journey went down to be for her.
 She compares her journey to that of truck drivers back in India, driving their trucks on The
Grand Trunk road, across Punjab to Amritsar, getting down at Dhaba in expectation of
homely food. She is also a trucker but of a different kind. People like her years away from
their home in Sialkot and Chandigarh, bear the weight of the rush and chaos in their lives for
some extra miles, and then at moments like these, they too stop, at restaurants and places
which promise them the feeling of home, with a hope of getting a break and giving a chance
to the memories reverberating in their heart to come to life and fill their environment with
nostalgia.
Then she describes the people around the table, a Lahore runaway, who left her home back in
Lahore, a Sindhi migrant sitting with his wife who prays to Krishna every day, an
Englishman too young to be influenced by his domicile and instill that feeling of superiority,
and two girls representing the typical Bombay culture with their confidence.
As she devours the heavenly food, a sense of nostalgia comes to the poetess’s mind. The tarka
dal reminds her of Auntie Hameeda, ever bite of kadhai gosht brings to life memories of
Khala Ameena, and the gajjar halva synonymously reminds her of Appa Rasheeda. And the
warm naan reminds of her significant other. As she continues to take another bite, she looks
around and devours the warmth of happy faces around her, the nostalgia the food brings. She
wraps up by saying that activities such as these, are rather excuses for remembering our long-
forgotten past. On a normal day, they would have preferred Chinese.