Finding falooda part-3

this is what we see as we go down our quiet street and turn left....

the boy watches me, alert and on guard, as we stop alongside long enough for me to grab a picture of his family buying chadars for Shah Ghazi's grave

and as we ease into the traffic and crowds on the main road...

It’s party time 🙂

Funny how we seem to be gravitating towards this time of night, you could even say we’re gearing up for it, in anticipation.

It’s funny because we don’t DO stuff like this normally. We’re what you’d call stay-at-homers.

There are a couple of reasons behind the reluctance to get out and go somewhere.

1. Roads. Uncouth drivers.

2. Jaywalkers. Beggars. Windshield cleaners.

3. Side-view mirror thieves. Parking fee collectors. Muggers.

4. Home is sweet. There’s internet and home-cooked food.

And when there’s no home-cooked food, there are piles of menus for home delivery. Nobody needs to go out.

So why this sudden enthusiasm for eating faloodas from street-side juice shops every night, you ask…….?

I don’t know! We must be mad.

Tonight we decided to stay closer to home and explore 26th Street to see if anyone sells a satisfactory falooda around these parts.

To our surprise we discovered they don’t. There’s loads of barbecue, and chaat, and a place that sold kulfi falooda (which makes me wish we were on a kulfi quest, cos kulfis are the one thing that make me go ‘mmmm’)

No problem. Karachi is one giant food street. We just swung outta there and put plan B into action.

Off to Zamzama!

Milano.

Feeling in the mood for something savoury before the sweet, and having heard much about a certain chicken gyro available here, we thought we’d try it out. No, never come here before either. I’m telling you, we don’t go out much. (And I don’t think we have a delivery menu for these guys.)

The waiter runs off with our order, only to return sheepishly with the news that they’re all out of gyros. And they don’t serve faloodas either.

Perhaps it was indicative of the way tonight’s quest would turn out that we ended up at the most pedestrian of all places in Clifton…the most hackneyed area of all….

 

.

Flamingo!

How boringly close to home could we get?

O well.

The waiter gave us a choice of two kinds of falooda……strawberry and pineapple.

Huz and I were kinda baffled. How can such non-faloody types of falooda possibly exist? We asked him again if he was absolutely sure what he was offering was falooda and not milkshake and he told us it was most assuredly falooda.

To be honest, the idea of a flavoured falooda (by which I mean anything other than rose) turned my stomach, but we chose the lesser of two evils and asked for  just one…pineapple. And while we waited, Amu and I had an extremely spicy mix-plate each while Huz devoured an aaloo bun kabab.

a very non-pink falooda

Ok, so it looked pretty good. But I let Huz have the first shot at it. He stirred it and stirred it……

cos that's how he rolls.

And I can tell you he thought it wasn’t bad. But then, he likes stuff with fruit and nuts. And jelly.

Me? I DID give it a shot. But somehow I just couldn’t get into it, even though I love pineapple. The whole concept of it just felt….wrong.

So I don’t think we’re going back to Flamingo for falooda ever again. But it was a good thing we ordered a standby dessert from Cool (Kool?) Inn. (In Karachi, the ‘C’s’ are often replaced with ‘K’s’)

it was called freezer plate ice cream. intrigued, i sent huz off to investigate. he returned with a pamphlet detailing flavours and types. basically it was a dessert version of katakat, where ice cream, chocolate and cookies were chopped up together and served in a yummy waffle cup.

There was a little girl wandering around trying to sell a bunch of wilty-looking roses to people parked all around having their ice creams and chaats and bun kababs. She came and sat down on the sidewalk in front of our car and I got the impression she was crying.

Then she got up and I saw that she wasn’t, and she wandered up to my window, and didn’t run away when I aimed my camera at her.

flower girl

I showed her her picture through the window. And then she kinda smiled.