Photo by Habib Dadkhah/Unsplash

We have heard about Fleet Street in London, the media hub that spawned so many stories. But meat street?

Across much of urban Arabia, there are food streets where pieces and pieces upon meat of various shapes and sizes are piled, in various hues, smelling of the ‘mystic’ East’s typical flavours, hung on iron hooks dangling from intertwined ropes in dusty bazaars. For a month in autumn, Mumbai’s otherwise nondescript Mohammed Ali Road swipes its dark alleys with the lights of such an Arabian bazaar — the food, the colour and ambience intact.

Needless to say, Ramadan is the occasion for eateries on this stretch to dress up and feed the hungry thousands who throng its alleys and roadside joints to savour kebabs, malpowa, phirni and the like.

There is so much variety of food, so many people hogging them, one would feel Ramzan is hardly a month of abstinence. It is a month of abundance — of tasty, succulent and mouth-watering grub — that no one can ignore, from the time the sun sinks to the first light of the morning.

The bylanes here throb with people. Standing among them, calling out for customers, Haseeb Khan of Janata, is ecstatic about his Chicken 65. It’s not a very Mughlai name, but hold on: there are 65 varieties of powders, mixes, herbs and spices used to marinate the chicken breast and legs. Though I could see about 15, he insisted that many of them are secret mixes.

The marinated mountains of chicken breasts are deep-fried in a new machine that Haseeb claims he bought for a few lakhs, “All for hygiene and health saab,” he says. To be frank, despite the gargantuan preparations for Ramzan, cooking methods are fairly clean, prepared on the road in front of suspect eyes. The meaty stuff was on full display.

Every single inch is cooked in a different style — including the tail. There is the usual bheja fry, the kalejee fry and, of course, the usual sheeks, rashmi and hara kebabs. The most intriguing, perhaps, is the gurda fry, the testicles of the goat.

When we finished our meal, wondering where to wash the oil that was sticking to our palms, a boy with a bucket and a bowl of water helped us clean up. It resembled a typically dawa meal, where you eat from and wash in the same bowl.

But if you thought the bheja-khaleja-gurda triptych or the shalay kabab, chicken 65, tava chicken were the end of it all, think again. After all the meat, comes a big spread of sweet.

The food here offers a wide variety of desserts and, to my underdeveloped taste buds, the rabri malpowa bests, even if by a whisker, the phirni and the falooda. The hospitality of AR Gilani at Modern Sweets made my day a better one. He explained how flour, mava, dry fruits, sugar and zaffran are moulded, mixed and fried to shape up into his heavenly malpowa. Gilani’s shop stands tall, even beside the fame and fortune of Suleiman Mithaiwala, who seems to own half of the road.

Suleiman is an expert on many other things, like the white phirni, coloured variants of which stand on racks. The white one — pure phirni — is the winner by a long margin.

Made of rice, milk and dry fruits, phirni is a delight for those who do not like too much sugary stuff. But what amused me was almost 50 types of barphi that adorned Suleiman’s many other racks — if kaju barphi, habsi halwa, jamul halwa, mango malai barphi and malai barphi remind you of traditional barphis, the strawberry barfi and black current barphi appears more inclined for the Ben & Jerry kinds.

While I left, only one thing struck a sour note. My pretty colleague could not eat anything except sweets. She is a vegetarian. Her loss.