It was the summer of 2008 when my husband and I moved to Islamabad, Pakistan with our two young daughters. We lived in the diplomatic enclave, cut off from the people around us both by the physical barriers of the compound and the mental barriers of being foreigners in an unfamiliar world. As the stay at home partner, I found life hard. It didn’t help when my husband came home one night after a dinner I hadn’t been invited to because it was a men-only event.
He crawled into bed, bubbling over with the evening he experienced. I had a chest infection and the baby had been crying for hours, so hearing about his apparently incredible night wasn’t something I particularly appreciated. But, his enthusiasm was infectious, and soon I salivated along as he described the feast of lamb. Specifically, lamb cooked long and slow in a pit built into the host’s garden, divided up and served one dish at a time, each morsel of the juicy meat offered separately so it could be fully appreciated. Chunks of shank, long skewers of rump, tidbits of kidneys, with just a bit of salad and some naan to mop up the juice. Each offering served in shaking hands by the elderly Pashtun chef who had spent the day hunched over the garden barbecue–the chef who became known to us simply as “the lamb man”.
All I knew about the lamb man was that he came down from the remote hill town of Landi Kotal near the border with Afghanistan. He came at the request of the party’s host to cook his specialty, something which I understood was an honor to experience. As our weeks in the scorching city turned to months, I heard the story of that night told again and again.
Then everything changed. One evening as we sat safely in our front room, a huge bomb went off at the Marriott hotel just a mile or two from where we lived. At least 54 people were killed in the explosion, and soon after we were told we were being sent home. Pakistan had become too dangerous.
My husband decided we couldn’t leave the country until I also experienced the lamb man. He arranged for the chef to come back to the city, and again cook the same delicious feast in a pit in a garden. It was just as good as described–the juicy morsels passed out by the same shaky hands, every piece served up as its own special gift. As the sun set on our short but difficult time in an incredible country, we mopped lamb juices from our chins and knew that whatever else we remembered from our time in Pakistan, the feast from the lamb man would be one thing we would never forget.
