Captain Usman was a lean, rugged doctor in the British Army with a wicked sense of humour and a Clark Gable air about him. In the tradition of the time, he had not seen the girl he had been engaged to. When her family asked for a picture of him, mischief prompted Usman to send a photograph of himself rigged out as an old man for a college play. The girl – 18 years old and peachy skinned – was devastated. The night before her wedding, she cried copiously.

There are no pictures of the wedding, none of the minutely documented, professionally photographed Bollywood-style extravaganzas associated with the weddings of today. If there were any, the photos were lost when my grandparents migrated from India to Pakistan. Captain Usman passed away 20 years ago, leaving the shy, quiet Razia Usman a little adrift.

The story of their wedding is one I have heard several times, but my grandmother never tires of telling it. With her papery skin, white cotton hair and stumbling gait, it is as if she has been erased little by little in reaching the present. But when I talk to her about her life as a young girl, spots of colour bloom on her cheeks, her eyes twinkle. And for a few moments, I see this old fading woman as a young girl.

She speaks fondly of her occupations, so different from mine. I get a picture of a girlhood in Lucknow, protected from the political winds of the time, of innocence, of stillness, as if preserved in sepia. She seldom went out because it involved dolis and parda. She and the sister closest in age to her would spend hours braiding and oiling hair whose beauty was in its thickness and length. They would read women’s digests and look up recipes from a dastarkhwan.

She fondly remembers peas fried in mustard oil, a dish she complains no one makes any more. She was in charge of the cooking, since her sister Ruqayya preferred the cleaning. My grandmother was an accomplished cook, often unhappy with the fare served up these days. Today’s koftas, she says in that crotchety way of the elderly, are quickly blitzed in an electronic grinder; they are not made with the love and care of yesteryear when they were hand ground on large stone slabs. They had no fridges or ice-boxes either and fresh meat was delivered every day, cooked twice a day before lunch and dinner. As a treat, when their parents were away, their manservant would buy kulchay – savoury not sweet, she emphasises – with kebabs and thick malai (the English word cream does not do justice to the Urdu word: one evokes light fluffiness, the other dense milkiness). I suppose it was the 1930s version of takeaway.

Her memories come in random bursts, laced with sighs of a life past and perhaps lost. I like to hear these stories for they breathe life back into my grandmother, and animate that past which is also mine. After all, isn’t who I am today composed of how I got here? My five year old – whose idea of takeaway is pizza and nuggets – doesn’t understand these stories. Her life is too new with the self-absorption of a little girl. But I hope to pass on a recipe of my grandmother’s as a connection to her antecedents.

It is of pasanday or tender beef steaks made with smokey, toasted spices, sweet lightly caramelised onions and a thick, slightly tart yoghurt gravy. My grandmother got it from her Bee Jee or her mother, and I got it from mine. I like to see it as an intangible inheritance from a culture past, as a preservation of one page of my grandmother’s story.

In Pakistan, there are two strands of thought about culture – one that says the country is still struggling to crystallise an identity derived from British colonial history and South Asian culture; the other revisionist, rejecting the other South Asian strands with an emphasis on the Islamic. The latter group also rejects what it sees as creeping westernisation. But culture cannot be corralled and segregated: it is a slow aggregation of the past and the present, of the personal and the historical.

Food is a reflection of that aggregation. Despite the viral spread of fast-food joints, convenience cooking and fusion food, tikkas and niharis have not lost their flavour. My grandmother may not like ‘fergetti’ as she calls spaghetti, but my daughter likes her pizzas and pulao. Surely, acknowledging the suppleness of culture is easier than violent rejection? Then again, perhaps not.

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