Zubaida Aapa in one of her shows | Photos: Hum network
Tariq’s first show ended when NTM closed down in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, a slew of private TV networks launched in Pakistan, and Tariq emerged anew. With show after show — she estimates that she’s aired over a staggering 4,000 episodes — she became counsellor-in-chief to a nation married to its television set. She was a constant in a country plagued by conflict and coups, upended by changing cultural mores and the emergence of fast food.
Zubaida Aapa’s popularity birthed an industry of home-grown cooking shows — from a local version of Masterchef, to cooking segments on morning talk shows, and, eventually, to Zaiqa and Masala TV, entire channels dedicated to cooking. Still, Tariq remains singular. “There just isn’t anyone like her,” says Perwaiz Ishtiaq, Masala TV’s head of programming.
Ishtiaq had worked at an entertainment channel before coming over to Masala TV, a move most of his friends regarded as ill-advised, at best. Trading real celebrity for a small, niche channel was surely a bad career move. “A few months after I joined, we had the [annual] Masala food festival. There were 300,000-350,000 people, and I saw how the audience was going crazy. At an event in Dubai, so many people lined up to meet Tariq that Amir Ansari, her director on Handi, quipped that he’d have emerged a multimillionaire if he’d charged five dirham a photo (Tariq, he insists, has never cashed in on her celebrity and has never turned down a request for a photo).
Burned into Pakistan’s collective memory, Tariq has also become Pakistan’s most enduring meme. Though Tariq herself doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and has no presence on social media, she has, in the last half decade, become a two-word punch line, a cultural reference that keeps on giving, eliciting an endless stream of “lolz”. There are countless Zubaida Aapa jokes: off-colour, cheesy, political, social, holiday-themed, hell-themed, and militant-themed, all riffing on her instructive totkas.
“People whose feet smell — if they cut off their feet and wear socks they’ll get rid of the smell.”
“If a cockroach enters your home, you should also enter its home so it knows what you feel like.”
“If you eat chillies before fasting, you’ll feel the fast less and the chillies more.”
“If you pray while wearing 3D glasses you can see yourself earning blessings.”
“If you wash your mouth out with detergent, you won’t have dirty thoughts.”
There’s even one about making a bomb to win a cricket match.
“Aapa is even involved in current affairs!” Ansari told me, then read out a joke from his cell phone, involving a legislator who had accused her party boss of harassment.
Tariq is aware of her internet infamy. Her director took her through the Facebook pages. “I thought Aapa wouldn’t mind. So I showed her that there are all these things in your name,” he told me. Tariq’s response: May God give them direction!
Ansari routinely rushes to tell her the latest joke doing the rounds. “She enjoys the joke if it’s funny,” he told me. In an interview on a morning talk show, though, Tariq implored people to stop. She asked them to at least have some consideration for her advanced age.
Despite her enduring popularity, Tariq has been dogged by criticism in recent years. A decision to endorse a skin lightening product led to a backlash for reinforcing South Asian beauty standards that punish women for having darker skin. Tariq doesn’t understand the criticism. For one, she told me in August, she trusts the makers of the product, and questions why people don’t criticise other show hosts whose tips for skin fairness are actually dangerous. It’s different when it comes from Tariq, I offered — her voice carries more weight. Tariq has no PR handlers. She answers her own phone. Her voice is hers alone.
“In our society women take to their beds at fifty, waiting for the kids to earn for them,” she told me one morning in the elegant sitting room of her Karachi home. “I feel good that I’m still working. I don’t have to rely on anyone. If you’re living in Pakistan, and you don’t have anyone dependent on you — or who you’re dependent on — you’re at peace.”
Women of Tariq’s age often layer themselves in white or gray clothes because they think it’s age-appropriate. Tariq unabashedly enjoys getting dressed up and wearing makeup. She owns around 1,400 saris and 12,000 bangles, she says. “I buy jewellery from Karachi, the kind that, if a robber tried to steal it, he’d give it back.”
Even after all these years, Tariq isn’t considered a chef. She’s done some ad campaigns, but she does not control an empire like Oprah Winfrey or Rachael Ray. A restaurant venture with one of her two children shut down. “You need cunning to run a restaurant,” she says, “and enough money so that it doesn’t hurt if you make a loss.” Tariq has eclipsed her siblings in fame but not in prestige. Perhaps it’s because home cooking — and particularly South Asian home cooking — isn’t considered worthy of critique or, by extension, serious praise. Rolling out pasta is an art; rolling out a paratha is what your mother does.
Even still, Tariq’s is the voice of a lost world. She is conventional, her beliefs anachronistic, even patronising. “The kitchen is the most important thing in a household for a woman,” she said. “The woman of the house who doesn’t use the kitchen — like we have this culture now — that house does not have any goodness or blessings.”
Tariq laments the loss of a culture of cooking and serving food. She laments how Karachi has changed. From the motorcycles careening through the streets, carrying panniers of delivery orders, to the manholes whose lids almost invariably go missing, Karachi today bears little resemblance to the gracious city of Tariq’s childhood. I asked Tariq if she thought Karachi had changed for the better or for the worse. “For the worse,” Tariq answered without hesitation. “It used to be beautiful. Now that city doesn’t exist, other than trash, heaps of trash.”
She carries the cultivated, rarefied air of an elder generation of the Urdu-speaking migrants who came from India after the partition, women who wear saris every day, are well-versed in poetry and the arts and the old recipes of a more refined past.
Tariq straddles the divide between the Pakistan that was and the Pakistan that may come to be, between the way society used to be — how women were seen, how kitchens were run — and a brave new world in which elderly figures like Tariq are open targets for mockery. She is a member of the elite and an idol for the middle-class; an elderly figure people can confide in, a stand-in for the mother who no longer lives next door. She is constantly in the background of urban Pakistani life, along with the constant litany of political crises that is the news. With her dyed hair and perfectly ironed sari, she really is Pakistan’s older sister, disapproving of a consumerist culture as she oversees her nation’s awkward struggle toward modernity.
I have never made a Zubaida Tariq recipe or looked up a Zubaida Aapa totka, but her wisdom has trickled down from television to cookbooks to YouTube to parental advice. When a lizard found its way into my apartment and my father told me to place eggshells wherever I suspected it might be coming in, it sounded suspiciously like Zubaida Aapa.
But I have eaten — and remembered — a Zubaida Tariq recipe: a soft, crumbly halwa — a dessert — that my mother followed from the show when I was a child in the ’90s. I would eat it obsessively, warm or cold, taking second and third servings. After my mother died, I couldn’t find the recipe among her things; she must have had it memorised. My father had an acquaintance who knew how to make the same dish, but she used a different recipe and when the Tupperware arrived, I politely took a bite and said thanks, though in truth it wasn’t a patch on my mother’s, which was really Tariq’s. Over the years, I’d forgotten about the halwa altogether, giving up on it as a dish from my childhood that I’d never taste again.
I didn’t remember that halwa until days after meeting Tariq, but even then I couldn’t remember the core ingredient, frustrated over another memory of my mother slipping away.
One night, weeks later, in a moment of clarity, the word ‘besan’— chickpea flour — popped into my head. Of course, I thought, it was besan ka halwa, a dessert made with a surprising, savoury ingredient.
I had Tariq’s number, but I didn’t make the 3am call. She doesn’t need to know that one of her recipes is now inextricably associated with memories of my loss. I am sure she has heard many overwrought women telling her stories about her food and their lives. It occurred to me that I could Google her recipe, so I typed out the words, but didn’t press enter. I wanted to eat the halwa of my childhood, the real thing, not to make something that would inevitably disappoint.
Had I asked for advice, Tariq would almost certainly have encouraged my efforts, just as she has for so many women over the decades. She still doesn’t think of herself as a great cook. That’s not the point. She’s bigger than that: the voice that tells countless women that their kitchens, their cooking, their families are going to be okay.
In March, Tariq underwent cardiac surgery but returned to work within a couple of months. “You start feeling more ill if you’re just lying in bed,” she told me when we met. Retiring has crossed her mind more than once; there might be a national day of mourning when that happens.
“I know people will remember me well,” she said, a modest understatement. “I tell my husband if I die, please have this inscribed on my tombstone: Zubaida Aapa totkay wali.” Zubaida Aapa, the totka woman.
Saba Imtiaz is a freelance journalist and author currently based in the Middle East
The full version of this piece can be viewed on webzine Roads & Kingdoms
Published in Dawn, EOS, January 14th, 2018