As Mumbai’s Iranis mourn Khamenei, the city’s only Persian sweet shop looks at a bleak Nowruz
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A fortnight before Nowruz, the Iranian new year, Mohammed Hassan Irani was fretting about his low stock of Iranian almonds.
Every year, around this time, the 65-year-old owner of Mumbai’s only Irani sweet shop gets ready to make a big batch of baklava for the city’s tiny community of residents with roots in Iran. “The highest demand is during Nowruz,” he said. This year, the festival falls on March 20.
But the attack on Iran by Israel and the United States and the killing of the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has shut down all transport links.
That poses a problem for Hassan Irani, who last travelled to the country of his ancestors three months ago to buy the ingredients for baklava and boxes of several Iranian sweets – the barfi-like louze zaffran, louze pista, and louze badam, the saffron-scented sohan and the white chewy squares of gaz.
He also brought back dried mulberry, dried red berries, dried cherry, and cheese balls made from camel’s milk.
The supplies now sit in his refrigerator, wrapped in air-tight plastic pouches.
Without more consignments, he is worried about turning away customers from Iranian Sweets Palace, a shop set up by Hassan Irani’s great-grandfather in a bylane in Dongri 107 years ago. “I will use Indian...