How to sit at a wazwan

The word is two words. Waza, cook. Wan, shop. Everything else people tell you about wazwan — the thirty-six courses, the Timurid ancestry, the overnight cooking — is downstream of that plain compound. It is the cook's shop, brought to your floor.

You will probably meet it at a wedding, or at a dinner we arrange with a family who still cook it properly. Either way the mechanics are the same, and they are not obvious to anyone who has not grown up with them. What follows is the short version of what to do with your hands.

Before anything arrives

The floor is laid with a dastarkhwan — a white cloth over carpet — and you sit on it. Not cross-legged in a chair pulled up to a table; on the floor, in fours. That grouping is the unit of the whole meal. You are not being served a plate. You are being served a trami: a large engraved copper platter that four people eat from together.

Someone will come round with a tash-t-naari, an hourglass-shaped copper ewer with a basin beneath it. This is not a bowl to dip into. Hold your hands over the basin, water is poured across them, the waste falls through. It comes round again at the end. If you have washed at a tap beforehand you still do this — it is punctuation, not hygiene.

The trami arrives loaded

Under everything is a mound of rice, and the first courses come already sitting on it: methi maaz, seekh kababs, tabak maaz — ribs simmered then fried until the edges go brittle — and a piece of chicken. The lid comes off. Nobody starts.

The convention is that you wait until the seekh kababs are lifted off and distributed, which is the signal that the trami is open. In practice: watch the two Kashmiris at your trami and copy them roughly half a second later. This is a completely acceptable strategy and everybody knows you are doing it.

Right hand only. No cutlery. You eat from the quarter of the trami nearest you and you do not excavate towards anyone else's. Take a little. There is a great deal more coming, and the single most common mistake a visitor makes is to eat the first four courses as though they are the meal.

The order, roughly

After the loaded courses, dishes arrive one at a time and are placed into the trami by servers moving continuously between the floor and the kitchen. The sequence varies by waza and by occasion, but the spine of it is recognisable: rista, pounded mutton meatballs in a red gravy that gets its colour from Kashmiri chilli rather than its heat; rogan josh, which you have eaten before and never like this; aab gosht, milk and fennel; marchhwangan korma, the one that will actually make you sweat; daniwal korma under a drift of coriander.

The meatballs are the thing to pay attention to. Rista and gushtaba are made by pounding meat on a stone with wooden mallets, for a long time, until it becomes a paste with no fibre left in it. That sound — a slow double-beat coming from a courtyard at four in the morning — is the sound of a wedding being prepared. No machine has yet replaced it, because a grinder heats the meat and the texture collapses.

Gushtaba is not a course. It is a full stop.

The end, and why you must eat it

Gushtaba comes last: a larger, paler meatball in a yoghurt gravy. When it lands, the meal is over. This is the one dish where refusal carries meaning. Declining gushtaba is not read as "I am full" — everyone is full, that is the entire design — it is read as a comment on the hospitality. Take some. A small amount is fine. Leaving a little on the trami is fine.

Then the tash-t-naari comes round again, and that is the meal.

Practical notes

• Vegetarians are not an afterthought. A full vegetarian trami exists and is genuinely good — nadru (lotus stem), dum aloo, chaman, rajma. Say so at booking, not on the night. The kitchen has to plan.
• Say the word "allergy" early and specifically. Nuts and dairy run through the gravies. Walnut and curd are structural, not garnish.
• Eat almost nothing beforehand. Not a light lunch. Nothing.
• Do not ask for a fork. One will be found for you, and something will have gone out of the evening.
• Kahwa afterwards, with saffron and crushed almond, is not optional either — though nobody minds if you take it slowly.

One thing worth understanding

A wazwan is expensive, it takes a day and a night to cook, and it is served at weddings to hundreds of people at a time. It has survived every disruption of the last forty years and it is currently under pressure from a direction nobody expected: cost, catering shortcuts, and a slow drift towards buffet service, which dissolves the trami and with it the whole point.

The four-person trami is the argument. You cannot eat a wazwan alone, and you cannot eat it without negotiating, silently and continuously, with three other people about who takes what. That is not a quaint detail attached to the food. It is the food.