New Sadabahar

New Sadabahar is a Karachi institution. This is not remarkable until you walk through the door and the smell hits you. The specific smell of tarka daal and grilled meat and bread coming out of a tandoor, which is a smell that belongs to Pakistan the way petrichor belongs to monsoon. This is where it was born. This is home.

JB has a large Pakistani community — migrant workers, expats, the diaspora networks that follow economic gravity. And And New Sadabahar is the kind of place where you order too much, where the naans come out too fast, where the waiter already knows what you probably want before you say it.

He photographed the restaurant at night. The neon, the street, the particular chaos of a desi restaurant that doesn't need to be beautiful because the food is the beauty. He ate well. He sat for a while afterward, in that full and quiet state that only good food produces.

The photo shows a FaceTime call in progress. A woman on the screen. He is holding the phone, or the phone is propped up somewhere, and the two of them are talking.

He doesn't annotate this with names. Broadway doesn't need to. The photo tells you everything it needs to tell you: there is a man in Karachi, full of biryani and a strange melancholy nostalgia, and there is a woman somewhere on the other side of the screen, and they are talking.

The call ran longer than expected. These things do, sometimes. You think you'll catch up quickly and then suddenly an hour has passed and neither of you has noticed because the conversation went somewhere that was worth going.