Flip

Every evening at about a quarter to six, the old city stops being three-dimensional. The domes go flat, the minarets go thin, and for twenty minutes Lucknow looks like something cut from paper and held up to a lamp.

I have been climbing the same terrace for a month. The owner, a retired schoolteacher, charges nothing and asks only that I bring him a print of the best one. I have not found the best one yet.

At ten the shutters come down on the cloth shops and the smoke goes up from the kebab stalls. The lane changes owners every night.

Galouti, soft as butter, cooked on a tawa wide as a cartwheel. The man who makes them has been doing it for forty years and has never once eaten one standing up.