In a lane off Ballimaran in Old Delhi, a man named Firoz Ahmed spends nine hours at a time stirring a copper pan of habshi halwa. He is not related to our family. He has probably never met anyone from it. But the recipe he works from came to him through a chain of hands that begins in our great-grandfather’s shop, and the packaging he sells it in carries a picture of the Ghanta Ghar clock tower — the landmark our family’s shop stood beside, and the name Delhi still uses for the halwa.
That is the strange afterlife of a recipe. Partition split a family business across a new border in 1947, and eighty years later both halves are still making the same sweet, twelve hundred kilometres apart, neither quite aware of the other.
The shop by the clock tower
Before Partition the family shop stood in Chandni Chowk, in the stretch between Kucha Rehman and Kucha Ustad Daag, close enough to the Town Hall clock tower that customers stopped using the family name altogether. They asked for the halwa from Ghanta Ghar. The shop’s proprietor, Abdul Khaliq, became known across Old Delhi simply as Ghantaghar Habshi Halwa Wale — the habshi halwa man from the clock tower.
By family account, the business had been there a long time before that. We say 1830, and we should be honest about what that number is: it is family tradition, carried down in the telling rather than in a document. We have not found a deed or a ledger that fixes the year, and we would rather say so than pretend to a precision we cannot show. What is not in doubt is that the shop was long established well before Partition, that it sat beside the Ghanta Ghar, and that its halwa was well enough known for the neighbourhood to name it after a clock tower.
1947, and a recipe left behind
When Partition came, Abdul Khaliq migrated to Pakistan. He did not take the shop with him, and he could not. What he left behind were his workers — the men who had stood at those pans beside him, who knew the timing and the colour and the smell of the thing better than any written recipe could hold.
They kept making it.
The chain is documented by Delhi Food Walks, who traced it in detail: one of Abdul Khaliq’s workers taught the recipe to a man named Hanif, and Hanif taught his son Firoz. Firoz Ahmed makes it today at Punjabi Phatak in Ballimaran. Hanif’s brothers opened Hanif Dairy in Gali Qasimjan, near the Hamdard Dawakhana. Taqi Ahmed opened Ahmed Dairy nearby. An entire small constellation of Old Delhi halwa shops traces back to one shop’s kitchen staff, still working from what they learned there.
We find this genuinely moving rather than proprietary. Nobody in Delhi owes our family anything. The recipe was not stolen; it was left, in the only way a recipe can be left — in the hands of the people who already knew it. That Firoz Ahmed puts the Ghanta Ghar on his packaging is not a claim against us. It is the same act of remembering that made us keep the name on our side of the border.
The other half of the chain
In Karachi the family started again. The knowledge that travelled was the same kind that stayed behind: not written down, but held in the hands of the men who had learned it.
Our current head chef is Shakil Ustadh. He learned from Irfan Ustadh. Irfan learned from Yameen Ustadh. Yameen learned from S. Abdul Khaliq who learned from his father S. Abdul Wahid himself. Five names, and every link in that chain is a person who stood next to the previous one at a hot pan for years until the timing became something in the wrists rather than something in the memory.
This is why we are named for Abdul Wahid rather than for his son. Abdul Khaliq is the man Delhi remembers, because he was the one behind the counter when the shop became famous. Abdul Wahid was his father, further back up the same line — and the person from whom the transmission we can still trace, hand to hand, actually begins.
What habshi halwa actually is
For anyone who has only encountered the word on a menu: habshi halwa is not a quick sweet. Ours takes about nine hours in the pan, and there is no way to shorten it that does not produce something else.
It begins with wheat, sprouted and left to ferment before it is ever cooked — that fermentation is where the deep, faintly sour backnote comes from, the thing that separates habshi halwa from the sweeter halwas it sits beside. Milk is reduced alongside it for hours until it thickens and darkens. Ghee goes in slowly, in stages, and the mixture is worked continuously; stop stirring and it catches on the bottom and the whole batch takes on a burnt edge you cannot cook out. Khoya, sugar and nuts come in toward the end. The colour deepens from pale to a dark, almost mahogany brown, and the texture turns dense and elastic enough that a spoon dragged through it leaves a channel that closes slowly.
The name is generally understood to refer to that darkness. It keeps for about a month without refrigeration, which is why it was historically a winter sweet, and why the Delhi shops still sell most of theirs between October and March. It travelled well, which mattered when sweets moved by train.
Why we are writing this down
Most of what we know about our own history exists as things said at family gatherings. That is normal for businesses of this age in this part of the world, and it is also fragile. The generation that could describe the Chandni Chowk shop from memory is nearly gone.
So we are writing down what we have, marking clearly which parts are documented and which are family tradition, and we would rather be corrected than be tidy. If you have photographs of the Ghanta Ghar shop, or a relative who bought halwa there before 1947, or anything at all that touches this story — we would genuinely like to hear from you.
And if you are in Old Delhi, go to Ballimaran and buy some halwa from Firoz Ahmed. It is the same recipe. It has simply been in other good hands for eighty years.
A note on sources. The account of what became of the Delhi shop after 1947 — the recipe passing from one of Abdul Khaliq’s workers to Hanif, and from Hanif to his son Firoz Ahmed, along with the shops at Punjabi Phatak, Gali Qasimjan and nearby — is drawn from Delhi Food Walks, who documented that chain on the ground in Old Delhi. We are grateful for their work. Without it we would have no independent record of what happened to the shop our family left behind.
The rest — the 1830 date, the family lineage, the chain of ustads — is family account rather than documented history, and is marked as such above. If you can correct or add to any of it, we would like to hear from you.