A few comments. I should admit sheepishly first of all that as someone who teaches and writes about the novel I am terribly self-conscious about how unsophisticated I am in my understanding of poetry. I am very weak on prosody in particular and so will try my best to avoid embarrassing myself on that front. In fact, I will restrict myself to a few fragmentary observations.

• Movement. Movement is central to the poem. It begins with the movement that takes us to the setting of the poem, to the Lahore Karhai: the journey across London, described heretically as a pilgrimage. This journey evokes another indirectly (in the second stanza), a journey of another kind, made by people the speaker is aware she cannot claim identity with (in the third stanza); at another remove still is the diasporic journeys that have brought her to London. At the level of form, the poem itself is on the move, its rhythm and energy, especially in the early stanzas, mimicking the movement it describes of the packed car heading to the Lahore Karhai.
•  The question of home and community. The only set location in the poem is the restaurant. It is a poem about intimacy, about family but it takes as its location not the family kitchen or dining room but a restaurant. Though it participates in a familiar diasporic identification of cultural identity and food it refuses to situate this within the bounded domestic space of family. Instead we are in a restaurant, a space of a larger conviviality, with “the owner’s smiling son”, “the cook at the hot kebabs” drawn into the circle of intimacy of food, “bound together by the bread we break”. And, of course, the speaker and her family are not from Wembley—they come from “across the city”.
• Hybridity. First the language; the refusal to translate “yaad na jaye” into English even though it signals early in the poem the theme of memory and connection that is central to it; the refusal also to italicize the food names. And also the motley crew at the table: “the Lahore runaway”, “the Sindhi refugee”, “his beautiful wife who prays each day to Krishna”, “the Englishman too young to be flavoured by the Raj”, “the girls…wearing the confident air of Bombay”. The poem enumerates this hybridity—religious, national, intergenerational—but does not make heavy weather of it.
• Lightness. The poem does not make heavy weather of the hybridity it describes and it is also unwilling to allegorize identity too heavily from the scenes it describes. The past may be worn “like summer clothes” but it clearly cannot be discarded either. We are in a contingent moment, not in a distillation of identity. “These/are ways of remembering”, yes, but, “other days, we may prefer/Chinese”.
• The Lahore Karhai. I have no idea if the titular location was/is an actual restaurant in Wembley. In my desultory “research”—I hesitate even to use that word—I have discovered that there are more restaurants in Wembley with Lahore or Lahori in their name than there probably are in Lahore but I’ve not found one named the Lahore Karhai. There may have been one that closed down—was it a significant name? Or did she choose it for its generic nature? I also confess I have not tried to track down what Dharker may or may not have said about this poem: perhaps this is a non-mystery.

Okay, that’s enough burbling from me. I do recommend the entire collection highly (this shopping link goes to Content, the indie bookstore in our town).

Next week: another poem set in a restaurant, but in another city. I look forward to reading your thoughts about the poem or about my readings of it in the comments if you are willing to share.