Originally published in Zora on 19 August 2019

It’s 2:15 a.m. and I am humming the tune of “Ederlezi,” approaching the Suada and Olga Bridge toward the Grbavica district of Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I have rented a room. Grbavica had suffered heavy shelling in the 1990s when Sarajevo was under siege by nationalist Serbs. Window sills bloom with flowers now, even though the acned walls keep the war alive. I’ve just exited a kafana, where the music has me swaying but the snacks left me hungry. I pull up my jacket collar to my ears and skip a few steps to enter the pekara on the ground floor of one scarred building. White light bright, and warm enough to loosen my stiff shoulders, the half-empty shelves promise to meet my meager needs. Burek — meat or spinach stuffed into a coiled flaky pie — would see me through yet another night.

“Eine burek molim,” I tell the woman at the counter, mixing fragments of German and Bosnian. She packs the two burek in a paper bag. “Kako?” She utters a word, pauses, then raises four fingers: That’s 4 Bosnian convertible marks (KM). Or, about 2 euros. Or, in a currency that I convert mentally, which makes me happy, approximately 170 Indian rupees.

Last year, I lived for six weeks in Sarajevo to report on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s divisive general elections for various international news publications. I am trying to be a foreign correspondent: a job that continues to be the domain of Western White people. I am not the norm in this circuit: I have an Indian passport, and I carry the Indian rupee. This means, unlike most of my colleagues who jet-set across the world flashing their U.S., U.K., EU, or Australian passports, I have to undergo a long process — often marked with humiliation in spite of a pile of documents — to be able to enter most countries.

The Indian rupee has been weakening. For a freelance journalist on a budget, every dollar or cent spent is the equivalent of the price of the refreshing and ubiquitous “cutting chai” on Indian streets — the quantity equivalent to an espresso shot.

One KM, the Bosnian currency, is nearly half a euro, and approximately 43 rupees: With that, I could get four vada pavs on Mumbai’s streets.

A slit is made through the round fluffy bread (pav) to insert a yellow fist-sized vada: mashed potatoes flavored with coriander, chilis, and mustard seeds, and deep-fried in a chickpea batter. Various chutneys are shoved in with a spoon: a green chutney of coriander, mint, and green chilis, and a dry red chutney of dried red chilis. Want an extra zing? Add fried green chilis. Priced at an average of 10 rupees and wrapped in a newspaper, just two vada pavs can sustain long hours of commute in a city that’s always in a mad rush.

Outside India, I’m constantly converting every price tag to the rupee. I seek cheap succor. That’s how my midnight snacks and quick breakfasts in Sarajevo were the burek. Brought in by the Ottoman Empire from Central Asia, it can be pulled apart with just three fingers, until you make your way around and end at the beginning of the coil. Lonely Planet has featured it among the best street food; every restaurant in Sarajevo’s historical and cultural center of Baščaršija features it.

Walking across Baščaršija and other parts of the city to meet my sources for my stories, I’d make a mental note of the prices of burek filled with piletina (chicken): 2 KM here, 3 KM there, and even 4 KM at some legacy restaurants with carved wooden interiors.

But I’d return to the tiny bakery near the Suada and Olga, the bridge where “Bosnia’s Romeo and Juliet” died in each other’s arms as bullets rained down from the hills surrounding the valley city. At that pekara, my foreign face became a familiar one. Like most people across the beautiful and broken Balkans, 25 years after the war ended, I’d break bread with burek.

The reductively termed “bread” is available universally in various forms, stuffed with complex savory or sweet fillings. Travel guides scream about them; makeshift joints earn more customers and hike up their prices. Each of these “discovered” foods — including the vada pav in Mumbai — would have a version of itself at high-end restaurants at astronomical rates. Chef and travel enthusiast Anthony Bourdain was brutally honest about his displeasure when people would visit only the places he had featured on his TV shows, rather than finding their own way without any itinerary.

So how do you satiate hunger when the night bus drops you off at 4:30 a.m.? Or, find an accompaniment for the morning coffee before you dash for your first appointment, the first day in a new city?

Trust the neon-signed kiosks. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, the blinking blue and red ones meant empanada.

The half moon with a curled edge, baked or fried, and stuffed with meat, vegetables, or cheese, is stacked in glass enclosures at the panadería that serves as a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. The menu on the wall jostles for space with photos of pizza slices where the reds of tomato sauce and thick white strings of cheese are augmented.

At one panadería not far from a popular tango milonga, which livens up after midnight, I stood in line with local customers. I toggle between Google Translate on my phone and the menu. One of the young men taking a break from the ovens explains the stuffings in his sparse English. I decided on two empanadas: with carne (beef), and with pollo (chicken). My bill? Seventy-six Argentine pesos, or a little less than $2.

The baked outer layer gives way to sparingly spiced minced meat inside. Every bite after the first is a struggle to ensure that the meat doesn’t fall out; juice slips down the fingers, which I’d try to catch with my tongue before it reaches my wrist. It’s messy, and I love it.

Empanadas serve all wallet sizes. One afternoon, I walk five blocks south on Avenida Nazca to reach the San Pedrito metro station in the city’s southwest. The street is buzzing with activity, the winter sun creating filigree shadows of trees. The large yellow M of McDonald’s stood out; on the sidewalk are hawkers whose facial features and skin textures indicate movement of people across landscapes and continents. They sell socks and sandwiches, T-shirts and torches. But a smaller signboard in yellow, a few steps ahead, catches my eye: “Empanada! 23!”

San Pedrito, the price of that empanada tells me, is a working-class neighborhood.

In the quiet mornings in Assam, India, the tekeli pitha — a steamed and stuffed rice ball — packs ammunition for daily wage workers waiting to be hired as masons, road cutters, and sewage cleaners. My parents were born in Assam, in India’s northeast. I was raised in the cosmopolitan mess of Mumbai, in western India. Each time I’ve traveled to Assam — as a journalist hungry for stories, as a child seeking cultural bindings — I’ve stumbled upon nuggets that are savored by the ones who sweat, and exoticized by those who don’t.

Unbeknownst to me until that bus departure at sunrise — because the women in my family prepared different pithas with more time and ingredients at hand — the tekeli (“urn”) pitha is sold by women on tiny tables that accommodate their paraphernalia. It’s still an elaborate affair on this mobile mall: A stove keeps black tea warm, and another stove has an aluminum kettle rumbling with water. A muslin cloth is laid in the inner concave of the kettle’s lid. Coarsely ground rice, sandwiched with a mix of grated coconut and jaggery, is filled to the brim. The muslin cloth covers it, and this contraption is placed on the bubbling kettle upside down.

Like a woman who simply knows her body without checking the calendar, the pitha vendor picks up the lid after a while. As she unfolds the muslin, a soft bale of white steam rises. A dense cloud of this pitha is served on a newspaper scrap to men sipping their tea. Give me two, give me another, fill me with more tea. The workers head off to keep the town functioning with their bare hands.

The traditional apparatus of a clay urn has been replaced, for the mobility of the pop-up shop, with the lid of the kettle. Tekeli pitha is now also called as keteli pitha.

The pitha, like the burek and empanada, welcomes all, without a reservation or a Michelin rating. Their freshness and price are a consequence of the nature of their existence: small-scale and quick to cook and serve to all, in exchange for coins and soiled currency notes, like the burek in Sarajevo or the empanada in Buenos Aires.In many ways, I carry the spirit of a Mumbai street reporter wherever I go. Thousands of miles away, I rely on the dexterity to soak in varying perspectives, day after day: relying on foods that keep foot soldiers of the world alive, even when I don’t speak their word. I am trying to thread piletina and pollo together, to tell stories of humans who toil for pennies, to fill their days with something that satiates.