'My dad calls it 'Indian Gatorade' for a reason.'
It was a scorching summer in Dallas, I was about 7, and my dad and I were doing our usual routine of going to the local library, and then picking up the famous homemade limeade from Braum’s—a regional ice cream chain known, surprisingly, more for their icy beverages than their hard-packed ice cream.
And then a few summers later, I tried it at my dad’s cousin’s place in Lucknow, a city in Uttar Pradesh. It was 100 degrees, and we had just arrived, completely dehydrated and drenched in sweat after an hours-long train ride with zero air conditioning. My cousin greeted us with a tray replete with glasses of shikanji. The drink was nothing more than loads of lime, ice, a touch of sugar, salt, and my dad’s family’s secret ingredient: a boatload of ground black pepper.
He blitzes all those ingredients together until a foamy layer forms at the top of the blender, pours it over ice in heavy beer steins , and garnishes the glasses with—what else?—even more ground pepper. When my brother-in-law, David, is in town, he will take the leftover shikanji and use it as a base for margaritas. I strongly recommend doing this.
For me, shikanji symbolizes summer more than a drippy popsicle or an ice cream cone or a slice of sweet watermelon. I now completely understand what my dad meant when he called it “Indian Gatorade.” Shikanji sends this sodium-laden, electrolyte-like jolt throughout my entire body. It’s the liquid version of standing directly in front of your blasting air conditioning unit during July in New York. And I would totally dump an entire water cooler of the stuff over my head after a football game.
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