ecipient of the Queen’s gold medal for poetry in 2014, Imtiaz Dharker grew up in Glasgow and lived for many years in Mumbai before settling in London with her late husband Simon Powell, the creator of GCSE Poetry Live. Her work is full of a deep relish for all the world has to offer – food, travel, colour, love – and a lip-smacking relish for words themselves. I Need by Imtiaz Dharker I need sarson da saag, nothing else will satisfy me, and hot makki di roti with butter melting over it. I need to eat bacon and eggs and the petals off a rose, one by one. My greed has no nationality. I need my mother’s chicken salan. I want her to break the roti scoop up the gravy and keep putting it in my mouth until my hunger’s done. I need to run out to my father’s land and sit in the old ganna field where I can hear the sugar growing, juice rushing up through the stem to reach my waiting mouth. I need to tear the outer skin and crunch the sugar-veins. I am hungry to be the woman watching the young man bathing at the well, water running down his back, streaming down the length of his black, black hair. I need to crack walnuts with my teeth and eat their brains. I need to take a train to somewhere, and get off at platforms I don’t know to drink sweet milky tea steaming in the early morning out of earthen hullers. I need to go to Crawford Market through the piles of fruit and buy a whole sack of ripe mangoes to suck and suck till nothing is left but dry seeds. I need you to come back. • From The Terrorist at my Table (Bloodaxe, 2006)