Of all the things that unsettled the famous Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta on his travels across Sindh in the 14th century, one was surprisingly small.

No lion, no crocodile, no monster of the river — just a lizard, dug out of the sand, cleaned, stuffed with turmeric and cooked. The people of the region ate it happily. The Moroccan traveller, who had crossed deserts and kingdoms and sat at the tables of sultans, flatly refused. The Ibn Battuta passage on the lizard eaten in Sindh is discussed in M.H. Panhwar’s account of Ibn Battuta at Sehwan.

The animal Ibn Battuta describes is almost certainly the spiny-tailed lizard, known across Pakistan and western India as sanda or sandha. In Sindh it carries stranger, gentler names too: patt machhi [ground fish] and reg mahi [sand fish] — as if the desert, having no rivers of its own, decided to grow its fish in the dunes.

It is a squat, dusty, short-legged creature, sand-coloured and thick-tailed, a grazer of desert grasses and leaves. It lives in burrows and suns itself with the patience of an old resident. Its range stretches from Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan into Rajasthan, Kutch and Cholistan.

From a dish that horrified Ibn Battuta to sanday ka tail, the humble desert lizard has acquired an extraordinary place in South Asian food, folklore and folk medicine

From a dish that horrified Ibn Battuta to sanday ka tail, the humble desert lizard has acquired an extraordinary place in South Asian food, folklore and folk medicine

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