Unless your origins are in India or Pakistan you probably know the word halva, if at all, as referring to sesame-based confectionery popular in the Middle East. This is indeed how it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, as “a Middle Eastern sweet confection made of sesame flour and honey,” and the OED cites the word’s origins as Hebrew, Arabic and Greek. 

However, while I’ve never been to the subcontinent, I have probably been in more Indian and Pakistani restaurants than is reasonable and wasted much of my life reading recipe books from the same region. 

In these, the word tends to be used far more broadly, to mean — as far as I can guess, maybe a reader who speaks of one of the two countries’ languages could help out here — simply a dessert, or, as most of us would put it, a pudding.