The bakery has no name. “Just keep driving on the Alibaug-Revas Road that takes you from the Mandva Jetty to Alibaug; about half way down after the railway crossing, but before Thal, is a booze shop on the right and a dirty Sintex tank on the left. Turn at the Sintex tank and take the little mud road that leads up to a small village, now follow your nose and try and find the bakery”. These are the scattered and dubious directions that were given to me by a painter and a friend, Brinda Miller, and fervidly endorsed by ex-banker and now wayfarer Shekhar Sawant. Brinda, Shekhar and I are Tuesday lunch mates. We meet at her studio, most Tuesdays over lunch, cooked by Brinda, adventured by Shekhar, or pot-lucked by me. We try to invite one or two guests who we may or may not have met or know but can contribute a dish or two, and more importantly sweeten the pot with some good conversation and enlightenment. Knowing my predilection and weakness for good bread, it was at one of these soirees that both Brinda and Shekhar gushed about this bakery. After about three failed attempts at finding this place, mainly because of the vagueness of the directions, I finally found the bakery on my fourth attempt this weekend. I have to assert that it was the aroma that guided me there more than the directions. It’s a small village with a narrow winding and ascending road. The bakery is nothing but a large shed. The blacked walls lined by logs of firewood. An old charpoy with an old gent speaking languidly on a land line outside the entrance to what looked like a dark yawning cavern. He waves us through, and we enter breathing in the sweet, sweet smells of baking bread. It is my wonderland. Two hot old-fashioned wood-fire overs, dozens of metal trays with hot bread straight out of the oven. Our heads turn, our noses lift, our eyes close and we say to ourselves, “Oh my God—that smells good!” For me, it’s impossible to resist that aroma of sugars combining with amino acids, forming tasty golden and umber complexes that throw off a variety of volatile aromatic compounds that float through the air. The clean, slightly sweet, yeasty air that somehow smells warm. With the permission of the gent on the charpoy, we broke a few buns off the ‘laadi’, so hot that the bread was impossible to hold. On the outside, perfectly golden and mildly firm glistening with butter that had just been brushed on the surface, and soft, white, steaming and blistering inside. It was soon turning into a bender, as we then broke into some of the hot, sweet buns with raisin, then focused on the flaky light “khaari biscuit”, the crushable hard “butter biscuits”, the milk toast, and other neatly stacked, freshly baked puffy, crispy, crunchy, toasty, sweet, salty, savoury splendours, which came out of the sooty woodfire oven. This is what I miss most. Hot fresh bakery goods form a local bakery.
I grew up in Mazagon, in Bombay, which in the 1960s, where, like in many areas of the city, a man on a bicycle, with a long beard, a skull cap and wearing a checkered lungi would come selling hot bread every day, sometimes two times a day. The ‘pav wala’. On the back of the cycle, he lugged big wooden box covered with plastic which in turn was held back by a huge rubber tube. This wooden box was packed with hot bread. This was the typical South Mumbai pav walla. He’d picked up fresh bread from the local bakery, the first shift of which would start at about 3 am, and hawk it on his daily neighbourhood beat, two times a day. Even today, you can see this lungi-clad cyclist selling bread, in most areas of South Mumbai, including Hanging Gardens, Warden Road, Nana Chowk, Prabhadevi and occasionally in Dadar. Much like his father or his father before him did. It is a sight that till today makes me rush to the window and yell for him to stop.
There are usually two or three varieties of breads in that box. The regular soft “ladi pav”, maybe “sweet bun”, crisp “brun pav” and often sliced bread, and just to add to the income a few kinds of freshly baked biscuits. Diversification means he may also sell eggs.
Most of these bakeries have shut down. Yes, some Iranis still prevail, like Worli’s City Bakery, which is the only bakery in Mumbai, I know, which bakes large, oversized ‘brun pav’. About a foot in diameter, at around two in the afternoon, City Bakery bakes a batch of these crusty, huge loaves, hard on the outside and soft with a marvelous hot honeycomb inside. I would wait outside with a 250gm pack of Amul Butter, for the hot Brun to emerge from their ovens. Break it with my bare hands and slather it with butter, eating it right there on the pavement. There is another largely nameless bakery behind Starbucks near Lilavati Hospital. Tucked in a small lane between two buildings, this sooty wood fired bakery will reluctantly sell you a single loaf because their clients are bakeries themselves. Pakeezah Bakery near the Mahim Dargah, spews out hot loaves every few hours. I often catch the 7 pm batch of “ladi pav”. You can barely hold the bread in your bare hands as it singes your palms though the newspaper it’s wrapped in.
These bakeries are living on borrowed time. I am sure the ‘Pav Bhaji’ industry has given these bakeries a lease of life but for how long? Some will stand strong holding out, some will fold, and I will always be left lamenting their demise.
Kunal Vijayakar is a food writer based in Mumbai. He tweets @kunalvijayakar and can be followed on Instagram @kunalvijayakar. His YouTube channel is called Khaane Mein Kya Hai. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
