The flat round bread glistened with its milky glaze, sending out tantalising aromas. It was hot from the oven, crisp on the outside and fluffy within. “What is it called?” I mumbled with my mouth full. “It’s Kashmiri bread,” said my friend Jiten, “locals have for breakfast it with tea to wash it down.” Around me, people were emerging from a narrow lane, all holding newspaper-wrapped roundels of bread. “It apparently also tastes really good with spicy mutton curry,” said he, “which is why you’ll see people eating it through the day here!”
We were in the old bazaar of Leh. The Muezzin was calling the faithful for afternoon prayer. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, but we decided to go through what the locals of Leh call the Baker’s Street anyway. As we entered the street, a crowded narrow jumble of smoky bakeries directly beneath the Leh Palace, we saw bread and small biscuits piled on tables everywhere. Sales were so brisk that they were being whisked off even before they lost their initial warmth. The ovens were like tandoors, open hearths fired with wood, where rows of shiny dough balls sat waiting to be flattened and cooked.
One of the bakers there was Ali. A baker in a street of bakers, all he’d done every day of his adult life was to knead a mountain of flour every morning and bake hundreds of the same type of breads over and over again. With practised movements, he’d break the dough into balls, flatten them with his palms and gouge a pattern on the dough. Then he’d stick it to the sides of a hot open oven, spear the half-cooked bread on a long curved skewer, and sear it slightly on an open flame.
“My shop has probably been here forever,” said he, “I know that my father and his father before him were bakers here.” I looked around at the soot-blackened walls of his tiny bakery, and it certainly seemed that way. I asked him whether he also made other types of breads. He looked surprised: “Why should I? Anyway, I make what people want to eat!” I bought another roundel, and asked if he also made tea. Again he said, “Why should I? People buy my bread and go home to have it with tea…my shop isn’t big enough to set up a stove to make tea in!”
But it could be good for his business, said I, thinking that tea would really be a wonderful accompaniment to Ali’s bread. “I knead fifty kilos of flour at dawn every day and my bread sells out by 4 pm. By then, my arms are hurting, the oven is too hot to handle and people are anyway ready to go home,” he said. “I can do this much and no more to earn my living. Anyway, what will I achieve by working even harder and earning more money than I need?” He was, he asserted, quite content with what he earned, and didn’t want any more of anything.
The afternoon prayer at the mosque ended. The emerging multitudes made a beeline for Ali’s bread. He got busy and I walked off slowly. Ali was bang on target, what good comes out of earning more than one can spend? I looked back, he gave a little wave as he slipped yet another roundel of dough into his oven. He probably didn’t realise it, but this little baker in a street of bakers had just taught me a life-lesson I’d never forget. I won’t forget his bread either.