Inside the Afghan bakery

At a friend's place, we were offered Afghan bread and he suggested I should visit the bakery, which I did and I wrote its story.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Real Page 3 of the Indian Express on Sunday, January 31, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
January 28, 2010

New Delhi, January 27, 2010
Long ago in a little bakery in Kabul, Aqa Sayed learned to knead the dough, cut it into pieces, then weigh it on a scale, flatten it and gently put it inside a stone-lined fire pit.

An apprentice to his father, a baker, Sayed came to his father’s shop in the afternoons after school, to learn the art of making Afghani roti.

Many long years have gone by since.

Now, Sayed, 48, is reclaiming from memory the bread-making skills he learned as a child in a little rented shop where an Afghan bakery has recently opened in the crowded Bhogal market.

Outside the shop called Afghan Nanwaee (the bread maker), a queue of Afghani people has formed. Most of them came to India as refugees, fleeing the perpetual state of turmoil in their homeland where the smoke and splinters from a bomb blast, and soldiers wielding Kalashnikovs and marching in the streets and on to their lives, are part of everyday living.

But home is an idea and like time and place, is a keeper of sanity. Familiarity, a semblance of what was destroyed, left behind, is what the refugee seeks.

So, inside the bakery, the four Afghani men have recreated their homeland, lining its sooty walls with tapestries of a countryside village, a mosque in its background, and pewter plates with Koranic verses on them. A broken part of a bed that once belonged to someone in Kabul, and has pink roses carved on it, that a refugee packed with his meagre belongings so he could keep a piece of his former life with him always, hangs near the entrance.

The oven, the fire pit or Tandoor, was bought here in Bhogal, but the bread that comes out of it, is intrinsically Afghani with little designs made by poking tiny holes, the size of a dot.

At fifteen, Sayed, a Tajik, gave up on school because there was no hope of finding a job as one war bled into another one in his homeland, and he stopped counting how many bloody wars ravaged Afghanistan, its people, the schools, the hopes, and the bakeries, too.

“We never knew who was ruling us. It changed too often, it mattered too little,” he said, Ali Jan, a Hazara boy, interpreting for him.

His wife and two children died when a bomb exploded in one of those streets in Kabul. Bombs were forever exploding, and killing, and filling streets with blood of their children and women.

Sayed then came to India. In Kabul, his bakery shut down, too.

For a few weeks, he was barely making ends meet. The little money he brought with him lasted a few days only. Then he met Ainuddin, popularly known in the locality as Mullah Jan, who was running this bakery and needed men who could bake.

Sayed had been a bread maker. His hands knew the craft, the acrobatics of baking the perfect home bread.

He is a sad man, always brooding, they said.

Only when he plunges his hands into the flour and pulls and pushes, and leans into the fire pit to check on the bread, he smiles.

The bread that he pulls out is a connector of sorts, its smell transporting him to a life he loved, and his memory comes alive.

On a Wednesday morning, after they had baked the first batch of bread, the four men sat down for breakfast – rotis, fresh cream, and afghani chai. A woman stuck her face inside, and asked for bread. She was late but her daughter didn’t want anything but bread. Mullah Jan picked one from the stack of breads they’d eat for breakfast and gave it to her.

***

Mullah Jan, 36, came to India three months ago. At 10, he had left Afghanistan.
The wars were getting personal, he said.

He lived in Iran, and then in Pakistan for ten years. In Afghanistan, things only got worse in the meanwhile.

“When a child leaves home, the homeland becomes an alien city. It is difficult to reconstruct your life from the rubble,” he said.

Mullah Jan completed high school, and could have studied further had it not been for his refugee status in the world, and the limitations of it. When he returned to Afghanistan after Taliban left where his family still lives, he opened a restaurant in Khoust.

Then, one day a bomb went off.

“My restaurant was blown to pieces. A bomb had exploded in the market,” he said. “So, I came here. The Afghanis wanted someone to bake bread for them so I said I could do it.”

He paired with Mohd. Sarwar, another Afghan refugee.

Sarwar said the initial days were difficult. He came with a thousand dollars and after it was spent, he lived in the burial grounds near Nizamuddin for a week. When he figured that Afghani families needed a bread-maker here in Bhogal, he knew he could do it.

“I took out a loan from friends and set up the bakery with Mullah Bhai,” he said. “It’s doing well.”

At least three times in day, people queue come to the bakery to buy bread – morning, afternoon, and evening meals are not complete without the bread.

“We usually buy our bread and don’t bake at home. That’s our culture and tradition. Mostly men bake the bread in shops and women do it at home,” Mullah Jan said.

A few years ago, an Afghan refugee operated a little bakery in the back lanes of Bhogal. But when he opted for a third country resettlement in Canada, the bakery downed its shutters. Since then, the local families started getting their bread from an Afghan baker in Lajpat Nagar. In Tilak Nagar, where many Afghani refugees live, there are a few Afghan bakeries.

But Bhogal is the new Afghani ghetto. In its crowded alleys, rent is cheap, and in the evenings, an Afghan boy sells momos and soup outside the bakery and men smoke and chat as they had done in Kabul.

Mullah Jan will tell you the Afghanis are resilient people, and even if you left them in a jungle, they’d survive. Because they have suffered enough to know better.

For the Tajiks, India is home, and Delhi seems familar. They have grown up on a staple diet of Bollywood movies, lining the walls of their homes with posters of
Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. The smattering of Hindi they speak was picked up from the films, and so assimilation was never so difficult.

There is no definitive number of Afghanis that live in Delhi. In Bhogal, there are upwards of 500 Afghani families, Mullah Jan said.

They rent out small rooms, most of them built in the fashion of a train corridor, one room leading into another dark room, and then to another. Most of them are unemployed, and short on money. Without the refugee status, they can’t find any jobs. And the waiting time to get the status stretches into months, years. So, they wait it out, pawning jewellery, working illegally in sweatshops, trying to get by.

Ali Jan is a Hazara boy with hazel brown and green eyes and rosy cheeks, who is learning English at an obscure school. In his free time, he doubles as a cashier at the bakery trying to earn his fees of Rs. 750.

“I hope I can get to college,” he said.

For Ali Jan and Sayed, the bakery is a relief, a means of getting somewhere.
Sarwar too has a plan. He wants to get married and that’s another reason he came to Delhi.

“The bride price is too high in our country and people like me can’t afford a bride. In India, we can marry because you don’t have to pay,” he said. “With the bakery money I can raise a family easily.”

For the families that have left their homeland, the bakery is a reminder of the happy times when life was normal in Afghanistan.

Ten years ago, at least 28 such bakeries dotted the city’s landscape. Then, people left for elsewhere and these bakeries were closed.

Now, as the war intensifies, and cars begin to blow up again and Taliban is once more active, more and more refugees are coming to India, and to Delhi.

Next to the bakery, there’s Kabul restaurant, which also opened recently. It sells Afghani food, and on most evenings, it is packed to capacity.

In the evenings, a steady stream of customers leave the bakery with rotis the size of snowshoes wrapped in newspapers.

Abdul Rehman was late. The bakery had shut for an hour. But he needed the bread because that’s what his mother-in-law wanted. She was sick and had peculiar demands.

“She just wants to eat the bread. Can I have one, please?”, he asked.

Mullah Jan obliged.