Published in The Wire (8.3.2026)
A good part of my wonder years was spent salivating over the goodies of our friendly neighbourhood bakery, Kamrup Bakery, a Willy Wonka’s den of freshly-baked delicacies in Guwahati. The moment the shutters went up, appetising aromas would waft out, lasso unsuspecting passersby, and lure them inside the bakery.
Bread was available either sliced, or as loaves – nothing more. Simple choices for a simple life, as far as bread was concerned. Brown, focaccia, baguette, bagel, multi-grain, gluten-free – these are words that we heard only when cousins came to visit us from faraway lands. In fact, scratch gluten-free from the list. Don’t think it existed then. Even for butter – Amul. Or jam – Kissan.
The other choices, however, resulted in delicious confusion. The glass shelves with wooden borders made it easier to point out to the chosen one – cream rolls, jam rolls, custard rolls, boiled cakes, fruit cakes, glass cakes, and birthday cakes with icing so strong that one bite would be enough to uproot a couple of milk teeth. Then there were the biscuits – sweet biscuits embedded with peanuts, salty biscuits with nigella seeds, plain vanilla biscuits, and lastly, the ‘S’ biscuits.
The ‘S’ biscuits – they were shaped like ‘S’ – were quite big in size, and tough, and when out of the eyesight of the elders, it would be used as missiles to keep errant siblings in line.
Whenever we visited Kamrup Bakery, samples would be distributed liberally to aid our decision-making process. The regulars would just have to step in and before one could finish lamenting about the price of hilsa fish in the festive season, neat brown-paper packages with scrawls that could give doctors a complex would be waiting at the cashier.
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