My Afghan Brother

A friend once described a compulsive habit I recognized well in myself. He called it “Bakery Tourette’s”, a condition I had long enjoyed but in this new light seemed suddenly embarrassing. My husband smiled at me knowingly and reached for my hand. Was this some kind of intervention? My relationship with bakeries stems from my earliest childhood yearnings. Some kids look up at the sky and wonder how airplanes can fly, I only wondered how a simple yellow cake could have such a perfect dome, how it would yield to a knife and spring right back up, what held the crumbs together and why did they dissolve in my glass of milk? How could a warm bun with butter and jam make me cry when I came home from school, opening a range of emotions I had kept in check all day long and now helped me recover from an ugly incident on the playground? Flour, butter, eggs, and sugar repeated themselves in magical patterns that mystified me until I went to France and learned to bake. I was unstoppable then, but still lured by bakeries.

I can’t recall ever passing a bakery, including a Happy Donuts, without feeling that tug on my sleeve. A magnetic field would reach, even if I was across the street, and pull me into oncoming traffic and through the glass doors. I have seen this irrational behavior in some women in the vicinity of jewelry shops, so I tell my husband: Just be glad I have a croissant tic. The odd twist to my condition is that this involuntary draw is most powerful when I’m in the vicinity of bread. Good bread, fresh from the oven, to hold against my chest. Only a baby is better.

Take Acme in Berkeley. I would stand in line under a hailstorm for their bread only to reach that unadorned counter and the person behind who looks genuinely happy to see me. Patiently she listens as I order one of everything with a friendly reminder that it’s cash only. Never just a baguette for me, I’ve driven across the bay to take as much of this place with me as I can fit in my car. And never in the trunk, I need to be enveloped by the scent of these warm loaves on the long way home. There’s Poilane in Paris. I like to leave it for my last day, after I’ve already been inside dozens of patisseries and boulangeries and sampled lemon tarts and éclairs and madeleines. I make my way slowly to the narrow rue du Cherche Midi, appreciating everything in this beloved city where I learned to cook, from the pearl gray sky to the pretty shop windows. This stop, an essential part of my pilgrimage, offers few choices, insisting instead on making the same outstanding bread over and over again without fanfare. I inch my way inside to find the ladies are still there, exactly how I left them a year ago, two years ago, fifteen years ago, slicing the enormous loaves of pain au levain into halves or quarters, counting dark raisin rolls that could sustain you for a day or two, weighing irresistible petit sables, tiny butter cookies, that transform coach to first class on the plane ride home.

I have brought you this far, only to make a staggering confession. I have forsaken them all since I found bread nirvana in a loaf of Afghan naan. A few weeks ago I went to the Persian market to stock my pantry with a few spices that were running low, but really I go there when I’m homesick for Iran. I like to eavesdrop on the banter between the old guys at the register and sniff packages of sumac and dried rose petals. When a delivery van pulled up with fresh bread, I smelled it before I saw it. Unlike the flatbreads I usually bought like lavashor sangak, with its sharp sourdough bite, this long slipper naan, part whole wheat and sprinkled with black sesame seeds, smelled of toasted nuts and wheat fields. Standing in line to pay I heard a man with a loaf of his own exclaim to no one in particular, God Bless the Afghan bakers! Indeed. There is a wholesomeness to this bread that when toasted and spread with feta cheese, fresh shelled walnuts, and mint, makes you feel instantly loved and nourished. Any variation, with sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and sea salt, dates, honey, or fig jam, is at once the ultimate open-faced sandwich. It is what you crave when you’re hungry, and what comforts you. My family laughs when I tell them it has changed my life, that my urge to make impulsive u-turns when I spot a bakery has waned.

After I made my discovery, I had to do some detective work to track down this Afghan baker. The Persian market was not forthcoming with the location of the bakery and the number I begged for was disconnected. It wasn’t until I asked Sarah, the stunning Afghan woman who cuts my hair, that I had a lead. She knew instantly: Ah, Maiwand Market! and gave me the address in Fremont’s Little Kabul, cautioning me to wait until a few days after Nowruz, the Persian New Year that coincides with the first day of spring and is also celebrated in Afghanistan. It will be a mob scene if you go now. Of course, we never have to stand in line, my father knows the owner. I had half a mind to call Sarah’s dad and ask him to take me. Exactly three days after the spring equinox, during one of the season’s raging storms, I talked my husband into going to Fremont promising a bowl of Vietnamese pho on the way. Only you would brave a tempest for a loaf of bread, he said. Only you would indulge me, I replied.

I have worked with three-star Michelin chefs and I confess that my enthusiasm for meeting this baker far exceeded my anticipation of cooking with master chefs. Sorry, Michel Bras. We pulled up to an ordinary corner grocery and ran inside. At the far end was the bread counter behind which stood the most haggard looking men I have ever seen with brown pockets under their eyes so deep like they were staring at me through binoculars. How long had they had stood before those clay ovens? Since they were boys, barely tall enough to pull bread from the fire? Had their small hands learned to shape and ripple the dough? These guys made line cooks look like honeymooners. One man handed me a hot slab of bread the length of a piano bench and held up two fingers. Two dollars? I asked. He nodded. I held the bread to my nose with my eyes closed and what happened next was a wave of nostalgia that welled up and I was once again eight years old with two coins pressed into my palm sent out to buy bread. Am I old enough to go by myself? I asked my mother. Old enough, but still afraid, afraid of the young men who straddled the path that curved past our house in Tehran. I even worried about the bushes that lined the road, of what may lurk behind them, underneath them. The worst part was the entrance to the bakery where several men always stood in the shade of its awning laughing coarsely and leering at me. At last inside, the baker stood in his undershirt, he, too, unshaven and haggard. Radio Tehran blasted the national anthem before the noon news hour and the announcer’s voice reassured me that the world is as it should be, that my mother was home waiting, that we would have lunch together and I must buy the naan sangak and leave quickly. By now the coins had left deep impressions of the Shah’s profile in my palm and I let them fall, one, two, on the glass countertop with a faded travel poster of Isfahan underneath. I held the long oval loaf like a shield against my chest. Now invisible to the men, I ran home.

We drove home in the rain, my face pressed into the still warm bread while my husband did the math: I don’t know honey, ten bucks of gas, five for the bridge toll, for a two dollar loaf of bread? And still there remained an unsolved piece of the puzzle because at the store they told us they don’t deliver bread anywhere. So I was back to square one, wondering where the original loaf had come from. Days later I was given another phone number and the man who answered spoke as if he had been expecting my call. Where do you live? he asked me. Where are you from? What is your name? And when I told him, he immediately switched to Dari, which is charming and effusive:Donia jan, you are like my sister, you are the world, your voice is kindness itself, how is your family? How are the children? I am so happy you called. How much bread do you need? I will bring it to your doorstep every Saturday. At this I chuckled and gave him our address thinking he’s pulling my leg. So I gasped when he rang on Saturday afternoon to ask me how many loaves I needed. Sure enough, around eight thirty, a green Hyundai pulled up and Kabir walked up to our porch cradling his bread like a child. As much as I wanted to hug him, I knew it would freak him out so I held out a cup of tea and some cash.

How could I keep it a secret? When I told Sarah, she exclaimed: My mom will be so jealous you have your own delivery man! When I told my friends, they quickly put in their orders and our house became the drop off location. Kabir did the math and it’s worth his time. He likes his tea with two lumps of sugar and we always have a nice chat. We learned he had fought with the Mujahedeen, that he had watched his country fall, and to spare him his father had sent him abroad. He learned how to bake bread from the bakers in Little Kabul and opened a place in San Jose. So many wars and families torn apart, he laments.

How little we know of ordinary Afghan people, of the ones who were left behind, of the children sent out to buy naan at the market, of those who never return, blown to bits, their bodies defenseless behind soft shields of bread, and of the ones among us who straddle two worlds, who craft new lives and watch the battleground that was their home on the evening news. God bless my Afghan brothers and sisters.