At times when I take the metro to work I cross this bakery, located right across the Iskcon mandir. I look at the bakery with its shining door amidst the squalid surroundings and my mind conjures up images of a delightful chocolate cake, cheese sticks and other goodies ... for a few seconds the music of the earphones die. Then I cross the shop and the spell is broken.
My room has one window with a long blue curtain, it is never opened, because ... I really don't know why. Once I tried and was hit by a dust storm and I never tried again. A part of the window is blocked out by a piece of wood, that's where the rented AC will fit in another month or so. The point is that throughout the whole day little or no sunshine enters my room. So this particular Saturday, having spent a good amount of the day in bed, I decided to take a walk to that bakery.
Dodging autos and cycles, which were being driven by people who had sworn to bump me off the road, I reached the bakery--Golden Fiesta. Bikes and vans blocked the entry, squeezing through them was not an option so somehow managed to find a gap. Inside there was everything that I could possible ask for... cakes, pastries, bread, chocolate sticks, low-fat milk coffee (shoot me if I ever drink that!), eclairs and what-not. Having ordered two savoury puffs and one pastry to be packed, I took a walk around the store, trying my best to ignore the two aunties who were ordering dozens of cakes.
It's not the best cake-shop in town, it's definitely not the best cake-shop I have been to but all the same it's a shop full of bread and cake that brought back memories of days when I happily walked inside Kookie Jar, bought a loaf of bread and returned home happy, the day my heart did a dance seeing the bright pink box with a golden "flury's" scribbled on it, the day when I bunked a disastrous French exam and went to the French Loaf instead and gleefully shared coffee and cake with my partner in crime and of the day when a crazy friend dragged me to a cake shop called Rouge, in a god-forsaken part of the city where I had the most amazing red velvet cupcake packed in a beautiful box.
At times it's bags, at times it's a book but today... today I am happy with my cake.
8 comments:
Beautiful. I long for bakeries too. Quaint ones; and here every day a part of me dies for chocolate croissants, eclairs, and crumpets. Finding bakeries in this city is another thing that goes into my to-do list of things to do when you visit Calcutta. :)
:) Sure
dont leave me out people...
Tumi dorshon dile dhonyo hoye jabo.
Ami "dorshon" ke "dhorshon" porlam.
Thou hast lost it.
when in the capital, do as the capitalites do... try hunting down Supreme Bakers in RKPuram they hav the most amazing cakes, even Flurys would tip its chocolatey hat...
@Debjoy thanks...will check out!
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