Baking pans with knobs of half-risen dough.
Behind a bullet-pocked wall in Colaba market, six men in banians and half-folded lungis with a light dusting of flour covering their bodies are constantly on the go, kneading, cutting and shaping dough, and baking pao. When their shift ends, another six men replace them at their stations. Here’s how their jobs are divided: three men work at the kneading counter which is so frosted with maida, yeast and salt, you have have to look closely to tell that it’s made of well-worn black stone. Another two load each of the “paatraas” or baking pans with knobs of half-risen dough, then stack the oven-blackened and bruised pans in a tight vertical herringbone, and cover the structure with gunny sacks. One chap works the oven, his bare hands maneuvering a paddle attached to a long metal pole used to load and rotate the pans.
This is the scene at Rex Bakery, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rex is one of Mumbai’s oldest bakeries but it’s now barely discussed outside its locality. If business stops, even for an hour, the neighbourhood has an anxiety attack, and soon a mixed crowd of very worried people huddle outside. During the day, there’s a customer every minute even at the slowest hour. They include Cusrow Baug and Cuffe Parade residents; local fisherfolk; school-going children trotting past for a snack of a single hot pao; someone from Sukh Sagar stocking up on the accompaniment to their bestselling bhaji; any of the many local vada pao sellers in and around Colaba; beat constables; local politicians; and, sometimes, me. At night, if the neighbourhood gets rowdy or if business slows down, pao is sold through a narrow hole cut into the wall by the counter. For those who can’t pay, the pao is gratis and the amount goes into a separate column in the ledger at the cash counter: sundry expenses. Rex has a roster of customers whose payments of gratitude are plenty.
No one seems to know exactly when the bakery was founded, but in 1957 it was taken over by an energetic 24-year-old man named Behram Irani. He had arrived in Bombay from a village near Yazd in Iran when he was only a teenager. Because he had barely any money, he waited tables at his uncle’s restaurant. He also wanted to learn how to speak English, so he joined a night school. A few days later, he overheard his aunt telling her husband that she wondered how their nephew would work all day if he was studying all night. Irani then decided to discontinue night school and work harder, so that one day he may have his own business. According to him, Rex’s wood-fired oven had already been blazing 24×7 for 60 to 70 years before he took over the bakery from the Lobos, the previous owners. This would mean Rex opened in the late 1800s and is therefore one of the oldest bakeries in the city.
The wood-fired oven at Rex Bakery.
Known as Behramseth Irani to everyone in Colaba market, the young man is now 83, and despite having had three major surgeries, he continues to visit Rex every few days. He chats with customers in Hindi and Gujarati, alternating between a staccato and a drawl, and promptly shakes hands with people when they come to meet him. His palms are soft, warm and buttery. They feel like a bread baker’s hands.
The bullet holes on the wall outside Rex are from the terror attacks in the city on November 26, 2008. The bakery is located opposite Nariman House or Chabad House, the Jewish centre where two members of Lashkar-e-Taiba held several hostages after firing indiscriminately in the street. Irani’s son, Kuresh Zorabi (Kuresh has taken the family name Zorabi) was standing by the door of the bakery when a man standing next to him was felled. Zorabi was pulled in by one of the staffers just in time. The bakery was shut for three days for the first time since Irani took over. It was the first business to reopen in the area. Sales started minutes after.
The bakery had persisted in the face of violence in the city before. In 1993, when almost all the bakeries in the city were forced to shut after the Suleman Bakery attacks, Irani kept his open. Zorabi, an eye surgeon at and the owner of Colaba Eye Clinic around the corner, is currently completing a programme in medicine in Sydney. In a phone interview, he said that during that week in 1993, there was a line of customers all the way to the central chowk of the market, a few blocks away. The demand for pao was so high, Irani said, that they had to push the oven to over its capacity, which caused to it crumble from overheating and age. He moved operations to another bakery close by so that he could continue making pao for the neighbourhood until he rebuilt the oven.
Rex’s oven, made of a stone floor and special bricks containing glass and a mix of minerals, is entirely wood fired. There is no facility for gas, oil or electricity. Before pao paatraas go into it, the oven is heated with logs of firewood, which are then pushed to one corner to make room for the pao. The morning shift begins with one lot of workers starting to mix maida, salt, yeast and water at 4am. The dough is kneaded heavily to develop its gluten and left to rest and rise in a large vessel (big enough to house an average Indian man if he sits cross-legged) and then pulled out and kneaded again. It’s then portioned for a single laadi and placed in the baking pans to rise again. Next, it’s shaped into ovoid knobs and left to rise a third time. These lumps are beaten down a bit, and after the pans are stacked and covered with gunny sacks, allowed to rise a fourth time.
Owner Behramseth Irani (right) continues to visit every few days.
The weather determines the depth of the gunny sack layers; the dough must be kept suitably warm. As soon as it’s puffy enough, the trays go into the oven. One round of about ten minutes makes regular naram (soft) pao. For brun, the bread must get two more rounds in the oven. The entire process typically takes four hours. Until 2000, Rex made hot cross buns and a variety of other baked goods, but as the Catholic population of the neighbourhood decreased, Irani gradually cut down on the varieties of bread offered. Today, he makes only two kinds of bread: naram pao and brun. When his employees go home to their villages, they are told to make sweet, crumbly nankhatai-style biscuits to take back to their families.
Zorabi said all the bread in Sydney (a city known for its exemplary sourdough) does not compare to the pao at Rex. He misses it, and makes sure to have it when he visits home every few months. Rex’s bread is a slightly tangy and very fragrant pao. It has large bubbles on the inside, with a chewy cellular structure and a crust so crunchy you can hear the hollow knock of good pao when you tap on it. The yeast comes, as it did 60 years go, from a Parsi family that lived in Nariman House, the bungalow opposite the bakery that was converted into a building that became the Jewish centre. (The family moved further south in Colaba but are still in the yeast supplying business.) Irani said that Rex pao hardens but maintains flavour even two days after leaving the oven. It has not succumbed to using baking soda, unlike many bakeries in the city. “My bread doesn’t stink of soapiness when it goes stale,” said Irani.
Irani has considered shutting down the bakery a few times in the last three years because he’s not as healthy as he used to be. Zorabi has also toyed with the idea of using the place to extend his clinic and starting a nursing home. A couple of years ago, when they felt they might have to make a decision one way or another, their workers started sobbing and begged to let them run it instead. Irani then reminded his son, “We’re Parsis, and we worship fire. The flame in our oven has been burning for decades and we must not let it extinguish.” Zorabi changed his mind. So now, “it’s a bakery managed by my dad, looked after by his son, and run by the [staff] boys, for the people,” he said.
REX IN NUMBERS
Firewood consumed per month 7,000 kilograms
Flour consumed per month Approximately 18,000 kilograms (a consignment of forty 90 kilogram sacks lasts about five days)
Size of the oven Approximately 15 feet deep, 9 feet wide, 2 feet high
Paos sold per day 18,000 (or 3,000 laadis)
Price of pao in 1957 5 paise per laadi
Price of pao in 2016 Rs6 per laadi for naram pao, Rs 12 per laadi for brun pao
Rex Bakery, Rajwadkar Marg (lane opposite Fourth Pasta Lane), opposite Nariman House, Colaba Market, Colaba. The bakery is open daily, 24 hours.
Monthly Specials is a new food column by Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi.