A Mumbai Without Pav
Less than 300 metres from my apartment in Mumbai’s suburbs of Santacruz sits Kalina Bakery, a bakery specialising in making pav. Google Maps suggests that if I walk for a minute from the main road I frequent, I’d get to the brightly lit, tall-ceilinged room overflowing with blackened trays and the loaves of hot, crackly leavened bread known as pav. Yet, in my seven months in this locality, I did not know of its existence. Tucked behind a banal storefront selling all sorts of premade and artificially coloured celebration cakes, and accessible through a dark alleyway so slim that it only fits one person, the bakery is hidden to the unknowledgeable eye.
A similar realisation hit Heena Punwani, pastry chef and founder of Maska Bakery, when she first started her flagship Maska Walks, curated tours that guide attendees through the histories of some of Mumbai’s oldest bakeries. ‘Once I started [exploring], I realised that there’s a pav bakery in literally every [corner of the city], and some of them only make pav.’
