Hansel and Gretel and a Walk in Calcutta

St James Church, Calcutta 

(PC Team Walk Calcutta Walk))

With our hemisphere hurrying towards the dark Solstice, family traditions around food are uppermost in everyone’s minds and the season brings with it Humperdinck’s opera ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The setting in the meagerly provisioned kitchen of the children’s family home, in the haunted woods with its dream feast and in the risky kitchen of the witch, blends seamlessly with our everyday lives of hunger, desire and hope.

In Calcutta, where I live, two of my friends, Deep and Ayon, have thought up a new tradition of food around the Solstice. On the first Sunday of December this year, we were on a trail that was strongly reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s forest walk.

Throughout the year, Ayon and Deep take their friends out to explore cultural and historical traditions in the city. Because they walk everywhere, their group is named ‘Walk Calcutta Walk’. This was our first time exploring old bakeries. And because it was close to Christmas, Deep insisted on visiting a few churches as well.

For ‘Walk Calcutta Walk’, churches are exotic. Most of us do not traditionally worship there. (To tell the truth, most of my friends do not formally worship anywhere at all, but I hope you won’t be turned off by that). We do, however, love to visit churches, wandering in the solemn interiors, the dignified grounds and quiet graveyards.

On that Sunday, the cyclone Jawad came close to the city, making it abundantly clear that our trip wasn’t going to be a cake walk. At 9.30 AM, though, at least twelve people had turned up at the spot marked with an X. We had been promised a visit to ‘Nahoum’s’, a venerable institution supplying the city with plum cakes and pastries for about a century. The cyclone was clearly not a deterrent.

Only, when we arrived at New Market, where Nahoum’s is located, all the shops were closed. Through the rain, Deep went off to investigate whether we had come that way for nothing.

This would, perhaps, have been a good time to call it a day. I had recently recovered from a fairly severe cold and my shoes were unpleasantly clammy. Sharing half an umbrella and sloshing through the puddles of the city’s potholed streets is moist.

But as we stood around feeling sorry for ourselves, a new comer joined us. ‘I had to do a blood test early this morning’, she explained with a smile. ‘That’s why I’m late.’ As we stood staring at her in awe, Ayon asked her ‘Did you eat the bread and the banana they give you after taking away your blood?’ ‘Oh, no’ she replied. ‘I’m fasting since I woke up.’

‘Okay team,’ said Deep, who had brought good news that the bakery was open after all. ‘Let’s hit the shop before she faints.’

The narrow twisting alleyways of New Market were dark and empty that day. Every time I had previously visited, they had been crammed with people, making progress all but impossible. The sight was unimaginably incongruous. Had I been alone, I would certainly not have ventured to walk there, even in the daytime. The haunted forest of Hansel and Gretel’s witch couldn’t have been spookier. The setting in the Met’s production, with the strange noises in the night, those trees which moved around so unnaturally in waistcoats, those high walls thick with creepers, would have blended in completely with the alleyway’s gloom.

My friends, however, ensured that the Sandman had no chance of showing up then. Once inside Nahoum’s, they fell upon the pastry as if they too had been starved all day. And there was no one to sing ‘Greedy little mousie, stop nibbling on my housie’.

Nahoum's: Greedy Little Mousie, Stop Nibbling on my Housie

PC: Team Walk Calcutta Walk

I had recently been telling a friend of mine about a fancy new restaurant in the city that was serving food traditionally eaten by the Parsi community. ‘It’s fake’, he said dismissively. When pressed, he declared that to be ‘real’ it had to be at least a hundred years old. ‘Like the Parsi cafes of Mumbai’, he added for good measure. By this token, Nahoum’s is certainly not fake. Within its brightly lit, carved interior, with old fashioned wooden tables and row upon row of dainty pastry, a plaque proudly displayed on the wall declares the year of establishment as 1902. The bakery was founded by Nahoum Israeli Mordecai, a Baghdadi Jew. In 2013, when third generation owner David Nahoum passed away leaving no children behind, fans wondered whether the doors would finally close. The institution continues to operate, thanks to other family members and the dedicated staff. Indeed, I was struck by how polite and engaged the employees were. It was as if we had visited them at their homes and it was their pleasure to take care of us. 

Saldanha's Oven: Worthy of the Witch? 

(PC Team Walk Calcutta Walk)

Outside, it was now raining in real earnest. There was no cutting short the walk, however, and we visited every single church on the plan. Deep usually tries to give a knowledgeable commentary on the site, only this time, he had neglected his homework. We stood shivering outside the Wesleyan Church, while he read aloud from his phone the information on Wikipedia. The team was astonishingly polite, never once interrupting to say that they could read from their smartphones just as well as he.

To recover, we stopped at Saldanha’s, a bakery established by a Goan lady, Mona Saldanha. This too was a family-owned business, fueled by Mona’s hospitality, her ubiquitous presence in reinventing the menu, in accounting, in greeting customers, in taking care of employee morale. Her business is now inherited by her daughter Debra, who, in turn, has a daughter, Alisha. ‘Walk Calcutta Walk’ has always had a penchant for visiting the institutions of the dwindling communities of Calcutta, such as the Chinese and the Jewish people, who had once been a sizable population, but had now emigrated. This made Saldanha an appropriate stop. Mona’s outdoor clay oven, pictured above, could easily have accommodated a score of children, but is used to bake coconut macaroons instead.

We said goodbye to each other at St James’s Church. You can see us above, gloriously loaded inside and out with cakes, warm despite the rain, and ready for the approaching season.