The Loaf and the Love

From bakery ovens to childhood memories, and the warmth that endures

The best bread in the world is the one you can’t wait to eat.

Not the kind that comes sealed in plastic, looking like it was machine-cut by a barber with obsessive symmetry. Not the kind that sits politely in your toaster waiting to pop up. I mean the real thing—bread that comes out of a family bakery oven still puffing steam, daring you to burn your fingers while pretending you have manners.

In Kottayam, near my wife’s home, there’s a bakery like that. Their loaves tumble out of the borma oven looking golden and carefree, like clouds that decided to stay grounded. You don’t slice them. That would be barbaric. You just tear off a chunk and stuff it in your mouth, blowing furiously to cool it down while looking around to make sure nobody caught you behaving like a hungry ten-year-old.

Confession: I never make it home with an untouched loaf. At the counter, I nod solemnly like a responsible adult, bag in hand. But the moment I step into the car, it’s war. Civility gone. By the time I reach home, the bread looks like it survived a wild animal attack. My wife has stopped asking.

This bread always pulls me back to childhood. My cousins once ran a bakery, and they’d bring me tins of broken biscuits to boarding school. Those biscuits were gold to me then, especially during the time my mother was in Vellore, fighting breast cancer and later a brain tumour. In those days, bread and biscuits weren’t just food—they were comfort, company, and a stand-in for a mother’s care when she couldn’t be there.

And that’s the thing: bread is suspiciously like a mother.

Think about it. Bread shows up everywhere, but nobody makes a fuss over it. Cakes and pastries get candles, photos, and applause. Bread? Bread just does the heavy lifting in silence. Mothers too. They cook, soothe, worry, and keep life stitched together while the world gushes over flashier achievements. Both are humble. Both are essential. Both are taken for granted—until they’re not there.

And just as bread has infinite variations—naan, baguette, roti, pita, injera—mothers do too. Each shaped by culture, each carrying its own recipe of love, temper, and sacrifice. Bread is kneaded, stretched, and baked by fire before it can feed. Mothers endure the same process—shaped by tests, stretched by circumstance, singed by hardship—and still come out strong enough to sustain others.

That’s why Marie Antoinette’s infamous “Let them eat cake” rings so hollow. She wasn’t just being flippant; she was ignorant of ordinary people starving without even bread to survive on. Suggesting cake instead was detached and cruel. It’s like saying: if a child doesn’t have a mother, don’t worry, the father will do. Possible, maybe. Equivalent, never. Bread is not cake. A mother is not replaceable.

The sadness is that bakeries like the one in Kottayam—the family-run kind, with bread that looks homemade and happiness-packed—are vanishing. Shiny counters and fancier menus are taking over. Progress, yes. But also a quiet goodbye to the warm, fragrant simplicity of bread that tastes best when torn apart by impatient hands.

Which is why every time I buy a loaf from that bakery, it feels like more than food. It feels like memory. Like love. Like my mother’s presence—steady, reliable, not glamorous, but the very thing that kept life going.

Ambition, glamour, and cake may keep the party going.
But bread—and mothers—keep us alive.

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And speaking of the simple things that hold us together, one more is just around the corner: the launch of my memoir, You Told Me To Be Brave. Stay tuned—it has a few loaves, a few memories, and a few mothers worth remembering.

Until then, may this story warm a corner of your heart. If it did, share it with someone you care about—perhaps they’ll remember a loaf, or a mother, or a moment they never want to forget.