Give Us Today Our Daily Bread And Forgive Us Our Sins

 I don’t know if you have heard of a bakery called Lavonne here in Bangalore?  It isn’t far from where I live, so this morning, in a moment of certified insanity and excessive obfuscation of the brain caused by watching three minutes of Republic TV last evening, I went over to Lavonne to buy something for breakfast.  I had been there once earlier (these are intermittent episodes of lunacy and it has to do with the full moon, or so I have been told).

They have a signboard outside that offers personal loans to buy bread inside (easy interest-free EMIs, please note, so carry your Aadhar card, the last salary slip and your school-leaving certificate) and a Buy-Now-Pay-Later counter run by this fintech called Slice, which, if you have missed it in reading this too quickly, is a pun (like ‘A pessimist’s blood type is B-Negative’ – you get the pic).

In summary, Lavonne is the sort of place where, if you buy someone a birthday cake, you postpone your car purchase to next year.  

Everyone there wears white, with disposable caps and masks and gloves and acts as if they are in a neonatal ICU, rushing around with an air of decided importance.

“Do you have fresh bread?” I asked defensively.
There was this kid at the counter who’s probably done a Coursera session on baking and received a ‘Just-about-passed-with-D++’ grade.  She looked at me and sniffed – some people don’t deserve an answer, they need an education, she was saying to herself no doubt – and asked me to look at a crate with heaps of breads of all shapes in it.  There were some long ones that looked like useful walking sticks on a trek and something called sourdough, which I have once eaten at a breakfast buffet and therefore know that it is great if you cut it up into pieces using an axe and use them in catapults to harvest guavas high up on a tree.  But I liked the one with some nice twists on the top – somewhat like a Hitchcock film – so I asked what that was.

“Babka,” she replied, while staring at the blank face in front of her, now certain that I needed an immediate education-on-scholarship in the interest of larger society and the 75th anniv of Indian independence. 

“Is it bread or cake?” I asked, because it looked like a mix of both and it was immediately obvious that, in their exalted history, neither Lavonne nor this kid nor the French civilisation had been asked such a daft question.  Her boss emerged from the shadows and grinned the way people do when they see someone from Jhumritalaiya (district Koderma) buying an iPhone 13. 

 
“How can a bread be a pastry?” she asked, with a giggle.  For a brief moment, I wondered if this was a philosophical question in existentialism of course, but decided to not pursue this thread (they have a CCTV in there and a red button under the counter).  

The bread tastes fine (I haven’t given it an option after coughing up a ransom) and I will go back for more one day after I encash those two lottery tickets purchased in Trivandrum sometime ago.