BBC TV once did a story on Yazdani Bakery and interviewed Zend. �Why is your bread so good,� the TV reporter asked the baker. �Because it has fewer chemicals, preservatives and softners,� he replied, �and it only contains apart from God-given salt, water and yeast, the Irani baker�s blood, toil, tears and sweat!� The TV reporter, a woman, made a face.

ZEND Meherwan Zend is, perhaps, Bombay�s oldest Irani baker. At 70, he is as brawny and blustery as the day he first began working in his father�s bakery as a 17-year-old college student. The old establishment, Yazdani Bakery in Cawasji Patel Street, Fort, remains the same. Zend, too, hasn�t changed too much. He was a boxer in college. First Siddharth College on D. N. Road. Then, because he was known as the K.O. artiste (Zend used to knock-out his opponents in the inter-collegiate), he got invited to join the more prestigious St. Xavier�s. Now, every time he enters the bakery�s godown where the big sacks of flour are stacked, Zend slips off his watch, rolls up his sleeves, and goes a few rounds with them. He pounds the flour sacks and then swaggers back to the bakery, dusting his floury fists, a sly smile of satisfaction on his handsome face.

He is a bit of a loveable character, this Irani baker. But then all Iranis are like that, they are excitable people, and they pour their passions into whatever they are doing. With Zend, it is baking. He runs Yazdani Bakery as a partnership with his brothers Rashid and Pervez. The Zend brothers are third generation Iranis from Nasrabad in Iran. However, they were born in Bombay. Their father, Meherwan Zend, started Yazdani Bakery decades ago. Before that, he was a partner at the Rising Sun Bakery in Bombay. �It used to supply seven-tier cakes by P&O to Singapore and Bangkok,� remembers Zend. �They were behind us in baking in those years.� He joined his father in Yazdani as a 17 year old. His brothers came in a short while later. He remembers also meeting his wife in those early formative years. �She, Pervin, was a student of J.B. Petit School, and she used to see me going from Siddharth College to the bakery. We got married before I was 21. I failed college that year! But later I completed BSc with Mathematics.�

Zend learned the job while at work. �In those days there was no machine to knead the bread so I had to use my hands,� he says, holding up big muscular arms to show. �The oven was wood-fired, today it is diesel and gas. I can bake different types of bread, make puddings, mava cakes, biscuits... it�s nothing big.� He is still on the job with his brothers, but now, the Zend family has increased, the fourth generation Irani boys are working in the business. But Zend remains hands-on at the old bakery. He is there at 5 a.m. to bake the first lot of bread.

The aroma arising out of the bakery�s chimneys spreads around the vicinity telling the just waking citizens that it is dawn and their breakfast is just about ready.

The smell of baking bread draws a lot of foreigners, especially Germans, who come to the St. Thomas Cathedral and Akbarallys department store nearby. The follow the aroma to Yazdani where, on Zend�s invitation, they are happy to step inside and inspect the old bakery. �Foreigners are amazed to see that we still knead the dough with our hands,� he says. �Abroad, it is done by machines in factories, then frozen and sent to bakeries. The aroma and flavour of the bread is lost in this.� The Germans again are impressed when Zend take a hard-crust brun-pav like the Persian Iranis make only in Bombay and Pune and crushes it in his huge palm. �I tell them, �This is the sound of music!�

Then I let them enjoy the brun with butter and tea.� He is hospitable and warm and funny, like most Iranis are. And first-timers to Yazdani are invariably offered a taste of some of the bakery�s goodies. They bake brown bread there (�without the caramel,� he says) and a 7-grain bread. Also Focaccia, which is known also as Italian flat country bread, Olive bread, Scotch bread �which is the Bombay ladhi, buns and bruns, mava cakes, khari biscuits, pudding, apple pie, mushroom and lemon tarts. BBC TV, which once did a story on Yazdani Bakery, interviewed Zend. �Why is your bread so good,� the TV reporter asked the baker. �Because it has fewer chemicals, preservatives and softners,� he replied, �and it only contains apart from God-given salt, water and yeast, the Irani baker�s blood, toil, tears and sweat!� The TV reporter, a woman, made a face.

Yazdan is a province in Iran where Zoroastrians were known to concentrate. And Zend is a Persian word, it is Zendabash, which means be alive. �Or live to the fullest,� says the old baker with some force. Is he religious? He is. He begins his day at the bakery at 5 in the morning. By 7, he is at the Banaji Agiary across the road. �It is an old agiary,� he says, �it was consecrated even before the Iran Shah in Udvada.� He oversees the production of bread in the bakery. It is distributed to several of the city�s big clubs and gymkhanas.

�Our bread is cheap, it is cheaper than even a banana,� he claims. He loves eating bread. And he eats everything else. Zend Meherwan Zend is not a gourmet or a connoisseur of food and wines. But he loves Western classical music. He admirers the Russian musicians and goes for all their concerts in Bombay. He is fond of theatre. But his passion is photography. �Landscapes,� he says. And also boxing. Occasionally he still shuffles into the godown to work off a sweat on the flour bags.