Portuguese pao

“Sending a shiver down her spine,

A draft blows through the door ajar
The crackle of the sunset crows
Floats upon it from afar”.
From Kya Baath 
Hein, Surr! by Bachchoo  
 
I will not write about the British general election.
I will not write about the British general election.
I will not write about the British general election...
Ditto...
Ditto...

April.10 : Which was the punishment or deterrent meted out in my school days to dissuade you from some sin you had committed or duty you had omitted, as in “I will not try to sound cleverer than Mrs Bagchi”. (She was the maths teacher, but I have, being gentlemanly, changed her name and sex to protect her identity). Note the two “dittos” in the fourth and fifth line of the repetitive exercise: one of the miniscule ways I devised of being cleverer than the aforementioned Mrs Bagchi to whom I had to submit the punitive assignment. When handing it in with just those five lines — and she looking aghast — I pointed out to her that as a teacher of Mathematics she had successfully imbued in me the idea that a symbol that stood for a whole sequence was a mark of advanced written discourse. Thus, the first “ditto” served to reproduce the three lines preceding it and the second to reproduce the entire sequence ad infinitum. Like two flat mirrors facing each other on the parallel and each reflecting the other to infinity. Ergo, she didn’t have just the 100 lines she had set me, but an infinite number. QED: Quite Easily Done.
She wasn’t pleased. A thousand more lines and no photocopier!
In confessional mode, I should add that no one set me the above resolution, but like a Pavlovian dog who has learnt his lesson well from the repeated admonishments of Mrs Bagchi and others, I resort, even in late adult life, to writing out resolutions several times in order to remind myself to stick to them.
My resolve to devote no columns to the British general election which is to be held on May 6 is because there is nothing much to be said about them except that all the parties are aware that Britain is in a hole and each party is continuing to dig in a way very slightly distinguishable from the others. Labour wants to collect more tax from the employers now and cut government spending later. The Tories want to cut spending now and raise taxes later. They each promise to preserve the health service, do good for education and see that the police catch wrongdoers. As we know from American elections, it doesn’t matter which party you vote for, an American always wins. (Not true, of course of Indian elections). Or as my late friend Eric Williams, the Prime Minister of Trinidad, used to say, “You can go to ballot box, soap box, any kinda box — in the end it comes to the same old khaki pants!”
So having resolved not to add any words to the tedious discourse about the UK elections being inflicted on the world’s public what shall one write about? Taking a leaf, or a sentence really, out of the book of early Western feminism, one can say that “the personal is the political”, so perhaps I should own up to having been presented an automatic bread-making machine on my recent birthday  — (None of your business!) — and have taken to baking very many varieties of loaf from its recipe book.
The smell of browned wheat or rye suffuses the kitchen, in which I have situated the said sanitary-looking, windowed white box and, faintly, the rest of the house. The odour of fresh bread is most appetising and the temptation to buy it hot and eat chunks of it on the way back from Barco’s Bakery in Gowlivadda, two streets away from our neighbourhood in Pune, where I was routinely sent to catch the six o’clock batch, are for me the staples of nostalgia.
Mr Barco and his family were Goan Christians and, while serving bread from the front shop all day and at most times, they strove to serve the surrounding neighbourhoods by supplying hot bread in hourly batches to suit the early and later dining families.
Of course, all these Indian families were bred on and ate chappatis and variants of that flat bread for dinner, but in western India the habit of the Western loaf was catching on. My cook called it “double roti”. One can only guess that it was so called because it was bloated and oblong rather than pan-cakey.
A more interesting etymology can be suggested for our western Indian word for loaves of bread, which is “paon roti” or just “paon”.
People tell me that it is Portuguese for bread and therefore was adopted and passed into Marathi and Konkani when the Portuguese colonised the coast of western India. So far so good, but it begs the question — did the word enter Portuguese before the colonialists broke bread in Goa, or after? Because the other suggested derivation of the word reverses the process — it originated in India and travelled thence to Portugal. The dough for the yeasted mixture of flour and water in such vast quantities was not kneaded by hand or machine but by the trampling under foot of the baker and associates exercising a gymnastic tattoo on it. I had dreams of the Barco family with their trousers and skirts trussed up doing a dance on acres of sticky dough in the dead of night while Pune slept.
The word for feet in Marathi and Konkani is “paon”! So it may very well be true that the bread was named after the method of kneading the dough by foot, distinguishing it from chappatis, parathas, naans and the like whose dough is kneaded by hand.
The literal translation of “paon roti” would in Marathi or Konkani be “foot-bread”, shortened for economy to “paon”.
The proof of the etymological pudding would be to compare the date of the word paon, as meaning bread, entering the Portuguese language with the date of the sailing of Vasco da Gama to the shores of western India. Chicken or egg? A riddle which in this case can have an answer.
I confess I am foot man, myself, even though the alternative explanation of some obscure European derivation would not dispel the vision of the dough-dancing Barco family from my subconscious — whence all fears, dreams and the nostalgia for the smell of fresh bread come. 
 
Farrukh Dhondy