By Micheal Meik

It was 1974, my Dad had just retired from the Pakistan Air Force and took a position as the Personnel Manager at National Motors. We moved from the Drigh Road Base to Soldier Bazar Garden East area, where we rented a home on D’Abreo Road, which was a street right opposite the front gate of the St. Lawrence Church and boy’s school. The first day there, we heard a man yelling at the gate “Cake Wallah”, Being ten years old, I was intrigued, as we hardly ever got vendors coming to the houses on the Air Force Base. Looking out the window, I noticed he was an older man with a long greying beard, riding a bicycle with a silver steel trunk on the back carrier. He spoke some English as well, and I saw all the neighbours coming outside, buying various biscuits, veggie patties and cream rolls from him. They told my Mom, you have to try his stuff, its really good, so Mom went out as well and bought an assortment of his biscuits. We were hooked from that day on.

A couple of years later in 1976 Dad decided that we should buy our home, so we found a ground floor apartment for sale in Taj Court on Maneckji Street, a ten-minute walk from where we were living. Just before teatime in the late afternoon we heard a familiar voice calling “Cake Wallah”, I ran outside, happy to see him. “Where is Mummy?” he asked. Inside I replied, so he yelled over the balcony wall “Memsaab, your cake man is here”. Mom came on to the balcony and bought some hot Butter biscuits, the crunchy layered Kharas, some Zeera biscuits, as well as these little flower-shaped chocolate biscuits with a round dot of chocolate in the middle, my favourite. He also brought the most amazing cream rolls and vegetable patties, similar in flavour to the ones we got in the school canteens. Sometimes Mom would even buy his plain pound cakes, they were always yellow inside and had this wonderful aroma and tasted of eggs and vanilla.

For the seventeen years I knew him, he seemed to look exactly the same, always an old man. I remember when we were little, he would show up while we were be playing outside. Taking the steel trunk off the back of his bicycle, he would put it on the ground, then move the upper tray of biscuits so we could have a better look inside. Then gathering all us kids together, he would ask how much money we had in our pockets.

Being the innocent children that we were at the time, we obediently empty our pockets and showing him, whatever change we had on us in the palm of our hands. Taking the money from each of us and would fill little brown paper bags with an assortment of biscuits and hand them to us. We got biscuits, whether we wanted them or not. They were good though, and he always gave us our money’s worth.

One day there was Martial Law and curfew was imposed in the city, the cake man got stuck in our compound. So, Khan, our chowkidar locked the gate, all of us children were outside playing, and our parents brought out chairs and were sitting in the compound. With our apartment being on the ground floor, we made a large daigchi of tea, our neighbours brought out different things to eat, there were pakoras, samosas etc. and I think that was the very first time the Cake Wallah had ever sold out of all his biscuits and cakes. Dad was in charge of the building maintenance at the time, and had just built Khan new living quarters, so Khan graciously offered the cake man a place to sleep for the night.

In July 1991, about a week before I was to leave Karachi to join my family in Canada, I was in the kitchen making myself a pot of tea, and there was a knock at the front door, it was the old cake man. He handed me a large plastic bag which weighed a few kilos, inside there were about a dozen of his small brown paper bags, each filled with one of the items we bought from him over the years, plus one pound cake and a marble cake. “Michael Beta, yeah Mummy ke liye kuch biscuit aur cake heah”. I was so touched by his kind gesture.

All those years of living there, and I did not realize he knew my name, I felt a little choked up, and invited him in for a cup of tea. Other than a few cushions, I had no furniture left, so we sat cross-legged on the floor in my empty living room, and for the first time, I actually had a chat with him. He told me that his father had been a baker before him, but he was not sure about the next generation, he felt that he would probably be the last in his family to do this. I told him “Baba, you know I won’t be able to carry this on the plane with me, as I was visiting England for a month, before going on to Canada. I offered to pay him, as it was a lot of stuff, but he adamantly refused, saying “No” to me in English “This is gift from Cake Man, I no take money”. So, I asked him out of all the thing he brought me, what his favourite was, he said the ginger biscuits, I pulled out the bag with the ginger biscuits and we had them with our tea, chatting for nearly an hour. He was remembering all the kids in the building that were now grown up, some even married with their own little ones. Then we heard some kids outside looking for him, as his bicycle was parked outside my balcony. He thanked me or the tea, wished me a safe trip, and left to tend to the kids outside.

That evening when Mom called me from Toronto, I told her about the Cake Man, so she asked me to call her back whenever he showed up again, no matter the time. So, at around 4:00 pm the next afternoon I heard him in the compound, I called out to him and asked him to come inside. I dialled Mom’s number in Toronto; it was about 6:00 am in the morning there. I handed him the phone and he had a long chat with Mom for nearly twenty minutes. He was so happy he got to speak to her, he handed me back the receiver saying, “mayra dil bohot khush hey, aaj Mummy say baat kia”. Giving me a big hug before walking out of the apartment, he thanked me for calling Mom. Forgetting all about selling his biscuits, he got on his bicycle and rode away waving to me. I saw him one more time after that and left Karachi a few days later.

He must have passed on by now, not sure if his sons ever took over from him, but I doubt it though. Being away from Karachi for nearly twenty-nine years, I wonder if vendors like the Cake Wallah still come around to the houses. It was a special memory that only ours and earlier generations would have experienced, that amazing fresh bakery aroma when he opened the lid of that steel trunk, the grease spots forming on the little brown paper bags as he filled them with the warm biscuits, and those flavours, each one different from the next.