The newsroom bakery - kandurwaan!

Winters are known for their harshness in Kashmir. And talk about Chillai Kalan, the forty toughest days of the year, you would have to negotiate umpteen times with yourself and your wushnear to venture out of your cosy home till at least the time when the sun is already halfway through its dawn to dusk ‘journey’ (it is we who are moving, though. Sun is stationary, at least, with respect to us!).

          But one thing draws at least one member of each family right out of the wushnear of their cosy homes at a time when the sun is yet to begin its ‘journey’ and people (mostly old!) are just coming back from masjid after Fajr and the Azkaar that follow.  But the thing i mentioned above is not just a thing, it is a combination of many things…..it is a local newsroom, a round-hearth (local variant of round-table) discussion table for Cricket and Politics, a place for negotiating small deals, a place to get fresh hot embers for kangri, a thakpaend for the insomniacs and primarily a place for fetching home a few crisp lawaas. Plus, if you get along a bit too lucky, you may even get to have a sip or two of the steaming hot noon-chai at this versatile Kashmiri Kandur-waan!

          The primary purpose of one’s tour de Kandur-waan is obviously to fetch home some fresh and crisp bread early in the morning. But natural, there is always something secondary to a primary. The latest news from the neighbourhood is first heard at the Kandur-waan and the person who braves chilling gutsy atmosphere in the morning to fetch some lawaas returns home with a bonus…..the breaking news. If it happens to be a morning when the preceding evening (or night) witnessed a loss for Pakistan team or a win for the Indian team, or vice-versa, in a cricket match, the customers at the waan all but forget what they had really come for! For all those who were a tad unfortunate not to have gotten a hot kangri at home, the waan is the ultimate solace providing fresh hot embers for the kangri.

          Insomniacs, or raatmongals as we call them, whose late sleep got disrupted midway due to calls from parents to fetch lawaas, find Kandur-waan a good place for a nap and in the meantime the late comers to the waan take advantage of this nap and take home the lawaas. The insomniac being among the first ones to come, is the last one to go back home. An often experienced thing which occurs here is that the time for which one has to wait for his turn is directly proportional to the no. of lawaas he has to take home. The ones asking for less than 4 lawaas have the kaandur on their side with a sympathetic jibe, “eemis chhe nein kamee” which means, “he has to take too few to wait here”.

          Apart from lawaas, a Kandur-waan has a lesson to offer for us. We are in this world with some primary purpose, secondary purposes come along. Fellow ‘customers’ come and go. Let us not become the insomniacs and lose sleep over matters sub-critical and fall asleep when the primary purpose beckons!!!


(This write-up also appeared in the Spring 2012 edition of Kashmir Lit.)