KARACHI: Mohammad Ishaq has been kneading dough for over 40 years now, and he does it with his hands. Almost buried in it up to his elbows in a big metal bowl he looks shocked and a little disgusted, too, not to mention offended, when I tell him that I thought the kneading was done with the feet at tandoors.

“Look, sister, whatever goes into the mouth the feet better not touch. It will be sacrilege if it did,” he says, touching his ears. “Tauba, tauba ...” Some dough is also on his ears now.

At the tandoor, there is also one person to make small balls of the dough, another to roll it out on a flat surface to make circles and yet another to bend over and reach inside and stick it to the walls of the cylindrical oven, or tandoor.

Ishaq says that the dough for preparing naan is usually not used for making thin chapatti. “For that you use chakki atta. It is pure wholegrain flour, not bleached white maida made from refined grain,” he says. “And there is no baking soda and yeast added to it for raising or fluffing up the batter.”

There are shalwar and kameez hanging from hooks on a wall. The men work in lungi and vests at the tandoor. “It is hot and this is how we work here,” says Mohammad Nazeer smiling. There are a few table fans on at full speed but “we work around fire. There is no escape from the heat at a tandoor.”

A waiter running to and fro from the tandoor to the sitting area of the restaurant takes back with him heaps of fluffy naans before returning empty-handed for more. He is also used to carrying hot naans. His hands have become immune to the heat.

The naans cost around Rs8 apiece but the way they sell, making them is a lucrative business. “The tandoor is just a cylindrical chamber that looks like a big flower pot turned upside-down. It doesn’t even cost too much, just a few thousand rupees. But you need to have a set-up around it for making the naan at a quick pace, for which you need to hire more people. I cannot afford that so here I am making balls of dough,” says Nazeer.

Naans come in a variety. There are also the ones baked in the flat brick oven, which is also known as bhatti. Abdul Ghani has a paddle with a long handle to place the naans inside the oven. Before that he also punches in holes in the flattened dough circles to keep them from fluffing up too much. And the flour this time is wholegrain.

“Some people don’t like the regular naan made from refined flour though both types cost Rs8,” says Abdul Ghani. “The wholegrain naan or roti also remains soft for longer while the other naan made from white flour loses its freshness and turns brittle too soon,” he adds.

Some customers coming to his shop ask if they can get kulcha. When he shakes his head, they ask if he makes Kandahari naan then. He shakes his head again before pointing out to some place ahead in the lane where he says that their preference for bread would be available, too.

“Naans are of so many types as it is and now it has become a science. And to add to the ones we already had there are also stuffed naan, and I’m not talking of just aloo-bharey or qeemay-wale naan here, the ones stuffed with mushrooms, cheese and what not are also becoming very popular here,” he says as he turns around to look at his modest place with plans to upgrade it to suit more palates.

Published in Dawn, April 23rd, 2017