The Bakery at Dawn

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Every person and shop in it is invented.

Half past three

Phurba Jangmu Sherpa unlocks the bakery at half past three, six mornings a week. It is a narrow shop on a side street in Jackson Heights, Queens, a block from where the elevated train runs over Roosevelt Avenue. At that hour the only other lights on the street are the streetlamps.

She is fifty-two. She grew up in a village in Solu, in eastern Nepal, came to New York twenty-one years ago, and worked in other people's kitchens until she could afford her own. The bakery sells what the neighbourhood wants: sandwich loaves, seeded rolls, sweet buns, and on weekends pan de bono, the small Colombian cheese breads, which a customer taught her.

The first thing she does is switch on the deck oven. It takes nearly an hour to come up to heat. While it does, she weighs out flour and water, starts the big mixer on the first dough, and says a prayer under her breath.

It is the Seven-Line Prayer, a short prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher remembered across the Himalaya for helping Buddhism take root in Tibet. Most Sherpas follow the Nyingma, the oldest of the Tibetan Buddhist schools, which looks back to him as its founder. Phurba's mother said the prayer every morning of her life.

The hearth in Solu

Phurba learned it before she could have told you what it meant. In the dark before dawn her mother would blow the hearth fire back to life, set the griddle over it for the morning's potato pancakes, and say the prayer while she worked: low, steady, over and over, the way the river below the village kept talking all night.

She did not learn what the words meant until she was thirty, in Queens, when a visiting lama gave a teaching in a rented hall. By then the sound was already part of her, like the smell of woodsmoke. In the bakery it starts on its own once the oven is on. She does not stop working to say it.

The new boy

Julián Restrepo started in November. He was seventeen, tall and thin. His aunt Gladys, who came in every Saturday for pan de bono, had asked Phurba whether she needed help. "He's a good boy," Gladys said. "He's just a little lost right now."

He was supposed to come at five. The first week he came at five past, hood up, earbuds in, and stood just inside the door as if waiting to be told he could go.

Phurba gave him an apron that came down to his shins and showed him how to grease the loaf tins. He did it fast and badly and glanced at her to see whether she minded. She did not seem to. She was shaping rolls, and her lips were moving.

He thought, at first, that she was counting.

Earlier and earlier

By December he was coming at half past four. Then at four. He never said why, and Phurba never asked. From Gladys, at the counter, she gathered pieces of it: his parents had split up in the summer, he was sleeping on his aunt's sofa, and he had stopped going to soccer practice and then, most days, to school.

What she saw was a boy who arrived before he had to, through the cold, and stood in the warm kitchen with his hands around nothing until she gave him something to do.

So she taught him to knead. Most of the dough went through the mixer, but she kept one batch each morning to do by hand, the plain round loaves, because that was how she had learned. Push away with the heel of the hand, fold it back, turn it a quarter, again. He pushed too hard and the dough tore. He went too fast and it stuck to everything.

"Don't fight it," she said. "It changes under your hands. You have to be there to feel it."

Talking to the dough

It was the first week of January, a little before five, when he finally asked. "Are you talking to it?"

Phurba laughed so hard she had to put the scraper down. "To the dough? No." She wiped her hands on her apron. "It's a prayer. To Guru Rinpoche. My mother said it. Now I say it."

He kneaded for a while. Then: "Does it work?"

"Work for what?"

"I don't know. Does it make the bread come out right?"

"The bread rises because of yeast," she said. "Yeast, and warm, and time. The prayer is not for the bread." She went back to her rolls. A little later she said, "When I say it, I am here. Not thinking about my daughter up in Albany. Here, with this." She pressed a thumb into the dough between them, and they watched the dent slowly fill.

Seven lines

Another morning he asked what the words said. She told him the way the lama had told her, in her own English, a line at a time, without stopping work. The first names the land Guru Rinpoche came from, far to the north-west. The second says he was born in the heart of a lotus. The third says he reached a wondrous accomplishment, the highest there is. The fourth gives his name, Lotus-Born.

The fifth says a great gathering of dakinis was around him. In Tibetan tradition dakinis are female figures of wisdom; the Tibetan word means something like "sky-goer". Phurba hunted for the English and settled on "wise women, from the sky". The sixth line is the wish to follow in his footsteps. The seventh asks him to come and give his blessing. After it comes a short mantra, a string of sacred syllables.

"Which one's your favourite?" Julián asked.

She thought about it longer than he expected. "The third," she said. "That one is about him, not me. I am not a great practitioner. I make bread. But I say it every morning, and I think: a thing can be finished. If you stay with it, a thing can be finished."

That was the week she showed him the windowpane test. You take a small piece of dough and stretch it slowly between your fingers. If it tears, it needs more work. If it stretches so thin that light shows through it, it is ready. The first time his held, he lifted it up to the bulb over the bench and looked at it a long time without a word.

Salt

In February he forgot the salt. Forty sandwich loaves came out of the oven pale and slack and tasting of nothing, and Phurba had to make the whole order again at speed, with the shop already open.

Julián said a word she did not allow in her kitchen, threw his apron on the bench and walked out into the snow. Through the front window she could see him standing under the streetlamp at the corner with his hood up, not going anywhere.

She did not go after him. There were rolls to shape. She worked, and the prayer went on under her breath the way it always did, not for him and not against anything, just there. When she next looked up, the corner was empty. She thought about calling Gladys, and didn't.

At four the next morning he was outside the door when she arrived, snow on his shoulders. Neither of them mentioned it. She unlocked, put the lights on and switched on the oven. He tied on the long apron, weighed out the salt before anything else, and set it apart in its own bowl where they could both see it.

March

By March the sky over Roosevelt Avenue was already turning grey when the first trays went in. Julián could do the round loaves alone now. He was not fast, but he had stopped fighting the dough. He had not decided anything about school. Gladys mentioned that he had been in twice to ask about summer classes. Phurba did not ask him about that either.

One morning, shaping, he said, "Can you say it out loud? Just once, the whole thing. I want to hear how it goes."

So she did, slowly, all seven lines and the short mantra after them, in the Tibetan her mother had used, while the oven ticked and a train went over at the end of the street. He did not say it after her. He kept kneading. But she noticed that his hands had found its rhythm, push, fold, turn, and that when she came to the third line they slowed a little, as if they were listening.

Then the train was gone, the bread was ready, it was half past six, and she unlocked the front door.

She still says the prayer every morning while the oven heats. He is still there most mornings at four. What he makes of it she does not know, and she has not asked. Some days the bread comes out right and some days it does not. The oven is hot by half past four either way.