The Great Pao Debacle of 2026
Ah, the taste of stale bread. I never knew buns were so ripe for puns.
It’s officially 2026. The “new” new year.
Just another occasion that could have passed unnoticed in the traffic of Hyderabad without honking its horns even once on the Outer Ring Road. But no, it had to flash high beams into my life’s rear-view mirrors and overtake in a mist of flamboyance.
Good riddance, though. It was gone. Even though I would have to move forward in the year’s wake, I would be keeping a distance. Safe space between the headrush of dates and my lifeboat, enough for a throng of buffaloes and cows to pass with ease.
But the year wasn’t having it. Or rather, my lovely wife.
Overflowing with determination and leaking with confidence, she made a declaration of dedication that decimal-ed its way to my diabolically disturbed decision-noggin:
“Let’s sell Dabelis!”
For readers in India living under a cowshed or those outside India unfamiliar with a food that’s decidedly un-European (even though it uses a European element) and un-American (even though it uses an American element, but not “USian”), here’s a simple English definition of Dabeli:
It’s an Indian snack originating from the Kutch region of Gujarat, consisting of a “patty” of boiled potatoes in a special spicy-sweet masala sandwiched in a Ladi Pao (a variant of the Portuguese bread) and heartily garnished with pomegranates and peanuts.
Now, back to the debacle.
Why did my wife want to sell dabeli? She loves them. It’s an easy snack that’s different from the usual Telugu and South Indian culinary staples prevalent in the city.
That was all the reason she had and needed. But there was so much gumption packed between those words, it would have outweighed a neutron star.
But while my wife is the cosmic background radiation of possibilities, I am the black hole of impossibilities. The prospect of dealing with prospecting customers perplexed me.
This isn’t my story, however. Neither is it my wife’s. The main attraction here, the protagonist, the lead, the champion, the antihero, the villain, the antagonist, is . . . the pao.
Let me elaborate . . .
When the declaration of serving our society with dabeli came out of her lips, my wife was on step 3 of her quick-start plan, which went as follows:
Pester friends to reveal secrets of Hyderabad’s better bakeries
Get in touch with a bakery to ask about the buns she wants to use
Declare the commencement of her ad-hoc dabeli business
Make your husband sweat in anxiety
With step 3 taken care of in the dastardliest confidences ever seen on this planet, the story now moved to step 4. And boy was I sweating.
So, here’s a bit of me that I am never proud of—I suck at initiation. However, it’s too reductionist to collate every initiation under this shameful banner that I carry over my head.
Not all initiations are the same, you know. Starting a book? Count me in. Starting my PlayStation? Count me in. Starting a fresh piece of copy bursting with clever ideas? Count me in. Starting my laptop to write a new piece? I’m already there, mates!
But starting a fresh business for self-dependency and a second income in a diminishing economy? Erm . . . well . . . I . . . uh . . . erm . . . sure?
My unwilling sacrifice of steeling myself from the better comforts of life to engage in my wife’s pursuits was a tale of tragedy even Homer couldn’t pen an epic about. Yet, my sweaty armpits did not dissuade the bubbling madness that was my wife, replete with the crazed expression of one patala-bent (lit: hellbent) on feeding people with savoury snacks on a Sunday evening.
However, the plot was about to thicken. Even before a potato filling was stirred into the cooking pan. We needed bread. Enough bread to run our experimental cloud kitchen shop from home.
Posterity always remembers the stories of Prometheus and Epimetheus—the titans of forethought and afterthought. I think the latter escaped its Mediterranean confinement and possessed my Arabian-sea-breezed partner in life.
It just so happened that I became privy to her conversation with the baker. Very loudly, and with the assured confidence of a chef ready to add a second Michelin star to her menu, she ordered forty (that’s 4-0, stitched together to eliminate any gaps, apart from kerning for readability) packets of paos, six per packet.
A sensible person would only go with a smaller test quantity—say, ten or fifteen.
An ambitious person would want to stock up for possible demand while limiting waste—say, twenty.
A sane person would first open a stall in the premises during celebratory activities and give the people that physical confidence of dealing with humans.
But my wife, with second helpings of all these qualities, went the insane route.
It was the next day when, while collecting the bread from a delivery man and dumping two cartons in our makeshift trolley (our toddler’s stroller), my wife had Epimetheus leave her body.
Remember that adage? Out of the pan and into the fire? In this case, the pan is Spanish for bread. And the fire is the aftertaste of that woeful afterthought left behind.
So far in this story, things are looking grim. And we hadn’t even tried out making dabelis yet. What could go wrong?
The two cartons of pao were witness to what did go wrong.
The entry to the kitchen, which shares its floor with a moored circular dining table that takes no sides when the lady of the house is locked in, was ringed with the halo of war: every light turned on, even that of the chimney.
There were sounds of chaos—a battlefield peppered with saltpetre masalas, potatoes lying crushed in the trenches of frying pans, onions massacred under Santoku steel, thick smoke snaking away through the chimney exhausts, exploded pomegranates with blood-red shrapnel everywhere, and paos subjected to second-degree crispy burns.
Soon, three appetising war memorials were erected, assembled from the remnants of this cocina sangrienta scene. And we were to taste them.
Now, I’m not one to brag, but my wife is one hell of a cook. The dabelis were the outcome she was clearly looking for. And I found them satiating that craving of a spicy, sour, sweet snack that I cannot put my finger on, because I was busy licking them. They were so good that I found myself drinking from the same well of confidence that my wife frequents. My eyes were sparkling. We could do it.
The second phase of the plan had begun.
In the war room, the map was laid. Everyone, sans our toddler, had their attention on getting the dabelis out there. But the hand of Epimetheus had not been lifted. A cold drop of calculated anxiety ran down my spine. Goosebumps unfurled to take in the dread. Eyes twitched with fomenting foreboding.
Naturally, I proceeded to make an ad poster on Canva and wrote a small copy to be posted on the society’s community message boards. We were ready to do business.
Business, however, was not ready to do us.
Nobody knew us. Nobody had sampled our dabelis. So, why would they ever place an order? But we weren’t thinking—neither straight, nor angularly.
Time, soon, slipped its hands under the duvet. The TV shied away from displaying clock counters on news channels. Our laptops preferred to go into sleep mode. Epimetheus was still sitting on the couch, lounging without meeting our eyes. At the stroke of midnight, he stood up titanically, exclaimed, “Ah! Now you know!” and barged coolly out of the door.
That was it for us. Tired and weary with the spoils of a war never fought, we retired to our dreams.
Only to wake up to a nightmare.
Those forty packets? We’d only consumed two. The rest loomed with the threat of storage, spoilage, and eventual dumping in the sewage (I challenged myself to not use “waste” here; I think I succeeded). We went with usage, however.
It would have been audacious to say “I told you so” at any point before this. But it was a new day, and I was feeling particularly testy, with an itch to tempt fate. My tongue, therefore, found it easy to slip this quadrisyllabic phrase.
Didn’t enjoy the look on my wife’s face, though. For the sake of drama, let’s say there were pao-sized puffs under her eyes. We had to deal with the consequences.
I think it’s time to give this a rest, now. For one, I’ve never had enough pao in my life in such a short span. We’ve used them for breakfast twice, and I just sat up after a pao-infused dinner. My wife just doesn’t want to look at another bun-shaped bread for a long time.
But I know her well. There will be a Pao-sized snack uprising soon.
Here’s to a Bready New Year!
