A good part of my wonder years was spent salivating over the goodies of our friendly neighbourhood bakery, Kamrup Bakery, a Willy Wonka’s den of freshly-baked delicacies in Guwahati. The moment the shutters went up, appetising aromas would waft out, lasso unsuspecting passersby, and lure them inside the bakery. Bread was available either sliced, or as loaves – nothing more. Simple choices for a simple life, as far as bread was concerned. Brown, focaccia, baguette, bagel, multi-grain, gluten-free – these are words that we heard only when cousins came to visit us from faraway lands. In fact, scratch gluten-free from the list. Don’t think it existed then. Even for butter – Amul. Or jam – Kissan. The other choices, however, resulted in delicious confusion. The glass shelves with wooden borders made it easier to point out to the chosen one – cream rolls, jam rolls, custard rolls, boiled cakes, fruit cakes, glass cakes, and birthday cakes with icing so strong that one bite would be enough to uproot a couple of milk teeth. Then there were the biscuits – sweet biscuits embedded with peanuts, salty biscuits with nigella seeds, plain vanilla biscuits, and lastly, the ‘S’ biscuits. The ‘S’ biscuits – they were shaped like ‘S’ – were quite big in size, and tough, and when out of the eyesight of the elders, it would be used as missiles to keep errant siblings in line.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyWhenever we visited Kamrup Bakery, samples would be distributed liberally to aid our decision-making process. The regulars would just have to step in and before one could finish lamenting about the price of hilsa fish in the festive season, neat brown-paper packages with scrawls that could give doctors a complex would be waiting at the cashier. In the afternoon, snacks such as singras (more commonly known as samosa), egg chops and chicken rolls would be available. Back when MTV was revolutionising the world of music, scrumptious chicken and mutton cutlets snuck out of tea garden club kitchens and made their presence felt in a designated corner of Kamrup Bakery, labelled ‘Hot Snacks’. They were served in floral-patterned circular paper plates, with a generous pour of mint chutney on the side, and minus the stuffy colonial club atmosphere where white-gloved attendants would look down upon the non-regulars with practised disdain. When unexpected guests would land up, as they did before WhatsApp uncles came into existence, my bounden duty was to run out from the back door, and head straight to Kamrup Bakery. If there were any change left, it’d be used to buy a packet of spicy potato chips that were sold under the brand name of ‘Hot Chips’. It was that simple.The becoming-an-adult stage of my life ensured that I landed in a city far away from Kamrup Bakery. Slowly but surely, like all pleasant memories of childhood, they receded gracefully to that special place where they waited patiently to be revived again.And revive they did, many years later when I was roaming around aimlessly in Bara Bazar, Shillong. The heady aroma of just-out-of-the-oven bread helped me sniff out Mr. Biswas’s modest bakery. There was something about Biswas Bakery that sent me traipsing down memory lane.A bit on the bashful side, Mr. Biswas lent an attentive ear as I recounted tales of my favourite bakery. I picked up some old favourites. As I was about to leave, I noticed his assistant keeping a fresh batch of nankhatai on the counter. I immediately ordered a kilo of it. Mr. Biswas packed a kilo in his finest brown paper bag without any fancy logos, slapped a strip of cellophane, and handed it over. When I took out my wallet, he vehemently refused to accept any money. “No charge, please,” he smiled.Be it 1980 or 2025, you can be sure of one thing – you always part on a sweet note at a bakery in Guwahati.Mriganka Kalita is a writer and photographer. We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.