Anand had lived alone for ten years and had been good at it, which is a different thing from being happy at it. The lockdown did not frighten him the way it frightened the families; solitude was his native country and he held a lifelong passport. What undid him, in the second month, was the yeast.
He had started a sourdough culture out of boredom — flour and water and patience, a small living thing on his counter that needed him at the same hour every day. It thrived. It thrived so violently that by week three he was producing more bread than one quiet man could eat, golden blistered loaves cooling on every surface, the smell of them filling a flat that had not smelled of anything for a decade.
So he began to leave them. A loaf in a paper bag outside 12C at dawn, before anyone could see. Another at 12A, where a baby had been crying for weeks. No note, no name — just bread, warm, on the mat, as if the building itself had decided to feed its own. He told himself it was only to use up the surplus. He did not yet admit that he set three alarms now, that the culture had given his shapeless days a spine, or that for the first time in ten years he was making something for the specific purpose of someone else's morning.
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