My father has been a baker since 1996, and he says a bakery only teaches you one lesson, but it teaches it about twice a year: everything breaks at once, or nothing breaks at all.
On the fourteenth of September 2018 we had an order for three hundred loaves. A wedding in the next street, six hundred guests, bread on the tables by seven in the morning.
The big oven broke down at ten o'clock that night, with the first ninety loaves inside it.
"Take them out," my father said. "All of them. Now."
We took them out and put them on the cold trays by the window, and my brother went to bring the van round so we could drive the dough to the bakery in Yangiobod. The van broke down at the end of our own street. At half past eleven we ran out of gas as well, and at midnight my mother sat down on a chair in the middle of the floor and laughed, because there was nothing left to do about any of it.
That was when somebody turned up at the back door.
It was Rahim aka from number nine. We had fallen out with his family in 2015 over a metre and a half of yard, and my father had not spoken to him since. He stood in the doorway in his coat and said one sentence: "My oven is empty until five."
We carried dough down the street in basins, forty kilos at a time. Rahim aka turned his oven on at ten past one. My father looked after the fire and never once looked at Rahim aka's face, and Rahim aka put up with that for four hours without one word about it.
The bread went out at ten past six. Three hundred and four loaves, because my mother worked out that we would count wrong somewhere and made four extra.
The two men did not apologise to each other. They did not make up with words at all. They made up with three hundred loaves of bread, and the metre and a half of yard has never been mentioned again by anybody in either house.