A Suitable Boy(103)

‘But there’s nothing to see,’ protested Kedarnath, covering his nose.

‘Have you been here before?’ asked Haresh.

‘No!’

Haresh laughed. ‘Stop here!’ he shouted at the rickshaw-wallah. Over Kedarnath’s protests, he got him to dismount, and the two of them entered the warren of stinking paths and low huts, led by their noses towards the tanning pits.

The dirt paths stopped suddenly at a large open area surrounded by shacks and pockmarked by circular pits which had been dug into the ground and lined with hardened clay. A fearsome stench rose from the entire zone. Haresh felt sick; Kedarnath almost vomited with disgust. The sun shone harshly down, and the heat made the stench worse still. Some of the pits were filled with a white liquid, others with a brown tannic brew. Dark, scrawny men dressed only in lungis stood to one side of the pits, scraping off fat and hair from a pile of hides. One of them stood in a pit and seemed to be wrestling with a large hide. A pig was drinking at a ditch filled with stagnant black water. Two children with filthy matted hair were playing in the dust near the pits. When they saw the strangers they stopped abruptly and stared at them.

‘If you had wanted to see the whole process from the beginning I could have taken you to see the ground where dead buffaloes are stripped and left to the vultures,’ said Kedarnath wryly. ‘It’s near the unfinished bypass.’

Haresh, slightly regretful for having forced his companion into accompanying him here, shook his head. He looked at the nearest shack, which was empty except for a rudimentary fleshing machine. Haresh went up and examined it. In the next shack was an ancient splitting machine and a wattle pit. Three young men were rubbing a black paste onto a buffalo hide lying on the ground. Next to them was a white pile of salted sheepskins. When they saw the strangers they stopped working and looked at them.

No one said a word, neither the children, nor the three young men, nor the two strangers.

Eventually Kedarnath broke the silence. ‘Bhai,’ he said, addressing one of the three young men. ‘We have just come to see how the leather is prepared. Would you show us around?’

The man looked at him closely, and then stared at Haresh, taking in his off-white silk shirt, his brogues, his briefcase, his businesslike air.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked Kedarnath.

‘We’re from the town. We’re on our way to Ravidaspur. There’s a local man there whom I work with.’

Ravidaspur was almost entirely a shoemaker’s neighbourhood. But if Kedarnath imagined that by implying that another leather-worker was a colleague of his he would win acceptance here among the tanners, he was mistaken. Even among the leather-workers or chamars, there was a hierarchy. The shoemakers – like the man they were going to visit – looked down upon the flayers and tanners. In turn, those who were looked down upon expressed their dislike of the shoemakers.

‘That is a neighbourhood we do not like to go to,’ said one of the young men shortly.

‘Where does the paste come from?’ asked Haresh, after a pause.

‘From Brahmpur,’ said the young man, refusing to be specific.

There was another long silence.

Then an old man appeared with his hands wet and dripping with some dark sticky liquid. He stood at the entrance of the shack and observed them.

‘You! This wattle water – pani!’ he said in English before lapsing into crude Hindi again. His voice was cracked, and he was drunk. He picked up ‘a piece of rough, red-dyed leather from the ground and said, ‘This is better than cherry leather from Japan! Have you heard of Japan? I had a fight with them, and I made them fail. Patent leather from China? I can match them all. I am sixty years old and I have a full knowledge of all pastes, all masalas, all techniques.’

Kedarnath began to get worried, and tried to move out of the shack. The old man barred his way by stretching his hands out sideways in a servile gesture of aggression. ‘You cannot see the pits. You are a spy from the CID, from the police, from the bank –’ He held his ears in a gesture of shame, then lapsed into English: ‘No, no, no, bilkul no!’

By now the stench and the tension had made Kedarnath somewhat desperate. His face was drawn, he was sweating with anxiety as much as heat. ‘Let us go, we have to get to Ravidaspur,’ he said.

The old man moved towards him and held out his stained and dripping hand: ‘Money!’ he said. ‘Feesl To drink – otherwise you cannot see the pits. You go to Ravidaspur. We don’t like the jatavs, we are not like them, they eat the meat of buffaloes. Chhhi!’ He spat out a syllable of disgust. ‘We only eat goats and sheep.’