A Suitable Boy(104)
Kedarnath shrank back. Haresh began to get annoyed.
The old man sensed that he had got under his skin. This gave him a perverse sense of encouragement. Mercenary, suspicious and boastful by turn, he now led them towards the pits. ‘We get no money from the government,’ he whispered. ‘We need money, each family, for buying materials, chemicals. The government gives us too little money. You are my Hindu brother,’ he said mockingly. ‘Bring me a bottle – I will give you samples of the best dyes, the best liquor, the best medicine!’ He laughed at his joke. ‘Look!’ He pointed at a reddish liquid in a pit.
One of the young men, a short man who was blind in one eye, said, ‘They stop us from moving raw materials, stop us from getting chemicals. We have to have supporting documents and registration. We are harassed in transit. You tell your government department to exempt us from duty and give us money. Look at our children. Look –’ He gestured towards a child who was defecating on a rubbish heap.
To Kedarnath the whole slum was unbearably vile. He said in a low voice: ‘We are not from a government department.’
The young man suddenly got annoyed. His lips tightened and he said: ‘Where are you from then?’ The eyelid over his blind eye began to twitch. ‘Where are you from? Why have you come here? What do you want from this place?’
Kedarnath could tell that Haresh was about to flare up. He sensed that Haresh was abrupt and quite fearless, but believed that it was pointless being fearless when there was something to fear. He knew how things could suddenly explode from acrimony into violence. He put one arm around Haresh’s shoulder and led him back between the pits. The ground oozed, and the lower part of Haresh’s brogues was splattered with black filth.
The young man followed them, and at one point it seemed that he was about to lay his hands on Kedarnath. ‘I’ll recognize you,’ he said. ‘You don’t come back. You want to make money from our blood. There is more money in leather than in silver and gold – or you wouldn’t come to this stinking place.’
‘No – no –’ said the drunken old man aggressively, ‘bilkul no!’
Kedarnath and Haresh re-entered the neighbouring lanes; the stench was hardly better. Just at the opening of a lane, at the periphery of the open, pit-riddled ground, Haresh noticed a large red stone, flat on the top. On it a boy of about seventeen had laid a piece of sheepskin, largely cleaned of wool and fat. With a fleshing knife he was removing the remaining pieces of flesh off the skin. He was utterly intent upon what he was doing. The skins piled up nearby were cleaner than they could have been if they had been fleshed by a machine. Despite what had happened before, Haresh was fascinated. Normally he would have stopped to ask a few questions, but Kedarnath hurried him on.
The tanners had left them. Haresh and Kedarnath, dust-covered and sweating, made their way back through the dirt paths. When they got to their rickshaw on the street they gratefully breathed in the air that had seemed at first unbearably foul. And indeed, compared to what they had taken in for the last half-hour, it was the breath of paradise.
4.5
AFTER waiting in the heat for fifteen minutes for a late, long and very slow goods train to pass a level crossing, they finally got to Ravidaspur. It was somewhat less crowded in the lanes of this outlying neighbourhood than in the old heart of Brahmpur where Kedarnath lived, but far more insanitary, with sluggish sewage trickling along and across the lanes. Picking their way between flea-ridden dogs, grunting filth-spattered pigs and various unpleasant static objects, and crossing an open sewer on a rickety wooden bridge, they found their way to Jagat Ram’s small, rectangular, windowless brick-and-mud workshop. At night after the work was cleared away, this was where his six children slept; he and his wife usually slept in a brick-walled room with a corrugated iron roof which he had built on top of the flat roof of the workshop.
Several men and two young boys were working inside by the sunlight entering through the doorway and a couple of dim, bare electric bulbs. They were dressed in lungis for the most part, except for one man, who was dressed in kurta-pyjama, and Jagat Ram himself, who wore a shirt and trousers. They were sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of low platforms – square in shape and made of grey stone – on which their materials were placed. They were intent on their work – cutting, skiving, pasting, folding, trimming or hammering – and their heads were bent down, but from time to time one or the other would make a comment – about work or personal gossip or politics or the world in general – and this would lead to a little ripple of conversation among the sounds of hammers, knives, and the single pedal-operated Singer sewing machine.