Haresh, noticing her embarrassment, liked her for it, and smiled; as usual his eyes disappeared. ‘No. I will ask for Baoji’s blessing, naturally, but not for his consent. He knows that I feel strongly about my engagements.’
After a few moments of silence, Lata said:
‘I see you like Hardy.’
‘Yes,’ said Haresh. ‘But not The Well Beloved.’ Then he looked at his watch and said: ‘I have enjoyed this so much that I’ve lost track of the time. I have to do a bit of work at the factory, but I wonder if you’d like to come and see where I work? I don’t want to hide anything from you; the atmosphere there is a little different from Elm Villa. Today I have managed to get the use of the car, so I could either take you there or have you dropped at Mr Kakkar’s place. But perhaps you’ll want to rest a little. It’s a hot day and you must be tired.’
This time it was Lata who said, ‘I would like to see the factory. But could I first—?’
Haresh indicated the bathroom.
Before she emerged she looked at the dressing table. Here too everything was neatly and methodically laid out: the Kent combs, the badger-hair shaving brush, the solidified stick of Pinaud deodorant that lent a cool fragrance to the warm day. Lata rubbed a little on the inside of her left wrist, and came out smiling. It was not that she didn’t like Haresh. But the thought of their getting married was ridiculous.
9.11
She was no longer smiling a little later in the stench of the tannery. Haresh had to take the new employee Lee around CLFC’s own tannery to show him the various kinds of leather (other than sheep, which they bought on the open market) that were available for making shoes. Lee’s designs would depend partly on the leather available; and in his turn he could influence the choice of colours that the tannery would supply in the future. Haresh’s nose, after a year at CLFC, was somewhat used to its distinctive smell, but Mrs Rupa Mehra felt almost faint, and Lata sniffed her left wrist from time to time, amazed that Lee and Haresh could treat the foul stench almost as if it didn’t exist.
Haresh was quick to explain to Lata’s mother that the hides were from ‘fallen animals’, in other words cows that had died a natural death and had not, as in other countries, been slaughtered. He said that they did not accept hides from Muslim slaughterhouses. Mr Lee gave her a reassuring smile, and she looked a little less miserable if not much more enthusiastic.
After a quick visit to the temporary storage godowns where the hides lay piled in salt, they went to the soaking pits. Men with orange rubber gloves were pulling the swollen hides out with grappling-hooks and transferring them to the liming drums where the hair and fat would be removed. As Haresh explained the various processes — de-hairing, de-liming, pickling, chrome tanning and so on — in a voice of enthusiasm, Lata felt a sudden revulsion for his work, and a sense of disquiet about someone who could enjoy this sort of thing. Haresh meanwhile was continuing confidently: ‘But once you have it at the wet-blue stage, it’s easy enough to see what comes next: fat liquoring, samming, splitting, shaving, dyeing, setting, drying, and then there we are! The leather that we actually think of as leather! All the other processes — glazing, boarding, ironing and so on — are optional, of course.’
Lata looked at the lean, exhausted, bearded man who was squeezing the water out of the wet-blue leather with the help of a roller press, then at Mr Lee, who had gone over to have a word with him.
Mr Lee’s Hindi was unusual, and Lata, the rebellion of her nose and eyes notwithstanding, could not help listening to him with interest. He appeared to be knowledgeable not only about shoe design and manufacture but about tanning as well. Soon Haresh had joined them, and they were talking about the reduced volume of hides that went through the tannery during the monsoon weeks, when air-drying was difficult and tunnel-drying had to be resorted to.
Suddenly remembering something, Haresh said, ‘Mr Lee, I recall some Chinese tanners from Calcutta telling me that in Chinese there is a word, a special word for ten thousand. Is that so?’
‘Oh yes, in proper Peking Chinese it is called “wan”.’
‘And a wan of wans?’
Mr Lee looked at Haresh in surprise, and, scribbling with the index finger of his right hand on the palm of his left he drew an imaginary character and said something like ‘ee’—to rhyme with his own name.
‘Ee?’ said Haresh.
Mr Lee repeated the word.
‘Why do you have such words?’ asked Haresh.
Mr Lee smiled sweetly. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you?’
By now Mrs Rupa Mehra was feeling so weak that she had to ask Haresh to take her out of the tannery.
‘Do you want to go to the factory then, where I work?’
‘No, Haresh, thank you, that’s very sweet of you, but we should go home now. Mr Kakkar will be waiting for us.’
‘It will just take twenty minutes, and you can meet Mr Mukherji, my boss. Really, we are doing wonderful work there. And I’ll show you the set-up for the new department.’
‘Some other time. Actually, I am feeling the heat a little—’
Haresh turned to Lata. Though she was putting on a brave front, her nose was crinkling upwards.
Haresh, suddenly realizing what the matter was, said: ‘The smell — the smell. Oh — but you should have told me. I’m sorry — you see, I hardly give it a thought.’
‘No, no,’ said Lata, a bit ashamed of herself. Somewhere within her had risen an atavistic revulsion against the whole polluting business of hides and carrion and everything associated with leather.
But Haresh was very apologetic. While taking them back to the car he explained that this was a comparatively odourless tannery! Not far away, there was a whole locality with tanneries on both sides of the road, whose wastes and effluents were left in the open to dry or stagnate. At one time there had been a drain that took the stuff to the river, the holy Ganga itself, but there had been objections, and now there was no outlet at all. And people were very funny, said Haresh — they accepted what they had seen since childhood — shavings of leather and other offal strewn all around — they took it all for granted. (Haresh waved his arms to support his contention.) Sometimes he saw cartloads of hides coming in from villages or marketplaces being pulled by buffaloes who were almost dead themselves. ‘And of course in a week or two, when the monsoons come, it won’t be worth drying these shavings, so they’ll just let them lie and rot. And with the heat and the rain — well, you can imagine what the smell is like. It’s as bad as the tanning pits on the way to Ravidaspur — in your own city of Brahmpur. There even I had to hold my nose.’
The allusion was lost on Lata and Mrs Rupa Mehra, who would no more have dreamed of going to Ravidaspur than to Orion.
Mrs Rupa Mehra was about to ask Haresh when he had been to Brahmpur when the stench once more overpowered her.
‘I’m going to take you back at once,’ said Haresh decisively.
He sent a message that he would be back a little late at the factory and summoned the car. On the way back to Mr Kakkar’s house he said, a little humbly: ‘Well, someone has to make shoes.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra said: ‘But you don’t work in the tannery, do you, Haresh?’
‘Oh, no!’ said Haresh. ‘Normally I only visit it about once a week. I work in the main factory.’