What the Smell Never Tells You

My father used to say the smell disappears after the first year. It didn't disappear. I stopped noticing it, which is a different thing, and it took longer than a year.

I was born four streets from the tannery my grandfather worked in, in a house my father built with money my grandfather never had. That's the whole story of progress in Jajmau. You get a slightly better house in the same four streets, and everyone in it still coughs the same way by fifty.

My grandfather cut hides. My father worked the drums, the chromium baths, until his hands cracked along lines that never fully closed, not even in the years he wasn't working. I used to think that was just what old men's hands looked like. I was twenty before I understood it was a specific injury, with a specific cause, that a doctor could have named in one sentence if anyone had sent my father to one early enough.

I don't work in the tannery. I want to say that like it's a victory. It isn't, really. I do finishing work from home, buffing leather scraps that come to me already treated, and some days I still cough the same cough my father coughs, and there's a chromium smell on my hands by evening that soap doesn't fully take off. The exposure didn't end because I found a way around walking into the building. It just changed shape.

Here's what nobody explains to you growing up here: this work was never a choice in the way people mean when they say "choice." It's caste. It was caste before it was a job posting, and it's caste now, dressed up as an economic fact, as if the reason the tanneries are staffed the way they're staffed is coincidence, is just who happened to need the work. My family has been doing some version of this labor for longer than anyone can date precisely, and every generation, someone still says it like it's a mystery why.

Three years ago the government shut the tanneries down. Overnight, practically. A court order, something about the Ganga, and I understand the river matters, I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. But you should have seen who paid for it. Not the men who own the tanneries. Those men have other money, other businesses, houses outside Jajmau they can go sit in while the order gets sorted out in a court that takes its time. The women here started doing two and three finishing jobs a day. A family two doors down sold their bit of land back to a moneylender at half what it was worth, to eat for the four months the tanneries stayed closed. Then the tanneries reopened, because they always do, because nobody actually stops needing leather, and everyone went back to the same buildings with the same untreated pipes and called it a resolution.

I used to think there'd be a moment where someone connected all of it out loud, the caste, the chemicals, the closures that punish the workers and never the owners, and something would actually move. I don't think that anymore. I think it gets written about. People come through Jajmau sometimes with notebooks, or now with phones, and they ask us questions with real concern in their faces, and then they leave, and the piece runs somewhere, and the CETP is still undersized, and my son is seven and already has his father's cough in miniature.

I'm not telling you this so you feel something briefly and move on. I've watched that happen enough times to know exactly what it looks like from this side of it. I'm telling you because my son is seven, and I want, at minimum, for someone reading this to understand that when his hands start cracking in fifteen years, it won't be bad luck. It will be the fourth time it's happened in this family, in this house, on this street, and every time it happens somebody calls it something other than what it is.

Translated by: Gowthamm Mandala