Running Out of Breath—Page 4

Despite the problems, there is some hope for Kanpur. The authorities have a plan, for instance, to shift all of the city's tempos from diesel to CNG engines; the switch is happening very slowly, but once completed, it should improve the quality of air. Perhaps one day, the state and city officials, whose faces beam down on Kanpur's residents from hoardings throughout the city, will see the benefits of such an initiative and be inspired to confront pollution with a greater sense of urgency. But for now, the locals, who are nothing if not enterprising, have come up with their own ways to survive the pollution.

Enter Jajmau, the suburb that is home to Kanpur's 350 tanneries, and the foul air assaults you almost at once. Behind the tanneries lies the slum of Monanagar, where perhaps a hundred people live in a few concrete sheds near the banks of the Ganges. This is the most polluted part of the most polluted suburb of Kanpur. The air is unbearably bad—perhaps the worst in the entire city.

Faced with pollution like this—pollution that is so overwhelming, so omnipresent—maybe the only escape is to cling to a kind of mystical faith that, at a certain point, the stench is powerful enough to become purifying. A few feet away from the colony is a series of black pots, bubbling with a black liquid and emitting smoke. Mohammad Anees, who is perhaps 25 years old, or 26, or 27—he doesn't really know—is watching over one of the pots. Anees explains that the tanneries send their putrid waste—piles of shredded leather—to this slum. He and the other slum dwellers boil the leather in the black pots, extract the animal fat that remains in the skins, and sell the fat to soapmakers. "If we don't take this stuff from the tanneries, it will cause diarrhea and diseases among the workers there," he says. Isn't he concerned that the waste will make him sick instead? Anees, who wears a talismanic amulet around his neck to ward off disease, as many poor in Kanpur do, shakes his head. "The smoke from this pot is what saves me," he says. The others in the slum agree. They too seem to believe, as Anees does, that all of them would have contracted tuberculosis amid this squalor, but for the magic fumes from these black pots. Sensing skepticism on the face of a stranger, Anees steps aside from his smoking black pot and gestures with his hand: "Try it for yourself."

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