Three Neighborhoods
Idlers, butchers, woodworkers.
Cover artwork by Juan Brufal.
Haldwani, July 2025
I hate the new butcher. He’s sickly, resentful, and ashamed of his trade. He badmouths his customers when they aren’t around. “This one,” he points to the balding fat man waddling over to his scooter with his black bag of meat, “he buys two kilos every day. He is, you know…” He brings an invisible bottle to his lips. I pretend to not get him. He leans forward and whispers, “booze”.
He disapproves of me visiting him daily. He has warned me of the dangers of bodybuilding and too-much-protein in a million veiled ways. He’ll lighten the scale by 50 grams if I don’t have my eyes on it. I hate his friends too. Like him they’re bony and jealous. They smoke all shifty-eyed like teenagers. Sometimes from afar I see them put out their cigarettes and scurry into the shop when our eyes meet. They’re all my age.
I had asked after the other guy when I returned to the town after a couple months. He hadn’t really answered my question. From his forehead and eyes I know they’re kin. The other butcher was married and had a kid. He had let himself go, but you could see those early years of bodybuilding on his shoulders and chest. Cleaver in hand he looked the part. He’d tell me stories from when he was a bouncer in Delhi nightclubs and the frames I was to look for in the couple films he was an extra in. A lot of his friends were his protégés. “This one,” he once announced with pride as he patted this bearded lug’s back, “he’s preparing for Sheru Classic despite his shoulder injury.”
I regret never asking him his name.
Almora, July 2023.
The ‘hotel’ is someone’s house on a cliff by the road and our ‘room’ is a spare kitchen with a couple beds thrown in. I got what I paid for, and the host is warm, the room is clean, and there’s free Wi-Fi; I have no complaints. My brother and I want to get some shuteye but there’s some guest in the living room and the walls are thin.
“The boy’s always had a streak of the devil in him, Kamla. Forty years and all he has given me is pain. He used to be such a sweet boy. Then him borrowing your daughter’s frocks, his glowering rage and theft of cattle and that monstrous appetite, eating food meant for twenty-five and all the paint off our walls…took him turning diabetic and losing a toe to calm down. Painting the house yellow helped; give my regards to the old lady. I’ll bring her a basket of fruits the next time I walk by the temple. Now he’s back. God knows what he’ll do now.”
I see him as we return from the literature festival: the jowly overgrown boy in spectacles on the roof of the yellow house beside our hotel, his fat chest spilling over the balcony, sweeping the road with his eyes. We see each other and he does not look away.
Nainital, November 2024.
The woodworker pulls out a small pine slab from a shelf and points to its xylem rings. “There’s more to these than just getting to a tree’s age, see.” His hovering finger halts over a ring thicker than the rest. Tapping it he says, “It must have snowed heavily this year. The tree grew thicker skin to protect itself.”
Outside there’s a chill in the air. Against that cloudless expanse of delirious blue, Naina Peak’s rugged face appears to be magnifying every passing second, lit up like a hill of gold while I look up at it from Ayarpatta’s cedar-scented shadows, tinged with the cool blue sheen of that boundless psychedelic sky.
This place feels familiar. The woodworker says his grandma used to run a kindergarten on the property. A neighbor taught here, I remember. All slides and swings and seesaws have vanished from the backyard. You can’t miss the workshop’s entrance: a huge circle with half-moon double doors. “I got that from Lord of the Rings.”
The world resides in his workshop. All shelves are crammed with wood from distant continents: there are blocks of wenge, zebrawood, and ebony from Africa, cabinets of Indonesian padauk and Chilean purpleheart, slabs of Alpine spruce, American cherry and Australian gumwood, stumps and beams of local haldu, oak, shisham, sal, toon, and many more. Japanese azebiki saws and kanna handplanes hang from a tool wall among chisels and spokeshaves and whittling knives. A giant lathe rests in a corner with a warning in bold stenciled across—CAUTION! THIS MACHINE HAS NO BRAIN USE YOUR OWN.
The woodworker is tall and bald and heavy-set. His enthusiasm is infectious. “Trees are honest, ruthless memoirists.” He shows me scars from leopard claws and fungal diseases and eras of feasts and famines forever inscribed within those layers of xylem. He crafts everything from cabinets inspired by Barcelona’s Casa Mila to lathe chisels and shave horses. Sometimes he teaches shop in one of the old colonial schools, in a century-old tunnel he turned into a maker-space himself. “They stored coal there for the students’ baths well into the eighties. When we reopened it in the pandemic we found some interesting stuff: old bells and lamps and a couple vinyl records from the Woodstock Festival, belonging to one Nina Buck. She’s alive, turns out. I mailed the records to her home in America.”
Delightful read!
Fantastic read. Really really enjoyed it.