The gulf between Naresh Lal and Munnilal notwithstanding, their factories still lie within a few kilometres of each other, in northern Delhi. In a village named Bhalaswa, otherwise famous for its landfill, Munnilal makes tandoors in a higgledy-piggledy complex of buildings, in an alley known locally as Tandoori Gali. He makes so many that they spill over on to the road, large clay pots standing like silent signals of the activity in this neighbourhood.
In a small metalworking shop, Munnilal’s assistants cut and weld sheets of metal into the cubical outer cases of commercial tandoors. (“Over a period of time, the tandoor makers woke up to the changes in the industry,” says Sonia Mahindra, director of Under One Roof, a restaurant consultancy. “So they started making the outers as well as the clay inners.”) Munnilal and his two brothers, however, are always to be found in a shed next door, dressed in singlets and trousers, mucking about with clay.
Every week, Munnilal has a truckload of terracotta-quality clay dumped into his front yard. With this clay, and with sawdust and goat hair mixed in to bind it all together, he makes a thin, foot-high ring; after allowing it to dry, he builds a second ring on top, and then another, curving the top of the final ring into a neck. (“My father used to use horse dung as binder, but we replaced that with sawdust,” Munnilal says.) When he has raised them incrementally thus, almost like children, he sends them off into the world to make their daily bread. The most spare clay tandoor costs Rs1,500; the biggest size, in its metalled shell, can cost more than Rs30,000.
It was in this workshop, Munnilal claims, that Naresh Lal first learnt the art of fabricating a tandoor. “He was an accountant earlier, and then he gave that up and joined me. I took him to Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore with me, when I went there to make or install tandoors,” Munnilal says. “But then he saw the volume of work, and he slowly started siphoning business away to himself and started his own company.” And then, most witheringly, Munnilal adds: “His name isn’t even Naresh Lal, it’s Naresh Kumar. He added the ‘Lal’ just to demonstrate that he was of this family.”
Naresh Lal insists, however, that the split was amicable, and that he still considers Munnilal his teacher and mentor. His factory, a little distance north of Munnilal’s, lies dispersed over Saroop Nagar; his metal shop and corporate office occupy one building, a storage shed is a few streets away, and his clay tandoor “factory”, with its 10 itinerant workers, is really an open plot of land surrounded by other open plots of land on Saroop Nagar’s outskirts. It looks considerably less scientific and more ad hoc than Munnilal’s workshop.
“When I was a boy, I was always the one trying to avoid doing this work, although my brothers and sisters all helped out with making tandoors,” Naresh Lal says. “It’s ironic that they’re all doing something else now, and I’m the one getting my hands dirty. But I love doing it now.”