To the utter confusion of one onlooker, Naresh Lal drives up to the open factory in his Hyundai Verna and immediately proceeds to strip down to singlet and underwear. Like Munnilal, he relishes working with his hands, and the seat of his formal trousers bear large smudges of clay. Even in the late afternoon sun, he squats over a thin carpet of wet clay, pounding the air out of it with his palms. At least 40 tandoors in various stages of completion are drying around him; in his storage shed, he counts 98 finished tandoors. One batch of six has been packed for export to Qatar; another batch of three is headed to Australia.
Naresh Lal’s technique varies slightly from Munnilal’s. In addition to clay, he uses black mud collected from sugar cane fields in Haryana and Punjab, and instead of goat hair, he uses horsehair. There are two other ingredients, but Naresh Lal refuses to reveal them to the public: “There is such a thing as a trade secret, after all.”
For what is, in its essence, still a traditional, artisanal craft, tandoor-making is enjoying a boom like never before, Naresh Lal says. “Right now, 75% of my demand is from overseas, and for comparison, I was making only 400 tandoors a year 10 years ago,” he says. “There are plenty of manufacturers who make tandoors that crack within six months, and then those customers come to us, because our tandoors can last even two years with proper care.”
Munnilal might disagree with at least a part of that statement; he insists that Naresh Lal does not know how to make a good tandoor. But he agrees with Naresh Lal’s roseate view of the market. “It’s a tough art, I’ll admit. A man cannot learn it fast, he needs five or 10 years to become a master,” Munnilal says. “But I learnt to work with mud, and I sent my children to college by working with mud. That’s my biggest achievement.”