I thought the trade had died long ago — when I heard his cry this morning at my gate “Shaana pudikaradha shaana, shaana Kathi.” It was the knife sharpener come again after many many years and I was excited: another memory of Chennai was at my doorstep.
Although I really didn’t have any knives to be sharpened, I raced to the gate and invited the shaana man in — just for the sake of old times, a chat, and to see if the trade had changed in any way. Last things first, the shaana man still carried his livelihood on his back and despite all the technological advancements in the world, this hadn’t changed: A whetstone driven by a wheel, which rested on a wooden frame.
Technology couldn’t be simpler. He set the treadle down on my portico while I went inside and returned with a few knives for him to sharpen. I handed them to him; “Twenty rupees per knife,” he said smartly in English. ‘Well some things had changed’, I thought to myself: The shanamans I recalled didn’t speak any English and I remembered paying about 1/5th what this man quoted. But I didn’t negotiate — I just wished to see how he worked.
As soon as I gave him the knives the shaanaman set his foot to the pedal. His hands ran the blade of the knife, slowly but surely against the fast-spinning whetstone; sparks flew. He pulled the knife back and across and then back and across until the dull edge became burnished glinting silver. He turned the knife over and repeated the exercise on the other side. Oh, how I enjoyed watching him. All the while that his finger pressed the edge of the knife against the whetstone I asked him questions. “How long have you been in this trade?”
“For the past 30 years, my father was a shaanaman. Those were the days when Madras had large houses and large kitchens, and people used to cook at home and used knives and aruvamanais to cut vegetables in the kitchen. Whenever I went to a house the lady of the house would bring all the knives, aruvamanais, choppers and cleaves and just dump them in a pile before me.”
And now?
“Nowadays, everything has changed in Chennai. There are lots of hotels. Many don’t seem to cook at home. When a knife gets blunt, people throw it away and buy a new one. Mine is a dying trade.”
I listened and watched as his practised hands and eyes moved back and forth, and the blade of the knife made a rasping noise as it passed the rim of the whetstone. He had sharpened two knives and a pair of scissors during the course of his chat. He slowed his pedaling and ran the blade one last time against the whetstone, as I watched fascinated.
He handed the knives to me and asked me to run my finger along the edge to test its sharpness. One flick told me how sharp it was; no Sheffield or Victorinox could match it.
I had one last question: How long will you and this trade go on? “Another few years. The younger generation in Chennai won’t even know there was a trade like ours,” he said.