October 8, 2013, Jajmau, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

My eyes watered, nose ran, lungs burned. I wasn’t sick, but I sure felt like it.

We’d spent the day wandering through Jajmau, a “suburb” of Kanpur - the Manchester of the East - and touring its tanneries. Lying just south of sprawling Kanpur, Jajmau is the epicenter of India’s leather industry, with tanneries of every size, every ilk, lining large boulevards and narrow alleys, tumbling upon one another down to the banks of the Ganges.