Siddhartha Deb
Siddhartha Deb (b.1970) is the author of two novels, The Point of Return and Surface, and an acclaimed work of non-fiction, The Beautiful and the Damned. Born in north-east India, educated in India and Columbia University, he now lives in Manhattan, where he teaches creative writing at The New School.
From the days of the British the collieries in Bihar had pitted cheap human labour and expensive heavy machinery against the earth, so that there was no reason to think the Gajalitand colliery would be unusual or different. I was told that it was much like the twenty other mines operated in the region by the Bharat Coking Coal Limited and that my assignment was routine and uncomplicated; when I arrived there I found that both men and machines had been run dry against that harsh, unforgiving soil.
I took the Coalfield Express from Calcutta to Dhanbad and found a jeep that would let me off at the colliery. The swarms of people at the railway station gave it the air of a refugee camp, and that impression was only confirmed as the jeep entered the countryside. The paddy fields we passed were barren and forsaken, interrupted by dry, rocky stretches of land and deserted slag heaps. Black, unmanned trolleys appeared above us occasionally, jerking along on their wires like old, run-down toys. Gajalitand seemed no better at first sight, with a dog stretching itself under the awning of a little stall near the entrance to the colliery. Across the road, where the land sloped down to a bare stretch of ground littered with fragments of coal before it rose steeply again, there was a small figure bending down, its right hand moving mechanically from the ground to a cloth bag it held in the other hand. From the distance, warped and bent by the heat, it looked like a child, but I couldn’t be certain.
The colliery office stood on the hill across from the road, its verandas and the loading station next to it covered with a fine black dust. From there, one could see across the dips and rises to the main pit that fell under the Gajalitand colliery division. Large, strange-looking machines were scattered through the landscape, some of them sinking into the ground under their own weight, the red rust on the machines gradually giving way to the blackened soil that was everywhere. A row of kamins, women workers, were silhouetted against the skyline, the baskets on their heads like inverted hats as they carried coal to the platform of the weighing station. A green BCCL truck was backed up under the chute leading down from the weighing station, the rocks and dust unloaded by the kamins pouring down in a steady stream, in the background the same stunted figure ceaselessly bending and straightening to the dictates of the bag in its hand. Over all this lay a haze created by smoke from the main pit, billowing out in a thick cloud as it emerged from a rusty funnel, spreading slowly over the kamins, the truck and the figure filling the bag, finally effacing the entire scene as if I had imagined everything, including my journey.
I worked in a small room in a corner of the office bungalow, starting early so as to stay ahead of the heat. Pandey and Mukherjee, the manager and assistant manager, came in from Dhanbad around eleven. The engineer, an Anglo-Indian called Coelho, stayed nearby in the company quarters. By the time I made my way to the office, he had already completed one of his numerous descents into the pit and was drinking tea on the veranda, looking sleepless but vibrating with a kind of nervous energy as he sat there with his dusty boots placed upside down against the railing.
The three officials had reacted strangely to my presence among them. Pandey was reserved, even cold; when I introduced myself as the new accountant, he merely nodded and had me shown to my room in the office. A tiny, dark woman, her wrinkled face like a crumpled paper bag, brought me the books in pairs, touching her forehead each time she put them on my desk. Someone had painted a large “Om” with sandalwood paste on the first register, but when I opened it I found that the initial thirty pages had been torn out. It was not an auspicious beginning.
The deputy manager, on the other hand, was an outgoing man. He had arranged for my flat in the colliery quarters to be opened and cleaned, and he came into my office every day to slap me on the back. On a couple of occasions, he even invited me to join him on birdshoots at a lake in Dhanbad, but he was astonishingly vague about his responsibilities or mine. The only man who acknowledged that I had come to the colliery to work was the engineer, and his recognition was a double-edged sword.
Through the open door of my room, I would see Coelho surveying my desk with an intense, piercing gaze. Sometimes he came right in, usually during the long afternoons when I was struggling with the heavy ledgers, their pages mysteriously blank or torn out. He would sit across from my desk watching me as I went through old, bloated folders and tried to figure out from the vague purchase vouchers and invoices what goods or services had been procured and from whom. He wasn’t that much older than me, perhaps in his late twenties, and he would have been a welcome presence in Gajalitand if it had not been for his questions.
“Not called the head office yet?” he asked me on an afternoon when Mukherjee and Pandey were absent.
“They told me not to call with complaints,” I replied a little tersely. “Perhaps they knew I would achieve nothing.”
“What is the grand design?” he asked.
“The only design I see is a big “Om” on one of the registers. Here, take a look.”
“But you are in the know surely?” he said. “Certainly, you are quite aware of the plans they have.”
“Look, Coelho, I’m here because I applied for forty-two jobs and got one. I would have preferred a bank posting, but in this market you take whatever you get.”
“Beggars cannot be choosers, certainly,” he said, nodding his head vigorously as if I had offered him some fundamental insight into life. “Yet you are clearly too qualified for this job. We have not seen an accountant here for years. But only now, when there is talk of assessing all the mines, you come down from Calcutta with your coloured pencils.”
“Coelho, I don’t even have an accounting degree. I’m just a commerce graduate. That’s why I’m here, sweating through the evenings by myself, miles from a town where one might find a restaurant or a film show. If I was a proper accountant, I would be with PricewaterhouseCoopers, flying first class to Delhi from Calcutta right now, with Gajalitand a speck on the ground below.”
Coelho wasn’t satisfied. He sat quietly for a while, pushing his long hair back across his scalp, leaving black streaky trails on his forehead. The office was quiet in the absence of Mukherjee and Pandey, who had left earlier in the afternoon with a fat, mean-looking man they had referred to by the mysterious title of “colliery agent”.
“Look Coelho, do you think it’s such a bad thing for these mines to be assessed? They can’t run on like this, you know.” He seemed taken aback, as if I held him responsible for the state of the books I was looking at. “But it’s a very good thing,” he said. “It should have been done so long ago.” Then he looked around him, to the room where Pandey and Mukherjee usually took their naps, lowered his voice, and said, “You would be surprised how profitable the mines are, even if the profits don’t show up there.” He pointed at my table. “Those books can tell you nothing of how things really are, just as sitting in the office won’t help you understand how the colliery operates. The truth hides underground here, invisible unless you look for it. I have seen the truth, and I am uncomfortable with it.” He fell silent as one of the women in the office came in with two cups of tea.
I didn’t understand the exact nature of Coelho’s worries, but there was enough in his disjointed comments to feed my own anxieties. I should have been grateful that I had been left alone by the managers, but Coelho’s edginess about the colliery brought to the surface everything I had noticed and then pushed aside. The head office had sent me to create order, to work out a system for the business carried on here, but every attempt I made so far had ended in failure. Numbers and figures tell you a story, even if in a specialised, symbolic language, but in Gajalitand they only revealed a blankness, as if every transaction carried out had resulted in a void. It was not so different from the way things were at the colliery as a whole. As I went about my work, I could hear the whistles marking fresh shifts, the coughing and shuffling of the miners, the clanking of the lift, Coelho’s voice ringing out confidently, but at the heart of this apparently ceaseless activity there was only a strange, impassive indolence.
The days were shaped by the rhythm of the heavy blades of a DC fan whipping the air, interrupted repeatedly by power cuts. The air would grow thicker as the fan stumbled to a stop and I would hear Mukherjee cursing and Pandey’s voice asking for a wet towel. Cups of sweet, milky tea were brought in at frequent intervals by the women who worked at the office, their bodies so frail and small that it seemed like an eternity by the time they covered the distance from the door to my desk. The women in the office were even smaller than the kamins carrying coal; they circulated around the figures of Mukherjee and Pandey like slow, silent dwarfs, serving tea, cleaning the rooms, waiting with mugs of water and towels as the officials finished leisurely lunches brought from their houses in towering tiffin carriers, each carrier consisting of four stainless-steel bowls piled on top of one another.
Coelho and I drank our tea in silence. Then he stood up to leave, wiped his hands on his trousers, and spoke very emphatically. “You will please come down with me one of these days.” It sounded almost like an order.
“Go down? What for? It’s not my job.”
“To see the pits, to get an idea of how things are so you can report to the head office.”
“Is it safe?” I asked.
“You are not afraid, surely? Your head office status will protect you from everything.”
I ignored the comment.
“How often do you go down, Coelho?”
“You accountants,” he said with an uncharacteristic smile. “All you want is a number.”
“Don’t engineers?”
“An engineer knows that there is a gap between numbers and reality. Between theory and practice. A gap in which the unexpected can occur.”
“The unexpected? Like what?”
“You’ll see when we go down,” he said, not very comfortingly.
Another week passed before Coelho reappeared, looking even more manic than usual, though it was difficult to tell if he was nervous or merely overjoyed at the prospect of showing me the truth. “So we will go down now,” he said. I had been anxious about going underground when Coelho first mentioned it, but now it seemed like a release, a way of escaping the futility of my work and the absurdity of Mukherjee and Pandey in the next room.
The two men looked up questioningly as I followed Coelho into their office. I was nervous and said I thought it would be useful for me to know a little about the work in the pits. The manager hastily put down his phone and narrowed his eyes, while Mukherjee genially addressed Coelho.
“The accountant down in the pits? Why’s that? What are you up to Coelho?”
“A little tour, sir, I thought,” Coelho replied.
“Oh yes, I see,” Mukherjee said, looking thoughtful. Then he rose from the chair and slapped his forehead in mock admonition. “I should have thought of it. We used to do this before, you know. Whenever we had a new officer joining the colliery. Drinks afterwards, a big dinner, a film show in the open for the miners.” He reached for his helmet and stepped out of the office.
A change of shift was going on and the returning workers had spread all over the site around the main pit. Some of them were depositing their equipment to a man who had set up a table in the shade, while others gathered near the water pump, their thin, calloused hands saluting us as we passed. Mukherjee stopped to watch the workers of the new shift. The miners were muscular but small, and Mukherjee towered over them like a benevolent giant, long hair reaching down to his collar, his short-sleeved shirt drawn taut over the expanse of his back.
The men on the new shift began getting into the lift – what Mukherjee and Coelho called the cage – and they seemed more purposeful now, adjusting their helmets and batteries and ropes, torsos bare, legs knotted and wiry below their shorts. A bell rang somewhere as I stepped forward for a closer look, and I noticed a grey sheen on the hands, knees and ankles of the miners. It was the shade of the naked clay one sees on idols or dolls when the paint has worn off, giving the workers an air of unreality and impermanence even as the cage door shut and they began their descent. Mukherjee began walking away from the site, gesturing at us to follow.
“Planned on showing him the main pit, Coelho?”
“Yes, sir.”
Behind us the cage dropped into the shaft like a stone down a well.
“Another time, maybe. Today we’ll just do Number Two.” Mukherjee turned to me. “There’ll be less disruption, you see. Number Two’s an old pit, nearly worked through.”
“I wouldn’t know the difference, sir.”
“I’m not worried about you. But the workers jump at every chance they get to slack off and I can’t hold up production, especially with you around. Number Two’s an incline so we can walk down to the seam without interfering with work.”
“Why operate it if it’s so old and unprofitable, sir?”
“Why?” Mukherjee stopped to look around. “You see all this?” he asked, his tone aggressive. He pointed at the long line of women workers strung out between the main pit and the weighing station, then at a row of Soviet loaders rusting without spare parts, and finally at Number Two, visible in the distance as a black gash in the green scrub. “Dead weight,” he said, almost spitting out the words. We approached a shallow canal and prepared to wade through it to Number Two. “In certain societies,” Mukherjee said, hitching up his pants, “the weak and the inefficient slow down those who are more capable. They hold you back. Right, Coelho?” Coelho nodded and pointed to the canal. “This is the Katri River,” he said in what I had begun thinking of as his confident, engineer voice. “More dangerous than it looks right now. It will become a proper river during the monsoons. Mr Mukherjee remembers when it flooded the pits in ’85.”
“Ancient history,” Mukherjee replied, “like Number Two. Our modern accountant won’t be interested in such things.”
Two men were waiting at the entrance to the tunnel with helmets, lamps and heavy batteries with shoulder straps. There was a pair of tracks running down the centre of the tunnel, lit by small bulbs along the overhead arch with two rows of posts supporting the roof. It took no more than fifteen minutes to walk down to the seam, although the ground was slippery and wet. The bare-bodied workers at the seam spoke in brief, terse whispers, so that the silence seemed part of the darkness, like a surface of utter absence through which the lights and the sound of the picks and the drills appeared as mere pin-pricks of consciousness. Mukherjee and Coelho offered me many engineering details that I found uninteresting and dull; what I retained was the impression of heavy walls and the curve of the roof, their colour indistinguishable from the darkness that filled all available space, and at some point the sound of my own heart and the clump clump of our feet as we made our way back up the incline.
Two men were working on the tracks, clearing away dirt from the rails. They paused as we came towards them, raising their hands to their helmets, and I felt a little jolt as I looked at the older man. The younger worker had said “Salaam, saab” as we stopped, but the old man stood silently in the half-light, eyes fixed elsewhere. He was shorter than any of the miners I had seen, almost a dwarf, but the broad squat nose, the lines around his eyes like fissures in a rock, and the grey beard that reached to his knees gave him the air of an Old Testament prophet.
“Who’s that?” I asked Coelho. “What’s his name?”
“Looks like Father Time, doesn’t he?” Mukherjee said, chuckling. “Wait, we’ll have some fun. What’s your age?” he asked the old man, leaning down towards him. The old man’s eyes grew wide and he looked away. The younger worker hesitated, as if debating whether to speak out of turn, and then said, “He doesn’t know his age, sir. They usually don’t.” Mukherjee laughed uproariously, the sound of his mirth echoing down the tunnel. “You bet he doesn’t know. Draws full pay, doesn’t he, for standing around in the tunnel. His name’s Ammonia.”
“Ammonia?” I asked.
“That’s what Mr Pandey calls him. The workers call him Mauniya because he doesn’t speak, so Mr Pandey turned that into Ammonia.” He leaned towards me and whispered into my ear, “He also changed Coelho into Koila, for coal.” Then he slapped me on the back. “Let’s not waste time on curiosities like this. Doesn’t know his age, probably doesn’t know if he’s alive. What did I tell you about dead weight a little while ago?” The younger worker shifted uneasily at this exchange but there wasn’t the slightest flicker of expression in the old man’s face. He stood there rigid, eyes unblinking, pick balanced on his shoulder, and only when we walked on did he move again, bringing his tool down to the rail. Silhouetted in the faint light of the tunnel, he looked not so much like a worker as one of the wooden posts planted along the tunnel, as if he would stand there holding up the roof even when the mining had stopped for good.
Certain things changed after my visit to the pit, as if the arrangement of forces around the colliery was shifting gradually in a prelude to some major transformation. The beginning of the rainy season took the edge off the heat, and in the cool fresh gusts of wind that came into the office bungalow, the two managers seemed a little more human. They were friendly, even solicitous, and Mukherjee suggested that all of us should go to his house for dinner at some point.
Perhaps I had crossed a line that made me part of the colliery, although I did not feel that way at all. Nor did Coelho, I think, for his afternoon visits stopped altogether and I took to wandering around on my own. One day I saw him at the tea stall outside the colliery, talking to two men I had not met before. With their wiry build and grey hair they looked like workers, and their manner was deferential as I approached them. “Abdul, Jagdish, this is our new accountant,” Coelho said in a slightly preoccupied manner, calling for a cup of tea for me. The men stood up and brushed their pants awkwardly and I was surprised when Coelho said they were union leaders.
“I come here to talk,” Coelho said, as if he knew I was surprised by his association with union leaders. “You have definitely noticed there’s no social life here. One learns interesting things from them.” After a while Abdul began talking, about how long he and Jagdish had worked at the colliery, about the migration of their fore-fathers to the colliery, and of the disputes between the regular workers and the labourers provided by private contractors. “The government’s never been very good to us, but now it looks like they mean to make orphans of us.” He looked a little embarrassed after he said this, but Coelho encouraged him. “Go on, he will understand. He’s not with them.”
“The contractors and officers take cuts out of the wages,” Abdul continued. “They say sixty workers but hire forty. Then they write down the government wage in the books, but they pay outside workers much less. The difference goes to the contractor and to the officers.” Some of the numbers and figures in the ledgers appeared in front of my eyes as he spoke, certain discrepancies I had noticed between the equipment issued to miners and their wages, but their relation to what Abdul was describing was not entirely clear.
“Where do the private contractors get their workers from?” I asked.
“Oh, from everywhere, sir, they round them up in the morning from marketplaces and bus stops, where people wait for the contractors. The ones who get picked consider themselves lucky,” Jagdish replied.
“Much migration from other parts of Bihar, especially from the north,” Coelho said. “Only seasonal agricultural work, with constant wage disputes, even bonded labour in some cases. The armies of the landlords burn down their huts so they come here to find a better life.”
“This is better than the oppression of the landlords?”
Jagdish and Abdul laughed.
“What about the local people?” I asked. “Everybody seems to be from somewhere else.” Coelho tugged at my arm, pointing at the figure I always saw on the loading dock.
“You see him gathering coal down there?”
“Yes.”
“If you walk around the outskirts of Dhanbad, you will see others like him, both adults and children, selling small bags of coal to people.”
“That’s how they get it sir, from scavenging around the trucks and the loading stations. The children run behind the trucks, picking up pieces that fall out,” Abdul said.
“But what about them?”
“If you look closely, you’ll see that they appear different. Very small and dark, and their faces are different, with flat noses. Aboriginal probably,” Coelho said.
“Manbhuyias,” Jagdish said.
“They are the local people,” Coelho said. “They gather small pieces of coal and they sift through the slag heaps for partially burned coal.”
“They are the local people and they have to do this? No one gives them jobs?”
“That’s the curious thing about our world,” Abdul said. “You look down, there’s still another man below you no matter how far down you think you are. You’d think the coal belongs to them if they have been here from the beginning but no, it somehow turns out to be the paternal property of Pandey and Mukherjee.”
Jagdish, who had been waiting to say something, interrupted. “But they’re not like us.”
“In what way?”
“We’re just workers. But they can talk to the apdevtas,” Jagdish said.
“Apdevtas?”
“You have not heard of spirits? The malicious, powerful ones?” Coelho asked.
“The Manbhuyias did work in the mines long ago,” Abdul said. “They can communicate with things down there. There would be accidents sometimes, so the coal companies stopped hiring them. They’re easy to pick out.”
“Some of the very old workers may be Manbhuyias,” Jagdish said. “It is said they live longer and that you can’t always tell their age. They’re not like us.”
“Well,” Abdul said with a philosophical shrug. “Some say that anyone can see or talk to the spirits if you stay down long enough. That’s why miners never really like it in the pits. You don’t get used to it. It’s not like being a fisherman.”
“Perhaps you sensed something, sir?” Jagdish said.
“From my first and only visit?”
“It’s well known that the old pit is more full of spirits than the main one. Many of the Manbhuyias worked in the old pit, which became unproductive only when the spirits grew angry with the company. Perhaps the Manbhuyias were unhappy and called on the spirits. Rocks would be thrown around, sometimes even roof collapses. Regular miners and officers would be led astray along tunnels that turned out to be dead ends.”
“Stop it,” Coelho said. “If there were spirits now, don’t you think they would do something?”
The two men fell silent. Coelho began speaking in his usual nervous manner. “Well, the telephone line in the main pit is down and nothing can be done. That’s why we are meeting here.”
“The monsoons are a bad time to be without the telephone,” Jagdish said.
“There is an alarm bell also,” Abdul said, “but sometimes it doesn’t work.”
I thought of telling the head office about the telephone, about the siphoning off of wages, about the account books I had been given. But they knew, just as they had known that there was no point in sending someone as inexperienced as me to Gajalitand.
I left Coelho and his companions with an odd mix of feelings. Coelho called out, “Remember what we said. It may be useful some day.” The land stretched all around me, with hardly a human figure in sight save for the boy gathering coal and the three men behind me. The ground below my feet was hard and unforgiving and yet it was better than what lay further beyond, beyond what I could see, where all that existed was the armies of the landlords riding through the night. I looked behind and saw that the three men had gone. The bench was empty, like a little stage prop waiting for the play to begin, while ahead of me, the boy went on, not stopping to look at me, still bending, still picking, filling the bag with all that his world had to offer.
The accident happened on the night we were at Mukherjee’s house for dinner, at the end of a wet, chilly day that changed the craters in the colliery grounds into pools of black ink. Coelho had meant to join us later, but no one was surprised when he didn’t turn up in what had become a thunderstorm. Mukherjee had been generous with the food and whisky, so that even Pandey finally abandoned his reticence in a flow of religious fervour. He was urging me to read the Ramayana when Mukherjee went inside to answer a phone call.
When he returned, he did not address us immediately. It was pouring outside, and the chandelier above us swayed in the gusts of wind, creating shifting patterns of light and shadow in the centre of the room. Mukherjee was a big man, but he looked weak as he clutched at the door-frame for support, his whisky-flushed face slowly waking up to whatever reality had presented itself. He stood there for a while and then walked over towards Pandey. A jeep had drawn up outside the house, its engine running, and they went out to the porch to talk in low voices.
“I am going home, you take care of it,” I heard Pandey shout. Mukherjee came in quietly and gestured at me to follow. “Come, come quickly. Something like an accident in the colliery.” Pandey squinted at me as I stepped out. “You go straight to your quarters and lock your doors.”
“What’s happening, sir?”
“There’s been an accident in the main pit. This rain, that river.” He turned to Mukherjee. “When the police come, send a couple of men to the accountant’s quarters.”
“Why?” I was beginning to lose my temper. “Why do I need policemen?”
“To protect you, son,” he replied.
Mukherjee dropped me off near the office and one of the workers broke away from the group huddled on the veranda, carrying a big black umbrella which he held over my head as we made our way to the officers’ quarters. Mukherjee had driven the jeep straight towards the main pit and I kept looking back at him, the man with the umbrella bumping at my heels each time I turned to look. I had imagined smoke and fire, the talk of an accident somehow giving rise to images of a horrific underground explosion, but there wasn’t the slightest wisp of steam from the boiler that usually chugged away furiously. All I could see was the rain pouring over the chimneys and pipes of the main pit and changing colour as it hit the ground, as if the rain too was being processed by the Gajalitand machinery into some kind of viscous, potent fuel.
I lived by myself in an empty building, with Coelho the only other resident in that drab concrete complex. The building had clearly been constructed to make some people richer rather than because there was a pressing need for officers’ housing at Gajalitand, but the management had at last found a use for it. I saw the first column of miners and their families approaching the building around seven, almost noiseless in spite of the children and women stumbling along with their belongings. Soon a man arrived to tell me that the workers were being moved here because there was some chance of their tenements being flooded. Katri River had risen by a couple of feet last night, he said; it was still rising.
As I made my way to the office, the miners’ tenements looming to my left, I saw that their shacks were on much higher ground than the quarters they were being shifted to. There were policemen moving things into the shacks, setting up a temporary barracks, even as the miners poured out of them. Behind me, at the gates of the officers’ quarters, a smaller group of policemen strung up blue plastic sheets to shelter from the rain.
It was the end of life at the colliery as I had known it, without any further pretence of work on my part. There had never been an active role for me at Gajalitand, but Coelho’s death reduced me to a silent observer. Pandey and Mukherjee asked me to sit in on meetings, but information about the accident came largely from other sources. I read the newspapers, watched reporters arguing with the policemen, saw the miners massed near the main pit as six industrial pumps churned out streams of water. I found out that the river had flooded its way into the tunnels on Friday night while the third shift was on and that the men on top had been unable to send the cage down to their trapped colleagues because of a power cut. There was a backup system of operating the cage with steam, but the boiler had failed to produce steam that night. The heavy rain brought the temperature down and the steam condensed, unable to build up enough strength to work the cage even as the alarm rang with the news of Coelho and the sixty four miners trapped below.
These were the facts, cold and irrefutable, but the truth that Coelho had spoken of, where was that? There is much that I don’t remember about the weeks after the accident; the different scenes, incidents, little pieces of information are stuck together the way pages in a book sometimes get, so that when you try to pry them apart you often find that the type from one page has become super-imposed upon another.
There was nothing I could do, so I watched. I saw the building come alive as the raggedy children of the miners played on the stair-cases, hiding when they saw me. The pumps continued their Herculean task of flushing out the bowels of the main pit, while the cage went down with unfailing regularity, as if ashamed and conscience-stricken at its inability to deliver at the moment of need. I got used to the thin, shabby reporters from the local Hindi newspapers who parked their two-wheelers near the veranda and said, “Sir, one minute?” before a policeman escorted them to Pandey.
One afternoon a former Bihar chief minister chose to visit Gajalitand with a large retinue of followers. The former chief minister stayed for half an hour, drinking tea with Pandey and Mukherjee and pontificating, while his bodyguards stood around on the veranda, also drinking tea and stroking their big moustaches. Of course, when he addressed the miners near the main pit, he gave a fiery speech about the need for justice, punishment and due compensation. The miners clapped half-heartedly and began walking away before he had finished, even though the bodyguards tried to bully them into staying. He had been out of power for a long time.
Pandey and Mukherjee responded to everything with a great measure of calm, simply waiting, knowing that time was their great ally. After the first couple of weeks had passed and not a single body was found, things quietened down. The politicians and the press lost their interest, and only a couple of reporters still hung around the colliery, hoping to discover some new fact that would propel the worn story of the accident to the front page again.
The rain began to let off and the pumps chugged away with greater effect than before, about a dozen of them spread out in the slushy ground. Mining work resumed in Number Two and in some of the tunnels of the main pit. Although the waters of the Katri had subsided, the miners remained in their new quarters, while in their old shacks the policemen set up lines of washing swaying with white vests, khaki shorts and striped underwear.
It was in this state of calm that things began to happen again, a second string of events that started with posters around the tea stall. The police were the first ones to get wind of it and a small group of them rushed to the office to talk to Pandey, rifles clattering behind them. I later went to sneak a look at the posters, even though I was not supposed to go anywhere on my own. Thin sheets of paper with big red slogans on them, the posters had been put up in even groups on the patchwork shutters of the tea stall and on the BCCL signboard at the colliery entrance. “We will act against the exploiters,” the Maoist Communist Centre had declared, and with a fine sense of the BCCL hierarchy, they had named their targets in descending order: the absconding colliery agent, Pandey, Mukherjee and me.
The Maoists didn’t have much of a presence in the area, but the reaction in the office was immediate. Pandey got on the phone and within hours the union representing BCCL officers had issued statements condemning the cowardly threats. The armed contingent at the gate was doubled, and when Mukherjee and Pandey travelled to and from the office, they were followed by a truckload of policemen.
Then the men operating the pumps, brought from outside the state, refused to work at night. They had been doing round-the-clock shifts so far, continuing under the glare of great big lights as darkness fell. They gave no reasons for their sudden decision and, being outsiders, they couldn’t be bullied into submission. The miners had been working in reduced shifts anyway, so the colliery became lifeless after dark. I began to hear stories, of the Maoists preparing an ambush, of the cage operating by itself at night and of the emergency telephone, now functioning again, ringing at the time the ill-fated shift had supposedly been trapped underground. Even the policemen lost their earlier boisterousness and rarely walked around alone, often leaving their post at the gate unmanned.
Finally, one of the reporters who had continued to follow the Gajalitand story got his scoop. It came out on the front page of a Dhanbad newspaper. By the evening, even the television channels in Delhi had picked up the story. The reporter had acquired a letter written by Coelho to the Managing Director of the BCCL. For reasons not entirely clear, Coelho had not sent the letter; the newspaper said he had been waiting for leave to take it personally. There was a photograph of the letter, but because it was in English and had been reproduced badly, the paper had extracted the major points and spelt them out for its readers.
The letter listed everything Coelho had observed in his seven years at the colliery, beginning with the practice of stopping the trucks between Gajalitand and Dhanbad to substitute part of the coal with rocks. It spoke of the lack of safety inspections, of the fact that Pandey and Mukherjee never went down to the pits, and of a steady attrition in the number of regular workers even as the production quota was steadily increased. Coelho also said that his seniors had removed workers from key posts, including the observation post near Katri River which had been set up in 1986.
It was a long letter with many details, and it seemed to seal the fate of the two officers running the colliery. Pandey and Mukherjee, however, were at their most resourceful when under pressure. They showed what they were made of over the next few days, as the reporters came back again, this time having tasted blood. In front of the television cameras and tape recorders, they appeared as hard-working, middle-aged men being persecuted by the press. After dark, they brought in the gunmen to find out how the letter had been leaked to the press. There were four of them, big fellows dressed in loose kurta-pajamas, sophisticated-looking automatic rifles slung casually over their shoulders. As they went about their business in the colliery, interrogating the miners, they brought a further chill to the place.
They were good at their work, so good that they didn’t stop to think for a minute that I was present when they stomped up to Mukherjee and Pandey one evening to ask what was going on. Mukherjee had been slightly moody all day and snapped at them. “What d’you mean what’s going on? You know why you are here.”
“To catch the fellow who passed the letter to the reporter. Not to wrestle with whatever’s down in your mines.”
“Explain,” Pandey said calmly. “Try not to get too excited. It’s bad for your blood pressure.”
The chief gunman, a thick-necked swarthy man shorter than his companions, wiped his forehead and neck with a handkerchief and sat down facing the two officers. “So we found the reporter yesterday when he was going home, near the mining school. We beat it out of him, who he got the letter from.”
“So where’s the problem?” Mukherjee said. “You know what to do next.”
“No, we don’t. The reporter didn’t have a name for the person. And I don’t think he was lying by the time we finished working on him.”
“Of course he wasn’t lying,” the other men said in a chorus, as if their professional competence had been challenged. The chief held up his left hand and they subsided.
“No, he wasn’t lying. He would have told us how he likes to do his wife if we had asked him.”
“You know I don’t like those kind of references. I am a religious man,” Pandey said.
“Beg your pardon, Pandeyji, just habit from hanging around with the low life.” The chief gestured at his partners.
“Can you continue?” Mukherjee asked loudly. “If he didn’t have a name, you have nothing. Nothing of use at all.”
“He gave us a description. And it was as detailed a description as he could make, since we helped him describe.”
One of the men in the back cracked his fingers and the others laughed.
“He said he was given the letter by a miner, somewhere near the tea stall. He had never seen the miner before and nothing was said, no money exchanged. It was dusk, and the man appeared out of nowhere and handed him the letter and left. Everything happened very quickly, and he didn’t get a good look at the miner except that he was small and had a big beard and that there was something about the way he walked, not like an old man at all.”
“Mauniya,” Mukherjee mumbled. Then he got up from the chair and began to pace through the room, reminding me of Coelho. The chief gunman watched him keenly, wiping his forehead again.
“Get that attendance clerk here,” Pandey said on the phone. “So find Mauniya. What is the problem?”
“We tried,” the chief gunman said. “We went to the miners’ quarters last night. Turned it inside out. Questioned the miners. The police quarters, we didn’t go into. But we told them to look, and they searched. It’s their territory. Why should they hide him?”
“They’re not hiding him,” Mukherjee said. “You won’t find him.”
“What are you talking about, Mukherjee?” Pandey said sharply. “He’s old, ancient, half-dead. Where would he go? They’ll find him.”
Mukherjee drew his breath. “They won’t find him because he’s not a miner.”
There was a puzzled silence following this remark.
Mukherjee went on, looking at Pandey, speaking in a low voice. “You and I have known for a long time that there was something different happening here, and we didn’t care because we were making money. So neither of us asked how Coelho kept things going down there, how he kept the normal rate of extraction with shifts less than full strength.”
“Full strength only on paper,” Pandey said, but Mukherjee cut him off.
“We have sixty four going below on the night of the accident, sixty four missing on the roster. But did you check with the miners and their families how many of them are actually missing? I did. Forty of them. So where did the others come from?”
“Mukherjee, you know the numbers are only on paper,” Pandey said placatingly. “Since when has that been a problem?”
“So if it’s only on paper, why do we have sixty four pieces of equipment checked out? Why does the attendance clerk remember Mauniya going down on that shift? Why do we have Mauniya’s name on the roster of that shift, along with nearly twenty other strange names that I don’t recognise? And why don’t those same names not appear on the wage books we have?”
“Mukherjee, you’re losing control. We were the ones who arranged for fake names.”
“We did, didn’t we? But if we arranged for fake workers, we also arranged for them to be paid their wages. That was the point of it. So why would we have fake workers going down and being issued equipment but not given wages? And how do you explain Mauniya? He wasn’t a fiction created by us. How is it that we have records of the work he has done, of the shifts he was part of, even an order from Coelho transferring him from the incline to the main pit, but nothing to indicate his wages? What man, fake or real, would work every day in the mines and not get paid?”
There were mutters of “Ram, Ram,” from the three gunmen. They were visibly uneasy now and their chief waved at them in a gesture of dismissal. They left the room and waited outside, lighting bidis, and in the inky darkness of the evening the glow of their bidis looked like fireflies inscribing slow, small circles in the air.
The clerk Pandey had sent for was standing near the wall. He had been listening carefully to what Mukherjee was saying and spoke up in a toneless voice. “I remember the bearded one going down before the accident. None of them made it out alive. But now the cage goes up and down by itself at night. Empty. With no one in it. The alarm bell goes off, the telephone rings.” He was going to continue but Pandey got up from his seat, walked up to him, and slapped him hard on the face. “You can go now,” he said in a quiet voice, and the clerk left, head bowed.
Mukherjee was in some kind of trance. “Who is Mauniya? Who are the others? What have we been playing with out here? I looked at the records we possess, not what was given to the accountant, and I can’t find any explanation for Mauniya or those extra workers Coelho used.”
There was silence in the room as everyone considered this last bit of information. The chief gunman was the first one to react. He stood up with dignity and addressed Pandey. “This is not what we were sent for,” he said. “We’re professionals, and we know our limitations. Chasing after shadows in the dark is not our job.” With that, he left the room.
“I feel old, very old,” Pandey said.
Mukherjee looked at him blankly and then cried out. “And Coelho? What about Coelho?”
Pandey got up and put a hand on Mukherjee’s broad back. He leaned towards Mukherjee, but his words were drowned out by the sound of the gunmen’s jeep pulling out of the colliery.
The police post at the gate was empty as I walked out of the colliery. The brown stray which slept near the shops began barking as my feet crunched on the gravel, but it calmed down once it saw me and began following me, sniffing at my ankles. Not a soul in that thin, translucent darkness, nothing visible except for the lumps of the colliery buildings and the figure down in the loading yard, already beginning its unforgiving work. Struck by a whim, I walked down the slope towards the boy. Behind me the stray stopped dead, whining. The boy turned when I came close to him but did not utter a single word in response to my meaningless query, meaningless in any time and place, but especially there and then, with the dawn emerging cautiously behind the main pit.
“What is your name? How old are you?”
He looked at me and waited, his right hand in the air. It was an old man’s face, rendered expressionless by time, and only when I began to step back did his hand and body move, stooping to the earth once again. I climbed back to the road and began walking towards Dhanbad.