by David Miller
They left that day, Rapunzel helping him back towards the town. Although I did not follow them, I knew they would find their way, and that when they reached the village’s outskirts his father’s men would find them, bear them back to his father’s house, that she would tell them her story, and they would listen in wonder. They would not return for me.
For my part, I busied myself. I made a poultice for his eye before they left, and heard later that, in time, his sight returned, and that they had taken up residence in his father’s house as man and wife.
And as the weeks passed and Jinka did not return, I made this place my home, tended the garden. And in time when the village people came to ask for my help I gave it to them, without bullying or fear. And the children began to come as well, and I found stories to tell them, and fruit for them to eat. Sometimes my neighbours came and asked me for the bounty of my garden, and if I could I gave it to them. Yet I was alone, apart; all understood that.
And then a day came when he came through the forest to my house, and with him he had a child, as blonde and beautiful as the sun. She was afraid of me at first, and hung close to her father. About us the day was warm, the trees full of light and air. We did not speak, the two of us, just sat and watched the child. And she turned to me, and smiled, and I held out my hand to her.
NOTHING VISIBLE
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? T
hey 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.
2
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 throu
gh 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.