by David Miller
3
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 walke
d 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.
4
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 r
easons 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.