“You had better get used to carrying coal. That’s all you will ever be good for. You’ll never get a husband. And stay away from that school. Knowing how to read won’t make you better at carrying coal. Now, get to work.”
She let me go and walked away.
I stood alone. After a while I started to pick up bits of coal that had fallen off a cart or out of somebody’s basket. I put the coal into my bag. My bag got heavier.
I thought about what Elamma had said.
I had been told my parents were dead. I had never met them, so I didn’t think about them.
Now I thought about them.
I decided Elamma was lying. But I had to be sure.
I headed over to the pit where I knew my aunt was working. I sat on the edge of the pit, dangled my feet and waited.
The pit was so big our whole village could be dropped into it and there would still be room left over. Dust rose up from the coal diggers at the bottom and from the feet of the women climbing in and out of the pit. I could hear the sound of pickaxes hitting rock.
The sun was shining but not much light got through the haze of coal dust and the smoke from the coal burning underneath the ground. I saw a few trees, but the leaves were gray, not green. If the sky was blue, it kept it a secret.
Everything was gray.
Except for the line of women coming up the trail from the pit. Their saris were points of bright colors. Not even the haze could blot them out.
It took a lot of scrubbing to get the coal dust out of those saris. I knew. It was one of my jobs to fetch the water to wash my aunt’s sari clean.
My own clothes were gray. All I had to wear was what I was wearing. The coal was in them forever. That was just the way it was.
I watched the bright colors moving through the fog of dust. I imagined that the women were birds, strange birds, and that I was sitting on the moon.
Could people really sit on the moon? If they could, it would look a lot like Jharia. I had seen the moon when it was round and big. It looked like dust and coal pits.
I was thinking about this so hard that I almost missed my aunt. Then I saw her, loaded down with a large basket of coal on her head, almost at the top of the path that led from the pit.
I ran over to her.
“Auntie, I need to talk to you.”
“Is your coal bag full? It’s not even half full.”
“I need to ask you a question.”
She kept walking. She wanted to dump her load of coal. The bosses were standing by the truck, so I held back. I didn’t want them to ask what was in my sack. They might take my coal without paying for it.
My aunt joined the line of ladies waiting by the truck. They dumped their baskets into the back of the truck. Workers on top of the truck shoveled the coal so it wouldn’t slide off.
When her basket was empty, she came back to me.
“Talk quickly. The bosses are in a bad mood.”
“Elamma said that I’m not really her cousin.”
“What? I can’t hear you.” She bent down so that her face was closer to mine. Her face was lined with coal dust and sweat. Coal dust was even in her teeth.
“She said you’re not my mother’s sister. She said my mother was just your neighbor, and that we are not family.”
“Child, look where you are standing!”
I was standing on top of one of the cracks that had opened up in the ground. Smoke was climbing up my legs. Hot coals were underneath my feet.
My aunt moved me away and kneeled down to look for burns. I could see a hot piece of coal smoldering red against the bottom of my foot.
“You’ve gone and hurt yourself,” she said. “Now how are you going to work? How are we going to get you medicine?”
I pulled my leg out of her hand.
“Auntie, I’m fine. I don’t feel anything. Is it true?”
She looked up at me. “Is what true?”
“Are we really not family?”
She was busy dusting coal and ashes off the bottom of my foot with the hem of her sari. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to answer me.
Then she did.
“We are not family,” she said. “Your mother’s parents gave us some money to take you in. That’s why you live with us.”
The bosses started yelling at her to get back to work. She put her hand gently on my shoulder and held it there for a moment. Then she picked up her basket and headed back into the pit for more coal.
I watched her go down the steep pathway until she got so far away that I could no longer pick her out from the other ladies with saris and baskets.
I was looking at my future.
I suppose I had always known it. What else could I ever do? But knowing something was different from admitting it.
On that day, that day for truth, I admitted it.
And when I looked clearly down the years at what I would become, another truth came into my head.
I had no family.
You stayed with your family because they were your family and families were supposed to stick together and care for each other.
But I had no family.
And I had no friends.
I had no reason to stay.
The truck behind me was getting quite full of coal. The worker jumped down from the back. The sides and flap were locked into place. The driver finished talking to the bosses and got behind the wheel. Another man got into the truck beside him. I heard the motor start up.
The bosses had their backs turned.
I was moving before I started to think about it.
I was good at moving fast. I was good at climbing and I had magic feet that didn’t feel the rough points and edges of hard chunks of coal.
In an instant I was at the truck, over the side and crawling to the top of the coal pile. The truck started to move. Coal fell off as I tried to dig myself into the pile. I watched children below scramble to gather it up.
The truck went through my village.
It passed the shack that belonged to the woman who was not my aunt.
Elamma was outside, sweeping the dust out the door. She had to hold the broom with one hand because her other arm was still holding the baby.
She saw me.
She started to call out for the truck to stop. It was moving slowly.
Instead, she dropped her broom. It hit the ground with a bang. She moved quickly toward the truck.
I think she wanted to come with me. She even reached out to try to grab onto the back.
Then she remembered the baby.
Even then, she looked around for a place to put it down.
There wasn’t a place. She was stuck.
I watched her cry as the truck rumbled out of the village and out of Jharia.
2
The Moving Mountain
RIDING ON A PILE OF coal was fun while the truck moved slowly through the village. It got scary as the truck turned onto a highway and picked up speed.
It was scary, but it was also exciting. I had never ridden on anything faster than a hand cart. I had never been away from my village, not once in all my life. All I had ever seen was coal.
Now I saw green. Real green, not green covered by gray. I saw fields and trees and paddies of rice and lakes full of water lilies. The sky was bright blue, the wildflowers were yellow and purple and pink. I saw buffalo and donkeys, mango trees and rows of cauliflower, tea plantations and bamboo stacked high for building.
I didn’t know most of the time what I was looking at. We were moving so fast that I felt like I was a bird, flying high and fast and looking down at the world.
The deeper I buried myself in the coal, the safer I felt. The weight of the coal on my back kept me from slipping off the mountain. Just my face peered out of the pile. I rested my chin on my hands and watched the road roll out behind me.
I didn’t think at all. I just looked.
Even after the sun went down, I looked out hard into the night. My eyes grabbed at any bit of ligh
t. The moon rose. It was full. I felt like the happiness would just burst right out of me.
The truck stopped a couple of times, pulling off to the side of the highway to refuel and for the driver and his buddy to take a break. I stayed still and quiet and kept my head down. I could smell pakoras and bhaji. My stomach rumbled, but I didn’t pay any attention. I had been hungry before.
The truck kept rolling all night long. At some point I fell asleep.
I woke up to daylight and a man crouching down in the coal beside me, shovel in hand and swearing.
“What is this?” he demanded.
I heard another voice.
“Raj! What’s the holdup?”
Raj stood up. “We’ve got a stowaway!”
“What?”
I heard the other man scramble up before I could see him. The way I was buried in the coal did not allow me to raise my head very much, so I only saw the lower parts of their legs. One of them smashed his shovel against the coal right near my face.
“When did this happen?”
“How should I know?”
“Didn’t you check?”
“Do I have to do everything?”
Back and forth they yelled at each other.
I don’t like shouting. It almost always goes along with hitting. I put my face down in the coal and covered my head with my hands.
“We should call the police,” Raj said.
“If we call the police, we’ll be stuck here for hours. That’s if we’re lucky. Maybe they’ll think we stole the kid. Maybe they’ll arrest us.”
“Look, Kam, maybe the child is dead. Buried in coal dust like that, breathing it in.”
“Then we have a dead kid to explain. How is that better?”
“We leave the body by the side of the road. Not here. We find a rice paddy or a mangrove swamp. If the kid gets found, no one knows anything.”
“We’re not that lucky,” Kam said. “The kid’s alive. Look.”
I was wiggling a little, trying to get more of my arms out of the coal so I could protect my head better.
“We could always kill it,” Kam said.
The words hung in the air.
I didn’t know what the men were thinking, but I was not going to let myself be killed. I had seen some wondrous things on the journey so far. I wanted to see a lot more before I died. I was too small to be much of a fighter against two grown men, but I could throw coal and I could bite and there were probably many other things I could do to make them think twice about killing me.
I could feel coal being tossed off my back. Hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out.
I was trembling.
I kept my eyes closed. It was less scary that way. They carried me down from the coal mountain and stood me on my feet beside the truck.
“We could still leave him by the side of the road,” Kam, the shorter man, said.
“Would you want someone to do that to your child? What’s your name?” Raj asked me. He was taller than Kam and had a scruff of a beard that he rubbed as he talked. “Why were you on our truck? You could have fallen off and been killed. Did someone put you there?”
The questions came too fast for me to answer them.
Then he had another thought.
“Is there anyone else up there? Hey, Kam, grab your shovel. There may be more kids buried up there!”
“There is no one else,” I said.
“Wait.” He peered closer. They both did. I was so thickly covered in coal dust it was probably hard to see that I was even a person.
“It’s a girl.”
“My name is Valli.”
“Who put you up to this? Your parents trying to get rid of you? What kind of parent would put his child in a truck full of coal?”
“I don’t have parents,” I said. “It was my own idea.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because … because I don’t like coal.”
“She doesn’t like coal,” Kam said. “She looks like she’s taken a bath in it, but she doesn’t like it.”
“Now we have to call the police,” Raj said. “We can’t leave a little girl by the side of the highway.”
The two men started arguing again. I was getting bored, so I left them to it and walked away. I didn’t know where I was but that was fine with me. I was somewhere. And I was going somewhere else.
I saw a lot of buildings and a lot of houses and little shops. The road was much busier with cars and trucks than my village road. On one side of the highway was the coal depot, which was not at all interesting, but everything else was new and different.
I hadn’t gone far when Kam grabbed my arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I pointed up the road.
“It’s not that easy.” He steered me back to the truck.
They seemed to have reached some sort of decision.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Kam said. “You’re going to get in the truck and keep quiet. We’ll unload the coal and then we’ll take you to a woman we know. Her name is Mrs. Mukerjee. She might give you a home.”
“That’s no life for a little girl,” Raj said. “She should be in school.”
“What school will take her with no parents and no papers? And will you pay the fees? How many children are you paying for now? Don’t worry,” Kam said to me. “This will work.”
He took me to the front of the truck and opened the door. I needed help to climb in. It was very high up.
The floor of the truck was littered with all kinds of things — empty crisp packets, cigarette butts, bottle caps. I sorted through it, looking for money. I didn’t find any. I licked the crumbs out of the crisp packets. They were salty and good.
When the men came back they got into the front seat. I had to stay down at their feet, which I did not like. Their feet were dirty and took up a lot of room. Plus, I couldn’t see out the window.
We didn’t drive for long before we stopped again. They got out. I smelled food, but I was shocked when they brought me tea and dosas. I ate in the truck. It was food I hadn’t worked for, food bought special for me, not left over from the children who were not my cousins.
They got back in the truck and then it was all start and stop, stop and start as the traffic got thick. I could hear the car horns and smell the exhaust. I felt the truck turn this way and that. I heard the driver yell at people who cut across his path, and I heard people yell at him when he got in their way. It was quite funny to hear, but I wished I could see.
And then the truck came to a full stop and the motor was shut off.
“Look, I’m still not sure …” Raj said.
“Quit fussing,” Kam said. “We’re here, aren’t we? The decision is made. Get up, kid. This is the end of the ride for you.”
3
The Butterfly Woman
THEY LIFTED ME OUT of the truck and took me into an alley.
Everything was cement.
No. It wasn’t. There were lots of other things.
There was a man sitting in a shop, tapping leather into shoes.
There was a woman pushing a cart full of bad-smelling stuff she had cleaned out of a latrine.
An alcove held a statue of the goddess Kali, all black with her red tongue pointing out. A young man in a suit and tie stood before her, praying.
Above me I heard a baby crying, and someone was playing music.
I couldn’t stop grinning.
“There is so much going on,” I said. “Thank you for bringing me here!”
“Don’t thank us,” Raj said.
They banged loudly on a green door. No one answered.
“Are you sure she’s in there?”
“She’s there. Where else would she be?”
They knocked again. They kept knocking until a middle-aged woman shouted down at them from an open window up above.
“Are you men crazy? You know my girls don’t get up until eleven. And I don’t rise before noon. Go away.”
“Mrs. Mukerjee. We have something for you.”
“Anything you have can wait until regular business hours.”
She disappeared inside, banging the window shut.
The men knocked again.
The window flapped open.
“You don’t want to make me angry,” she said.
“Mrs. Mukerjee, look!”
I was made to move away from the door and out into the alley where she could see me.
“What in the world is that?” the woman asked.
“It’s a girl.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She started to go back inside.
“She has no parents!”
She stopped and leaned out the window again, taking a hard look at me. I waved a bit and tried to smile. She made me nervous, but I wanted to make a good impression.
“My name is Valli,” I said. “Good morning.” I made the namaste, pointing my fingers together and giving a little bow.
“The only good morning is mid-afternoon,” she said, lighting up a cheroot. She breathed out a puff of smoke. “I’m coming down.”
She disappeared. Then after a moment she opened the green door.
“How do I know you didn’t steal her?” she asked. “I have enough trouble with the police.”
“I climbed on the back of their coal truck,” I said. “They didn’t know. I wanted to get away from Jharia.”
“Wanted the bright lights of the big city, did you? Looks like you brought Jharia with you.” She stared at me some more. “What were you doing in Jharia?”
“Picking up coal,” I said. “That’s all there is to do. But I can read and write and I can speak a little English.” I started to recite the English alphabet, to impress her. I was prepared to go on to Bible verses if necessary. The bicycle teacher had taught us a few of them.
Mrs. Mukerjee waved me to a stop after the letter j.
“And where are your parents?”
“Dead,” I said, even though I didn’t know about my father. “I was living with my aunt but she turned out not to be my aunt, so I left.”
She bent down and stared at me, eyeball to eyeball.
“I don’t like liars.”
I didn’t even blink. “Neither do I.”
She straightened up and talked to the men.
No Ordinary Day Page 2
