The Rat-Miner Son-in-law

Chapter Nine: Pappy And Raju

Kabir did not need Varun to tell him where the missing boys were. The munshi's register already had.

Ishani had photographed every page of both Sagar Line ledgers before Ramesh carried them to the inquiry. That night, after the service tunnel, she went through the photographs again while Kabir slept with his head in her lap. Two pages after the margin note, in the column where Ramesh logged camp rations, she found two extra plates entered every day since the collapse. They were marked for the Thekedar's labour camp behind a brick kiln outside the city. Ramesh had written them down himself, the way he wrote down everything, without ever being told who would eat them.

The Thekedar was keeping Pappu and Raju quiet until the inquiry was over.

Kabir went in the next morning. He took no police, because he no longer knew which police belonged to the Thekedar. He took Mohan and Ramesh, and he took the mothers of both boys, who had come down from the hills on the overnight bus the day Ishani said their sons' names on television. They were small, silent women in shawls, and neither of them had slept.

The kiln stood at the end of a dirt road, its tall chimney breathing grey smoke into a flat white sky. Red dust covered everything. Men, women and children moved between the stacks of drying bricks with loads on their heads, and every one of them stopped when the jeep pulled in.

Ramesh got out first. For a moment nobody moved. Then an old man with a basket of bricks on his head looked at the munshi's taped spectacles and lowered his eyes. He stepped aside. The others did the same, one after another, until there was a clear path through the stacks to a row of tin sheds at the back of the yard.

The last shed had a padlock on the door. Kabir fitted the blade of his trowel behind the hasp and leaned on it once. The screws tore out of the old wood.

Inside, in the hot dark, two boys were sitting against the far wall on a single jute sack. They were thinner than Kabir remembered, their ribs showing through torn vests, and when the light fell across them they flinched and covered their faces. Then one of them lowered his hands and stared past Kabir at the doorway.

The mothers got to them first.

Kabir stepped back and let them through. He stood outside in the red dust with Mohan beside him and listened to two women from his own hills crying their sons' names over and over, as if they needed to hear the words to believe them.

That afternoon, at the inquiry, Ramesh's register was read into the record.

The chairman read the forty names aloud himself, slowly, one after another, while the room listened. When he reached the end, he read the margin note about Pappu and Raju and the steel. Then he put down his glasses and gave his orders. Varun Malhotra was placed under investigation. Rajendra Malhotra was questioned for three hours behind closed doors and released. Malhotra Infra was barred from every public project in the state while the inquiry ran. By evening, Inspector Bhosale had been suspended from duty, and his photograph was on every channel.

It should have felt like the end. It did not.

The Thekedar's network was still out there, supplying unregistered men to building sites across four states. Somewhere tonight, men with no names on any paper were going down shafts and up scaffolds, and if anything went wrong, nobody would count them. Ramesh had kept the books for twenty years and had never once seen the Thekedar's face. Nobody had.

That night, in the room in Dharavi, Kamla stood at the little gas stove making rotis, slapping each one between her palms before laying it on the flame. Sonu was asleep. Kabir sat outside on the doorstep with his back to the room, watching the lane.

Ishani knelt by the tin trunk and took out the old register.

Kabir had kept it for days now, and he had not untied the string once. She knew why. She did not ask him whether she could open it. She only looked at his back in the doorway, and after a moment he gave the smallest nod without turning around.

She untied the string and peeled back the plastic. The pages inside were brittle and brown at the edges, crowded with the same small, cramped hand she now knew so well. Ramesh had been younger then, and his writing a little steadier. Crews of men, dates in and dates out, thumbprints faded to grey smudges. She turned the pages carefully while the smell of roasting wheat filled the room.

The last page was only half full. Near the bottom was the line Kabir had never been able to bring himself to read.

Bhuvan Rawat. Beside his name was the date he went into the mountain tunnel, fifteen years ago. In the next column, where every other man had a date out, there was a second date, written in a different ink. It was the day the tunnel fell. There was no thumbprint beside it, because he had never come out to give one.

Ishani pressed her hand over her mouth. Behind her, Kamla went on making rotis, unaware.

Then she saw the last column.

It was the column where the Thekedar signed for each crew he supplied. Every line on every page carried the same mark, small and neat, written with a careful flourish at the bottom. It was not a signature. It was only an initial.

It was a K.

Ishani stared at it until the letter seemed to lift off the page. She had seen that K all her life. She had seen it at the bottom of grocery lists and staff wages, at the foot of every page of the leather-bound household account books that lived in the drawer of the dining room sideboard. She had watched it written in fountain pen at the breakfast table, with exactly that small flourish, a thousand times.

It was the same neat K her mother had written at the bottom of every household account book Ishani had ever seen.