The Rat-Miner Son-in-law

Chapter Seven: The Munshi's Register

Ramesh Tiwari came down the lane after dark, keeping close to the walls, with an old canvas bag pressed against his chest as if it might bite him.

Kabir knew him by sight. Everyone on a Malhotra site did. For twenty years, Ramesh had been the Thekedar's munshi, the thin clerk in taped-up spectacles who sat at a folding table beside every shaft and wrote down who went in and who came out. He never looked anyone in the eye. On the night of the collapse, he had written twenty-eight names in a book nobody would ever admit existed, and one of those names had been his own son's.

Kabir had carried that boy out on his back on the second night, crawling the length of the pipe with the boy's arm hooked around his neck and his breath rattling in Kabir's ear. Now the boy stood a step behind his father in the doorway, thin as a reed, his hands still wrapped in gauze.

Kamla let them in without a single question, the way she let everyone in. Ramesh set the bag on her little table, between a plate of chopped onions and a stack of steel tumblers. His hands were shaking.

"I've kept the Thekedar's books on Malhotra sites for twenty years," he said. "I wrote what I was told to write. I never asked where the men went when the book said they had gone." He glanced back at his son. "Then I watched my own boy go down that shaft with his name on no paper the company would ever show anyone. If you hadn't come for him..." He could not finish.

He opened the bag. Inside were three cloth-bound ledgers, their pages swollen with damp. Two of them belonged to Sagar Line, one for the men going in and one for the men coming out. Ishani pulled the first toward her and turned to the night of the collapse.

Forty names filled the page. Beside each one was a thumbprint in blue ink, because half the men could not write. Sonu Rawat was there, near the bottom. So were the twelve names from the company's printed register, and the twenty-eight it had left out.

In the margin beside two of the names, Ramesh had written a short note in his small, cramped hand. Pappu and Raju had been moved out through the side drift two hours before the collapse, on the foreman's orders, because they had been asking questions about the steel.

Ishani read it twice. Her voice came out rough. "They noticed the ribs," she said. "Two boys with no names on any company paper looked at that steel and knew it was wrong."

Nobody answered her. Ramesh reached into the bag one last time and took out the third ledger. It was much older than the others, wrapped in a plastic sheet and tied with string, the cloth cover faded almost white.

"The mountain tunnel," he said quietly. "Fifteen years ago. I've carried it with me ever since, and I've never dared to open it."

Kabir looked at the bundle for a long time. He reached out and laid his palm flat on the plastic, the way a man touches a grave. He did not untie the string.

At the door, Sonu said, "Bhaiya."

Four men were coming down the lane. They walked abreast, filling it from wall to wall, and the one on the left carried a yellow plastic can that sloshed with every step. The smell of kerosene reached the doorway before they did.

Ramesh's face crumpled. "They followed me," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Kabir did not get up. He kept his hand on the old register and said, "Sit down, Rameshji."

He did not have to move, because the lane did.

The tailor next door laid down his scissors and stepped out of his stall. The chai-seller at the corner left his kettle on the flame. The women at the water tap set down their steel pots, one after another, and straightened up with their dupattas tucked into their waists. Then doors began to open all along the lane. Men came out of them, men Kabir had dragged out of the Sagar Line pipe a few days earlier, some with bandaged heads, some limping on sticks, one still wearing the hospital's paper wristband. They stepped into the lane and stood shoulder to shoulder between the four strangers and the green door.

Not one of them said a word.

Thirty-eight families in Mumbai and the hills had their sons back because of the man sitting inside that room, and every person standing in the lane knew it.

The four men stopped. The one with the kerosene looked at the wall of silent faces in front of him, then at the men beside him. Nobody gave an order. After a long moment, they turned and walked back the way they had come, the yellow can knocking against the leader's leg with every step.

The lane waited until they were gone. Then the tailor went back to his stall, the chai-seller turned down his flame, and the women picked up their pots as if nothing had happened at all.

Inside, Ramesh sat down on the edge of the cot and wept into his hands. His son put a bandaged hand on his shoulder and kept it there.

Ishani looked across the table at her husband. He had not moved from his seat the entire time.

Ramesh did not go home that night. He sat up at Kamla's table with the Sagar Line ledgers open in front of him, drinking the tea she kept putting in his hands, while Kabir and Ishani took turns watching the lane. The old register stayed where Kabir had put it, still wrapped in its plastic, in the tin trunk under the cot.

At dawn, Ramesh washed his face at the tap and buttoned his shirt to the collar. Then he walked to the inquiry office, with his son on one side of him and Kabir on the other.

The state had opened its inquiry into the collapse two days earlier, under a retired High Court judge with a reputation for reading every page. The chairman was already at his desk when the clerk showed them in. He looked up at the three of them, at their creased clothes and tired faces, and waited.

Ramesh did not hand the registers to the clerk. He walked to the desk and set both ledgers down in front of the chairman himself.

"My name is Ramesh Tiwari," he said, and for the first time in twenty years, his voice did not shake. "I write down who goes in and who comes out."