The Rat-Miner Son-in-law

Chapter Two: The Rat Silkhet

The first time the air died, Kabir was eleven metres past the dead machine, flat on his stomach in a hole he had cut himself.

He felt it before he heard it. The steady push of the air line against his cheek faltered, sighed and stopped, and the hiss went with it. In a hole that small, the air would turn sour within minutes. Kabir did not stop cutting. Panic burned air faster than work did, and he had learned that before he was old enough to shave.

He had been fifteen. His father, Bhuvan Rawat, had carried rock out of mountain tunnels all his life, a quiet hill man who came home grey with dust and fell asleep before dinner. Fifteen years ago, a Malhotra tunnel came down on him in the mountains. The company sent a letter blaming "worker negligence," and a man in a pressed shirt told Kamla Rawat there would be no compensation. Not one rupee. Kabir stood behind his mother and read the name on the letterhead until it was burned into him.

A month later he was in the illegal coal pits, because his mother had to eat and his brother was five years old. For four years he crawled through holes barely wider than his shoulders, dragging coal out in a sack tied to his ankle. Men died in those holes all the time. Nobody wrote their names down either.

Behind him, the air line shuddered and began to hiss again. Kabir filled his lungs and kept going. Every few minutes he pushed the loose spoil back between his legs, and the digger behind him dragged it away in a plastic tub. The Pathfinder men worked in relays of twenty minutes each, but Kabir had not given up his place once.

Eight years ago, forty-one workers had been trapped in the Silkhet highway tunnel, and every machine the government brought in broke down, one after another. As a last resort, they called six rat-miners, the same men the newspapers had called criminals the month before. The rat-miners dug the final metres by hand. The first man through was a skinny twenty-two-year-old who whistled three times into the dark to tell the trapped men he was coming. The country called him the Ustad. He covered his face with a cloth for every camera, and after a while the cameras gave up.

With the reward and the contracts that followed, he built Pathfinder. It was now India's leading tunnel-rescue and safety firm, the company every government called when the ground gave way. Anjali Iyer ran it in public, giving the interviews and signing the deals in a sharp grey suit. The man who owned it was lying in the mud under South Mumbai, and his in-laws called him the rat.

A year ago, Ishani Malhotra, the family's young civil engineer, had noticed the quiet labour supervisor who knew more about her tunnels than her own consultants did. They argued over soil reports for months. She was the only Malhotra who listened when he spoke, and the only one who never called him anything but his name. Then one evening she asked him to marry her. Her father agreed on one condition. Kabir would live in their house, work on their site and never forget what he was. Kabir said yes, and he had never once told her about Silkhet.

Near three in the morning, the air died again. This time Mohan Thapa crawled up the pipe behind him, his grey head bumping the steel. Mohan had dug beside Kabir at Silkhet, and he was the only man alive who still called him Ustad to his face.

"It's cut," Mohan whispered. "Near the shaft, same as before. A clean blade, both times."

Kabir kept his eyes on the earth in front of him. "Put a man on that line, and don't let him move."

"Somebody up there wants this hole to go quiet."

"Then we dig faster."

At dawn, Kabir came out of the pipe dragging a stretcher. The man strapped to it had a broken leg and a grin full of mud, and the Pathfinder diggers lifted him into the cage as if he were made of glass. Behind Kabir came the others, crawling out one by one, grey from hair to heels, blinking at the work lights as if they had forgotten what light was. Twenty men, alive.

The last of them was Sonu.

His red sneakers were black now. He took three steps across the tunnel floor before his knees gave, and Kabir caught him before he hit the ground. Sonu clutched his brother's shirt with both hands. "I heard the whistle," he croaked. "I told them. I said that's my bhaiya." Kabir held him and could not say anything at all.

When the cage reached the surface, the cameras were waiting behind the barricade. A reporter began counting out loud as the men stumbled into the light, and others picked it up, their voices rising with every number. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty was eight more than the Malhotras had admitted, and every channel in the country had just counted them.

Kabir had barely handed Sonu to the medics when Inspector Bhosale of the site police pushed through the crowd at the shaft mouth with two constables at his back. He was a heavy man with a neat moustache and a uniform that looked freshly pressed for the occasion.

"Kabir Rawat," he said loudly, for the cameras. "You are under arrest for illegal excavation that endangered the official rescue."

The handcuffs closed on Kabir's wrists before the words had fully landed. "There are twenty more men down there," he said. "I know how to reach them. Nobody else does."

"The official rescue will see to them."

Mohan shoved forward. "Pathfinder is in command. The state order says so."

Bhosale did not even look at him. "The order names Pathfinder. It says nothing about a labour supervisor crawling through a hole he had no permission to dig." He pulled Kabir toward the police jeep. Sonu shouted his brother's name from the stretcher, and the medics held him down.

Kabir twisted around once and looked back at the shaft. Dust was still rising out of it, slow and grey. Somewhere beneath it, twenty men were waiting in the dark for the rat to come back.