By Ellerine Diengdoh
Thangkso.
The smell hits you first. That wet ash smell, sweet and rotting, like burnt meat. It hangs over the silence where thirty men were roasted whole. It’s the darkness that takes them and we know this darkness well.
Ksan. Rymbai. Umpleng. Urak. Others too, others we don’t hear of.
They are just names on a map now, blurring together, but the ending… the ending is always the same…the earth keeps them. It is an efficient system, in a depraved sort of way. You don’t need to bury the dead, you just count the coal and walk away.
We are told that sealing twenty-two thousand abandoned mines is an “uphill task”, and perhaps it is because the holes aren’t just in the ground…they are in our conscience, and those are much harder to fill.
I have been trying to visualise this number. Twenty-two thousand.
That is not a landscape; that is a colander. Twenty-two thousand death traps!
A sponge made of rocks that has been drinking the blood of the poor for a hundred years. It suggests that for many grim decades, while the people slept and the rains fell, the ground was being stolen from underneath our feet, bucket by bucket, until we stood on nothing but a thin crust over a watery hell.
“Rat-Hole Mining”, a name that strips a man of his worth before he even enters the earth. I have tried to imagine the wretchedness of the rat-hole. It is a tunnel no wider than a coffin, the air thick with sulphur and the rot of damp earth. The men who crawl inside are not brave; they are starving. They are possessed by a hunger that overrides instinct, they drag themselves on their bellies, inch by agonising inch, into the mountain’s throat. They squeeze into fissures so tight, the rock shreds their skin, while the darkness presses against their eyes with the weight of a premature burial.
When death comes, it is swift. It is a hammer blow of air itself catching fire, a sudden, searing vacuum that tears the breath from your lungs and slams you against the tunnel. It is the terrifying, instant panic of smoke blindness. It is the smell of singeing hair, the stench of roasted flesh….your flesh….cooked in a space no wider than your shoulders, and the frantic, choking, clawing realisation that the coffin has become a kiln.
While they burned below, I stood above, outside the storm of grief, like an intruder… drinking in the raw, grief-torn wail of the wife, the child, the sister, the withered grandmother. But to the cold eyes watching from high windows, these are not families. These are nameless subterranean vermin, interchangeable refuse, mere burrowers in the dirt who simply forgot to come back up.
In response, the nation steps over the bodies and drops a coin. “Here, take two lakh rupees.” That is sufficient to wipe the black tears….tears of coal dust and salt….off a face. That is enough to ward off the hunger for the rest of their days.
It is pathetic!
There is something almost farcical about the state’s sudden awakening, announcing a manhunt as if this were a mystery. They claim to be hunting invisible men, but these financiers aren’t hiding in the crevices where men go to suffocate. They are invisible only because they are overexposed…..hidden in the blinding glare of absolute power. Their manicured hands are scrubbed clean of the black dust that now calcifies the lungs of the dead. The High Court screams like a preacher in an empty church, but the barons do not hear. They live in their palaces of air, too high for the laws of men to reach them.
It makes me look away with shame. We call this a “Christian State,” don’t we? I have been reading the Bible to understand how this works. From what I can gather, the central character, Jesus, was quite specific about looking after the poor. He didn’t seem to have any parables about burying them under tons of debris.
The only true heresy you commit in this pious state of ours, is the vulgarity of getting caught. As long as the bodies remain pressed into the silence of the mud, the faithful will not blink. When the dead refuse to stay hidden, when they clutter the surface with their inconvenient rotting bodies, then everyone will scramble to put on their mask of hallowed rage. Let us not be fooled by the noise of the minister’s rehearsed and hollow resonance at the podium. The manhunt will fade, the sirens will die out, and the rains will wash away the blood from the headlines. The holes will remain open, like gaping, insatiable orifices waiting to be fed, and desperate men will crawl back into the dark, dark belly of the earth.
In our land of God and sun-kissed clouds, the only thing that trickles down is the water, and the only thing that rises is the coal.
