Wolf

I.

Sharing a bottle of boiled water, right fists clenching a funnel around the plastic crinkling aperture, filtering pathogens, mineshaft women with long-dangling lobes rested their picket signs in the negative space of their bodies. Tonight, gold leaked from creases in palms. It was dark inside the Wolf. Figures sat by stone-coddled fires and sifted flecks of shale from pules, blue breaking green. Others formed a loose perimeter, leaning on their jacklegs and sinker drills, flicking dupattas over muscular clavicles. Little punctures of fire, little candle torches. They had learned each other’s bodies underground, in the shadows cast by scaffolding and low-density dust that rose from the hypnotic percussion of Company’s one-ring drilling machine. An approximation of kilograms that each woman along the line could heave and pass. The dynamite-layers’ pace, and an attuned quiet in the aftermath of their work: nearly three hundred fingertips against the tunnels, feeling for a wet knock that would herald a cave-in. Once cleared for safety, a spatter of stakes would unfurl into the new cavity, cautiously struck into rock wall. Then a draping of lamp cables. A dimpled bucket, a goatskin glove, a headlamp’s leaking battery. Below—as now, above.

Thumbing things smooth, sucking teeth. A sudden heat at the back of the neck catalyzed by a bell of laughter in the darkness. Atmospheric earthen steam from cauldrons of daal cooked with sampf and aliums to ward off the indigestion caused by uncertainty, the probability of a job lost by striking. Other indignities laying waste the body.

II.

This time of year night skies were huge and polished. Depending upon which shift you were assigned to—sundown to sunrise, or sunrise to sundown—you might never see them, unless you took an unpaid leave of a few days: wedding, funeral, birth. You might adjust the fraying canvas strap of your torch over your shoulder, scuff your toe against the gravel at the mine’s entrance and descend, in direct correspondence with the rise of the evening star. You might emerge pinked by dawn light, stars polished away.

This night was pulpy darkness. Luminous. Inside the Wolf someone installed dangling things that carved new dramas of light interrupted. Someone dipped their hand-rolled cigarette into the flames, tobacco hissing and sparking. Dangling husks of citruses. Damp, like phlegm we waited and ripened in that warm veil that was the Wolf. Thinly grafted between us and the train coming to deliver a slack message, or a slumping tangle of scabs climbing down the mine shaft, or a clot of slack-mouthed company partners. Sit with us, we would, around our fires, say. Stay awhile. The rolled kantha quilts would have been warmed and distributed, clove candies dropped or pressed into gesticulating hands. Documenting local events at irregular intervals.

They might be our sisters, or our uncles, or our betrotheds after all. They could be our children, if we stretched. The sandpaper of their chipped teeth against our nipples. They might be something other than children on a night like this.

A mother has died.

III.

Ordinary is heightened by many things. By the unlanguaged shock of sudden color in the grasses. The apparition of your knuckles on river-red gravel when your lover turns you onto your stomach, her fingers catching a new ridge inside you. A crowd of pye-dogs with concerned faces sniffing at the doors to the lift after a loose patch of rock dislodged from the shaft wall, the Wolf breaking a few miners’ legs. Too exhausted to wave them away, the injured surrendering to dogs’ tender tongues lapping excess blood from their covered, dribbling wounds.

And so a son pressed a crackling voice between ear and shoulder on a Nokia cell phone, head angled to keep the phone in place while he pencils a note on a repair order. The polaroids pinned to the shop wall distending and taking on bloated dimensionality. Five years. His face has thinned slightly and a tattoo appeared in year three, but his cropped hair and black t-shirt have remained the same. Last month, he was finally awarded a managerial role after five years of posing with tourists who wandered into the shop with a jet-lagged technological crisis. Circular tourists who became seasonal neighbors, and eventually loyal return-customers: the snowbird Waldorf-school intellectuals from Chandigarh; the European swimming instructors who work at both the canyon hotel and the false prophet’s ashram in the hills; the Israeli who invites you to his paid yoga circles on your own beaches; the Russian couple, both composers, whose doe-eyed teen daughter is a Kollywood back-up dancer; the Kenyan sadhu with this two-meter walking staff, his tiny mumu-wearing wife, and their strange American granddaughters. One and all need sim cards. One and all seem to find their way into the life of this son holding a pencil against the news of his mother’s death, and the lives of his cousins and their cousins who staff the electronics counter in this small shop above a vegetarian chaat stall.

Death, so ubiquitous, has sharpened the line that dictates his waking hours. A coconut palm horizontal. His mother pinned beneath it. Finally, this is what an inching collision between two moving points could mean. Growing older like a magnetic wave, sliding into the decline of it, the unpredictable shirking of a sand bank by its dune. Tectonically shifting its weight.

IV.

Kickstarting his motorbike, he leaves the shop early. He promised to deliver a new cell battery and a fresh jug of his mother’s dahi to the sadhu’s granddaughters, in their orange apartment overlooking the bus station. When he arrives, he walks up the stairs and enters the open door. The granddaughters are on the patio painting; their grandparents are sleeping. They notice his silhouette in the doorframe and swarm him, stay for cha, look we painted you, come with us to the traveling carnival, did you see it being constructed across the street? Their arms around his shoulders. He will shrug. He will be unavailable to fix their phones, or wire money to their relatives, or give them rides to the beach, because his amma has died, and decades of resistance and disidentifications are suddenly rushing toward him, once still facets of a landscape. He numbly thinks of the illicit tub of coconut liquor he’s side-eyed since childhood, fruiting with lizards. Amma’s gold tooth.

In a few hours, he will have become someone widely flung spiraling to one center, then another. He will ride slowly home to the farm, taking in gulps of sweet and briny air, and after sundown he will ride into the ghatt and the mine’s clearing to inform his sister. She will be wearing a polycarbonate construction helmet, twin moles hidden on the bottoms of her feet.

V.

Every now and again the mines collapse, and in most cases insurance fine print deems the site too dangerous to recover the buried casualties of bodies and equipment. The Company could just blow the mountain up and start anew, following the path that the more lucrative quarry contractors have taken. A simple task. The Company partners consider diverting a few trusted office boys to lay dynamite around the site’s perimeter. Blow the jain out of the hill har har har and all that, the partners would joke with prickling sensations of foreboding along their spines, imagining the series of happy accidents that led them here, to co-ownership, to collapse, thundering upwards scatalogically and blotting out the sun. The mountain taking on the likeness of the partners’ mothers’ furrowed brows and tight top-knots. The boulders their mothers would pray beside in the foothills. The Company decides not to blow up the mountain. They assemble new teams and bore into the wet red heart of the continental plate instead. The fantasies of total destruction remain within the grumbling realm of hotel bars, tempered by gold alloyed wrist watches.

A mother has died, a farmer, a comrade who grew coconut and tulsi. We speculated. We came to a familiar conclusion. Her death was an accident of the monsoon, an architecture of roots loosening their grip. An underground cave-in. Red of the closed eyes. Doors left open despite an ominous low tone of gases gurgling up from the mine’s guts. Imprints of sound left in the geodes, haunting the trees, the deer, the growing things.

It is in this context that a brother and sister’s appa remains in a collapsed mine unmourned, along with so many others. That a child circumambulates the ghatt, riding deeper into the night, pulling the momentum of a mother’s death into a sister’s fire-lit garden of political attrition. That we strike. That we strike again.