I am seventeen, but my lungs are much older. And more wasted than my body.
A doctor once told my mother I wheeze like a seventy-year-old cigarette addict. The same middle-aged doctor who was very fair and had curly golden hair, and spoke in a way that made all of us giggle. Hariya and his friends said he was a Sahib from a foreign country. Even we thought so. Otherwise, why would he ask so many questions to the babus and the local Nurse Didi? And why would he look all around with wide, surprised, disbelieving eyes? What was so strange about heaps of garbage rotting alongside the kuccha road where children played, and men gathered to smoke bidi, and women fought for their turn at the common community tap? As if he had never seen such a place before!
We soon realised we had guessed right. How would a foreign doctor know we didn’t smoke cigarettes here…that we never had the money to buy cigarettes. The only thing we smoked was the dust of coal.
Black, choking, endless coal.
And this is Jharia.
A township where the earth burns from within. Angry, ruddy, like a goldsmith’s foundry.
Where children grow up with soot in their teeth, and fire in their playgrounds. Where even the air tastes of iron and our breath exhales coal dust.
The day starts early here. Not with the sound of birdsong or chanting from faraway temples, but with coughing. First from the hut next to ours, then from our own. A gravelly chorus of phlegm and rasp, rising with the smoke that curls through the cracks in our roofs. Hariya, my little brother, only twelve, coughs until his body doubles over. His eyes have sunken so deep in their socket, I fear they might just shut someday. Lifting the flimsy vest clinging to him like second skin, I rub his back gently to ease the cough. My fingers involuntarily recoil at the touch of the bare bones that crisscross his human shell. Sometimes he vomits bile. At others, he just stares with unseeing watery eyes, asking me in whispers why the night doesn’t leave his eyes.
“Didi, it hurts,” Hariya whispers, clutching his chest.
I rub his back and wipe his eyes with the edges of my frayed dupatta.
“Breathe slowly. In…out.”
He shakes his head. “Feels like someone’s sitting on me.”
“You’ll be fine.”
I don’t know what else to tell him.
It’s a lie, and he knows it.
I wait for a miracle to unfold, one that can whisk us away from here. But nothing happens. I continue to wait.
*
Our house isn’t a house. It is a lie held together by mud, cement and hope. The roof is a collection of rusted tin sheets nailed together by desperation. When it rains, we place buckets everywhere. Sometimes I think we are more buckets than people. Our beds don’t escape the spray – they stay damp for days. The fetid mix of sweat, damp and slush languishes much like a guest who has overstayed.
In Jharia, rain doesn’t clean. It just makes the coal dust stick better to skin. Is that why our skin is all ebony and chestnut brown, and not white and gold like the Sahib’s?
*
When I was ten, Baba sent me to school for three years. The gram panchayat school was located in the neighbouring village – one common school for three villages. I remember the chalk dust, the faded alphabets on the cracked blackboard, the teacher who came late and left early. And caned our knuckles and palms if we forgot to bring our notebooks. Or if we carried plain roti with pickle for lunch, instead of vegetables and lentils. He was stricter with the boys.
He just about tolerated us, the younger girls. But he appeared quite affectionate towards the older ones — looking concerned, speaking like a friend, patting them patiently on their back. But strangely, the girls always spoke ill of him whenever we walked home together after school. All fifteen of them. Much of their anger was drowned in the whirr and thud of the crushers and bulldozers around us. I couldn’t understand them back then. Now I do.
Yet, those were my golden years. The only years when I held a pencil instead of a lump of coal. I had friends who played with me. I got to read books which had pictures of people who had enough to eat, and of places which were clean and dry.
Good times don’t last long in the coal fields. So, we had these floods in our mines, and one of the underground walls collapsed. Baba and a few others were trapped under the debris. When he was rescued a day later, he was alive and breathing, but barely so. His right arm was dangling dangerously below his elbow – it had cracked in two places. He lost his job. The coal company did not sponsor his treatment or offer any compensation. Why would they? After all, he wasn’t an official worker registered in their records. He was a part of the ‘informal’ labour brigade which consisted of disposable workers. Disowned, in times of crisis. Pretty much like the plastic wrappers we burn for firewood.
Mai cried for weeks, then sent me to the coal heaps.“But Mai, what about school?” I protested feebly.“Family first,” she asserted. “School doesn’t pay for our food. Books don’t cook rice.”
So, at thirteen, I stopped being a girl and became a scavenger, instead. Not of bones or bodies, but of coal. One more face added to the dark, hopeless lunar landscape.
But somewhere deep inside, lay a core of molten lava fuelled by images of fire, dust, lungs, and loss. Images that no one else saw.
*
Four years later, nothing has changed.
Every morning, I climb the heaps of waste, searching for black rocks fallen from trucks, scattered from loading belts, abandoned near pits. I scan the railway tracks, hoping to pick a few dry chunks blown out of the brimming goods carriages. My rolled-up dupatta acts as a padding, a cushion, on which I balance the large iron scuttle. My back bends. The coal is heavy. But heavier still, is the silence of hunger at home. My hands blister. But they hurt less than the despairing eyes of my father, withering away on the sagging coir cot.
Some kids here carry more than their body weight every day. Some fall. Sometimes they don’t get up again. A few stagger along but never reach home. The newspapers never write about them. They become mere statistics in a moth-eaten, sepia register, becoming one with the dust that gathers on its cover. Is it any consolation to realise that it is one mouth less to feed?
*
I lug my sacks of coal to the market to sell. But transactions are always done in whispers and through gestures. Because technically, it is stolen. Everyone does it — the shopkeepers, the contractors, even the policemen who pretend to look away. Corruption isn’t a secret here – it is the currency.
At the market, I squat by the sacks piled up near the weighing scale – my hands black, nails chipped. A shopkeeper weighs the coal as I look on hopefully.
“This lot has more dust and less coal, Dulia,” he grumbles. “Not more than seventy today.”
“It’s good coal, Chacha. At least give me a hundred.” Our dinner depends on my haggling skills.
“Eighty.”
“But Chacha, that won’t even buy food for all of us.” I glare at him.
“Then go find some other fool,” he shrugs, and turns to the woman waiting behind me.
I slam the sack down. “Fine. Eighty! But next time you cheat me, I’ll sell it to Manilal instead.”
He smirks but hands me the notes. I clutch them tight, feeling both rich and robbed.
Eighty rupees for one sack. I want to scream. But all I do is swallow my rage and walk away. There are tasks to be done. Like picking up rice, lentils and cooking oil on my way back. Hariya once asked me why coal is worth more than children’s lives and studies. I told him not to say such unholy things. But inside, I wondered the same. I still missed attending school. I still missed spending a few hours away from Hariya’s cough, Baba’s groans, and Mai’s badgering.
At the market, I see girls my age buying bangles, ribbons and nail paint — their hands supple, their laughter ringing happily. They don’t smell of smoke. They smell of perfume, and possibilities.I hate them. I also want to be them.
*
Jharia’s secret is no secret at all. A zone bereft of grass and greenery. Far removed from the urban lenses, it is a toxic belt where the underground fires never sleep. They eat the coal seams slowly, silently, turning soil into ovens. At times, glowing, smouldering beams burst out from invisible fissures on the ground. Houses sink overnight. Singed trees snap. Roads melt. But there are certain constants too, like the silhouettes of children lugging heavy coal scuttles across the smoke and the fumes.
Our neighbourhood lies on the edge of one such fiery zone. We walk on eggshells every day, as if the earth is a thin crust of bread laid out over boiling soup. One wrong step, and we’ll fall into the bottomless pit below.
“Didi, is this our punishment?” Hariya whispers, pointing at the flames at a distance. “Do we live right above hell?”
I hesitate. “No, not hell. Just fire. The fire that fuels all our needs.”
Hariya looks at me, part curious, part confused.“
Then why doesn’t God put it out?”
I pretend to fall asleep. Silence, I’ve learnt, equates survival. But silence tastes bitter, more bitter than soot, a bitterness that eventually creates self-hate.
At night I lie awake, watching the gold and orange glowing ribbons spiderwebbed against the dark sky. The ground itself feels alive - breathing, crackling, waiting to swallow us. Some call it a cursed land. Some call it karma. To me, it feels like a festering wound that won’t close.
*
Hariya once tugged my hand when we were walking past a group of schoolchildren in clean, white uniforms. He asked:
“Didi, when do I get to wear a shirt like that?”
I looked at the scrubbed, happy faces of the children.
“Someday,” I said softly.
“Promise?”
I forced the word out. “Promise.”
I wanted him to have what I had given up — not just books, but also the right to dream.
His eyes shone with something unfamiliar – hope. Hope, here, is both dangerous and heavy. More dangerous than the inferno. It fires hearts and incites rebellion. Heavier than coal. It breaks spines.
That night, Hariya coughed blood into his pillow. Mai tiptoed outside with the pillow cover and washed it secretly. Baba looked the other way. I wanted to scream, but the silence in our house is like cement… hard, suffocating, permanent.
That night, I began to hate promises.
*
There’s a boy, Baru. Nineteen. Earlier he used to work as a registered, legal miner, though nothing here feels quite legal. His sooty face looks vulnerable...innocent…but his eyes? They are two pools of fire — clear, stubborn, hungry.
Sometimes, after the day’s work, we sit on the abandoned railway tracks. He kicks at the gravel. We watch the express trains whizzing past, with awe and admiration. The whooshing wind uncoils my bun and the loose hair strands cover my eyes. I catch a hint of coy admiration in Baru’s eyes. We talk about the world beyond Jharia.
“Dulia, I dream of leaving this place someday. Board one of these trains and just vanish,” he says.“And where do you plan to go?”
“Patna. Maybe Ranchi. Or even Kolkata. Places which let you breathe, cities where the air doesn’t stifle you.”
“And do what?”
“Sweep the roads. Sell vegetables. Doesn’t matter. Just, not this.”
He turns to me. “And you? What are your dreams?”
“Dreams don’t survive in dust,” I tell him, looking at my hands, all grey and black. “At night, I worry about how to get food tomorrow. About how bad Hariya’s cough would be. Whether I would be able to get some free tonic from Nurse Didi for Baba and Hariya. Those are my dreams, Baru.”
I smile wryly. He looks hurt.
Once, Baru held my hand. His palms were coarse, calloused, but warm.
“You deserve more than this,” he whispered.
I laughed, not out of joy, but out of disbelief. As if he had cracked a joke.
‘Deserve’ is an illusion for us. We simply take whatever is thrust upon us. It’s always doles, never deservingness.
But secretly I hold Baru’s words close to my heart, as if it’s that fragile silken thread binding me to a fairytale future.
*
Last winter, the arid winds blew long and hard, pushing the fires closer to us. Entire rows of huts were charred in a matter of days. As we rushed out, packing our lives and future into a few messy bundles, I turned back one last time to look at the space that cradled my childhood memories. At that precise moment, I realised the true meaning of homelessness, of displacement. For all the drudgery and disease, for all the pain and penury, this was my only refuge, a tiny rundown space that offered me safety and shelter. And now, that also was gone. Snatched away cruelly!
Like refugees, we were herded into temporary camps with plastic roofs that flapped like broken wings.
The community gathered. They protested.
“Hum apna ghar nahi chhodenge (We won’t leave our homes)!” An old man cried.
“We want our homes and lives back!” The women echoed, sticks in their hands.
The company coal trucks rolled past nonchalantly. Children bawled. I stood with them, throat dry, chanting words I barely believed in.
“We want justice! Justice! Justice!”
Justice is another word that shines only on the pages of books. Or is delivered to people who can afford it. For us, it is like the proverbial golden deer — beautiful to imagine, pleasing to look at, but impossible to get.
The police arrived. Lathis and blows rained. People scattered like birds. I ran, but Baru stayed. He threw a stone at a lathi-wielding policeman.
They beat him with their stout batons until he bled, and fell unconscious.
Something inside me cracked that day. I felt tired of simply waiting and watching. I felt tired of silence. I decided to grow my anger. For the first time, anger felt cleaner, purer than coal dust.
Baru limped for weeks after that. Rebellion against the masters is considered blasphemy in these parts. Loyalty has to be shown to those who hand out the moolah, not the ones who survive on them. His name was struck off the mine’s register. He became one of us, looking for coal around the railway tracks and pits.
*
With each passing month, Hariya’s health worsened. His frail body was racked with bouts of dry cough. He could neither eat or drink, nor sleep. Others in the camp had started showing their irritation at this nagging sound. One early morning, we took him to the government hospital. The building was grey, peeling, and smelled of antiseptic mixed with despair. A few patients waited in the tiny waiting room while others slumped against the walls of the paan-stained corridor. Nurses and ward boys walked past like zombies, avoiding eye contact with anybody. The smell of disease and the stench of toilets made my stomach churn.
Hariya was called in around lunch time. The doctor barely looked at him and scribbled something on paper.
“TB test,” he muttered.
“How much would it cost, Doctor Sahib?” I asked, almost wishing he wouldn’t reply.
“Three hundred rupees.”
“Three hundred? But we don’t have—”
“Then take him home. Boil water. Massage his chest. Pray.” He waved us away.
Mai’s eyes filled with tears. “Doctor Sahib, please…”
But he had already turned to the next patient.
The test would cost more than three sacks of coal. And four full meals for us. It was a cruel choice to make.
On our way back, I told Mai, “Why didn’t you shout? Why didn’t you demand, instead of begging?”
Mai shushed me. “Don’t talk like that. It can get you killed. Stay quiet.”
But that day, I felt something stirring and shifting within me. I kept ranting all the way home. I no longer believed silence would save us.
We didn’t run the test. Instead, Mai boiled neem leaves, made weak tulsi tea, and prayed. She spent long hours rocking back and forth, muttering holy chants. She stared endlessly at the photos of her gods, who, in turn, stared back at her with cold, impassive eyes. Sometimes I wondered if she was losing her mind!
Baba chewed tobacco and traced his fingers along a geometric print on the plastic sheet that covered the floor.
I tried to scour more coal and got into a fight with the younger boys. At Jharia, coal is what binds us as a community. It is also coal that sparks friction and conflict. We curse it for the way it corrodes and consumes our lives. But we treasure it the most because it helps light our hearth.
*
Hariya has grown thinner. His ribs stick out like the spikes of a broken umbrella. He barely speaks, and his laughter fades into wheezes. His TB-ridden breath grates like a rusted machine struggling against its own decay. Sometimes, I press my ear to his chest, listening for his heartbeat. Each thud feels like a countdown to an end.
It’s a hot summer night. All of us from our cluster of tents are sitting out in the open, near the old well. It is moderately humid, and a light breeze keeps the heat bearable. We talk and laugh and reminisce, like regular neighbours enjoying a few light moments. I sit and watch their faces — for once, happy and unburdened. For no apparent reason, I start missing Baru.
Suddenly, the ground trembles. Not like an earthquake. More like a growl from the netherworld, deep and hollow. Within minutes, smoke and fire erupt near the old well. People scream.
“Run!” Baba shouts, pulling Mai’s arm.
I grab Hariya and run. The breeze starts blowing stronger and the flames are fanning out dangerously in all directions. I run helter-skelter, training my eyes on the rugged path ahead, Hariya in tow. Once or twice, I turn around to see bright staccato sparks rising and licking the night sky. Columns of dark, ominous smoke billow out of almost everywhere, choking our lungs. People jostle, and scream, and elbow each other, desperate for a breath of fresh air. In the mayhem, I lose my grip on Hariya and find myself shoved and pushed forward by others.
A muffled cry freezes my blood.
“Hariya!” I scream, searching through the smoke.
I see his small figure, coughing, stumbling towards the fire. Towards the apocalyptic glow that lights up his face like a ghost. Panic, along with chronic illness, has left him disoriented.
By the time I reach him, he has collapsed. A thin scarlet trickle escapes his lips.
“Didi,” he whispers, “it’s burning inside me.”
I hold him tight and plead, “Stay with me. Please, Hariya.”
His eyes look glazed. He glances at the sky.
“White shirt…,” he murmurs. And then, nothing.
His eyes are open, staring not at me, but at the sky. The fire did not take him. The smoke did. His lungs, too full of soot, simply gave up.
We shall bury him tomorrow. Not in soil, but in slag. The ground here isn’t kind enough for graves. And Hariya is too young to be cremated.
*
It’s been four months since Hariya left us. His slate still lies under my bed. The chalk letters are smudged, but I trace them sometimes — A, B, C…Letters that never formed words. Chalk stick that never graduated to a pencil.
With Hariya, something inside me has died, too. Is it the urge to dream? Is it the impulse to rebel? Or the fear of loss?
“You need to let go, Dulia…you’re feeding your soul with grief and despair,” Baru tries to reason with me.
He still nurtures happy dreams.
Let’s get married. Let’s move out of Jharia and start afresh. Please, Dulia.”
Baru’s earnestness is hard to ignore. But how do you leave a place which houses your half-dead parents? Where each stone and every mound whispers your dead brother’s name?
I refuse. Not because I don’t love him. But because love here feels like another debt we can’t repay. And while these coal fields continue to be a blistering wound, they are the only stamp of reality in my life, the only certainty I know. Hopeless, but permanent. For now, I rise at dawn, throat chafing, chest constricted. I cough. Walk to the heaps. Collect coal. Every step feels like walking on my brother’s grave. Baru helps me carry my haul back home. Sometimes I dream of Hariya in a school uniform, his white shirt glowing like the moon. Sprinting in glee, lungs free, through endless green fields without smoke.
“Come Didi, let’s race! Let’s catch that rainbow at the end of this field.” Hariya’s clear, ringing voice echoes in my ears. “ You better run fast or I’ll beat you to it!”
Urmi Chakravorty is a freelance writer-reviewer living in Bangalore, India. Her non-fiction has been published by The Hindu, The Times of India, Outlook Traveller and Deccan Herald. Her personal essays, short stories and poetry have found space in over fifty domestic and international literary magazines and anthologies across India, the USA, UK, Africa, Singapore and Canada, including The Hooghly Review, Rigorous, All Your Stories, Mocking Owl Roost, Uproar, Story Sanctum, Wordrunner, TMYS Review, Kitaab, Muse India, Madras Courier, eShe, FemAsia, Borderless Journal, SheThePeople, Pena, The Chakkar, Indian Review, and The Wise Owl. Her fiction and poetry have been awarded by Rupa Publications, Women’s Web, S7, Wordweavers, and the University of Hawaii. A passionate traveller, Urmi is a lover of psithurism, petrichor, ginger tea, and everything in between. Her other interests include music, photography, and spending time with her community dogs. Urmi’s writings can be read here: www.wordsnverses.com