Walking to Work
Ravi Jain
This happened a long time ago, when I was eighteen, home from college for the summer. We still lived in Zambia then, part of the tightly knit, insular expatriate Indian community. My father was an engineer in the copper mines, and I had found a summer job in the electrical repair shop, cleaning and calibrating instruments after the technicians had repaired them. It was a tedious job, especially for a bookish boy who had read a lot about the world, but the pay wasn’t bad, and I could walk to work.
I had to leave the house quite early, about six in the morning. This morning was cold, I remember, and crisp. The weather had been mild for the previous few weeks, and I had carelessly left the house wearing only a light shirt and jeans. The sun had risen barely half an hour earlier, and the air had a bite that caught in my throat.
The main road to the mine passed close to our house. I turned on to it and joined the steady trickle of men walking to the big gates. About a mile away the mine shaft rose dark and bleak in the early morning light. On the left, set back about twenty yards from the road, were the old slag heaps, thirty feet high, the remains of decades of copper mining. They said that when the Company had sucked all the copper out of the ground it would return to these slag heaps and squeeze out whatever metal was left in them. The slag heaps had pitted and cratered faces, and years of rain had cut strange, twisted little gullies down the sloping sides.
The mine siren gave a short blast, punctuating the air sharply, just as it punctuated the lives of everyone in our town. My father
would be at the breakfast table, scanning the newspaper, finishing his tea, with enough time to drive to the engineering office. I had to leave earlier as I had to walk; I pretended that was an imposition, and we had daily banter about how unfair it was. The other technicians in my workshop rose before dawn in the mining townships. The townships were an hour or more away by bus, and much further than that from our lives. Our lives were contained, stratified, comfortable.
I slowed down near the vendors’ stalls. There was a small line of women sitting on the ground under the trees, selling roasted groundnuts, buns, small cartons of milk, mealies. One saw my eyes linger on a pack of cigarettes, and immediately waved it at me.
“Only one Kwacha, bwana,” she called, “one Kwacha.”
One of her breasts spilled out of her shirt; a baby was suckling on it. I could see the soft, deep brown flesh swelling to the baby’s mouth. I looked away as I paid. She struck a match for my cigarette and I leaned over to the flame. Her fingers smelled faintly of ground nuts. The baby let out a loud sucking noise.
The mine siren gave a second short blast as I stepped back on the road. I still had fifteen minutes. In any case, Ferguson, the foreman, was always a few minutes late. He was a big, bulky fellow with a huge voice. I was afraid of him at first, but then got used to his rough way of speaking. Sometimes he stopped by my bench to watch me work.
“Make sure you clean those instruments good, my boy,” he boomed. “And keep your bench tidy-safe.”
I walked by the side of the road. A man was shivering next to me. He was wearing a hard hat loosely on his head; tufts of frizzy black hair escaped it. He wore light green overalls and gumboots; a refinery worker. One of the front buttons of his overalls was missing and he was holding it closed with his hand. I caught a
glimpse of the black skin underneath, and I could imagine the taut, lean muscles of his chest.
He was humming quietly, a soft susurrous croon under his breath. It sounded nice. I fell in step. His big black gumboots crunched the gravelly dirt beside the road. I can still see that dirt, the deep rich red-brown, when I close my eyes.
The cigarette was gone. I thrust both my hands in my pockets.
“Cold this morning,” the man said. Cold, I said, quite cold. We walked on, looking down at the ground. I thought of smoking another cigarette.
“My nephew died day before yesterday,” the man said.
I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. He was still looking down, one hand holding his overalls as he walked. He was humming again, quietly, and walking a little slower now. I glanced at him, but his face was closed. We passed under a jacaranda tree, the ground a purple carpet off lowers under our feet.
“Drowned. Ah, yes,” he said. “You know Mindolo Dam, near the old army camp.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. He was murmuring under his breath again. I looked at him now, hard, willing his face to soften or at least look at me. But he continued to look down, the gumboots going crunch, crunch, crunch.
I could see the new slag heaps in the distance now. They were rectangular hills with smooth sloping sides and flat tops. Along the top ran a narrow-gauge railway track. The little slag train pulled up alongside the edge, on time, just like clockwork. The first big iron vat tipped open sideways, as from a signal from the sky, and smoothly discharged the molten slag down the side of the hill. It burnt fiery red and orange, glowing like a fierce lava as it ran down the pitch black side of the heap. One by one the vats of the train opened, and rivulets of molten lava flowed out, like fresh blood from an open wound.
I turned my eyes away. It isn’t good for the eyes to look at the liquid slag too long. A red image danced before my eyes for a few seconds.
We were nearing the big main gates, with the sentry box in the middle. There was a steady flow of men through the gates. The man alongside me was still murmuring, still crooning under his breath, and I wanted to stop him, make those eyes look at me instead of the copper earth.
The crooning slowed, hesitated and stumbled, as if there were something caught in the man’s throat. He coughed.
“He was . . .” the man stopped, then continued haltingly. “He was almost your age now,” he said.
He wiped his nose with his sleeve. I didn’t know what to do. I made a small incoherent noise in my throat.
Now he shot me a glance. His eyes were red-rimmed and there were tiny red rivulets of sleeplessness swimming in their whites. But they looked straight at me, through me. Suddenly I felt naked, unprepared.
For a moment my hand reached up, as if to touch his arm or shoulder, but it trembled slightly and fell. He was waiting for me to say something. I felt somehow afraid, and colder still. I was young, unsure, a stranger to myself. My hand touched the shiny top button of my shirt for a moment. I looked away from his eyes—I could not look at them too long. But not before I saw a shadow flit across them—was it knowing, pity, or disdain, I still don’t know.
The mine siren gave a short double blast. The man took off his hard hat and passed his hand over his hair, then sighed and put it back on his head. I shivered as a gust of wind swept by, and so did he. Even so I did nothing. I don’t know why.
We were silent as we joined the thicket of men near the sentry box. I pulled out my mine pass from my pocket, and the man fished his out from his overalls. How different we must have looked to the
sentry guard, a middle-aged black man in mining overalls, a young Indian boy in workshop clothes, both cold, walking together. We flashed our passes at the guard in the sentry box, and walked, silently, past the big gates and on our separate ways.