Before, there were green hills. Now, narrow roads snake through layers of blackness and thick phantoms of smoke float up from the grounds as if the air is drawing out the past’s vestiges. With tongues hanging out, dogs chase one another up and down those roads during territorial wars. The guttural whirring of trucks, excavators, generators, and engines is a stubborn presence like the sweat cruising down the workers’ bodies. The nights ward away the day’s heat, bringing with them an army of mosquitoes that feast on blood mixed with soot and hopelessness. In summer, when the sky bursts open and rain hammers down on the mutilated hills, the children stick their tongues out and let the drops wash the grime off their faces. They run up the slopes, climb up the amphitheatre-like hills, jump on black puddles. The adults bring out steel and plastic buckets, bottles, and bowls from their tin sheds to fetch the icy offerings. As the rain taptaptaps the inhabitants’ skulls like inquisitive neighbours relentlessly knocking on doors, they are, briefly, swollen with a sense that this empire of smoke and soot will be rinsed clean and pepper vines and flowers will jut out from the black earth. But once the rain stops and the blackness still triumphantly stands before their eyes, their momentary optimism swims away. In the black rainwater zigzagging through the grounds, swishing into the drains.
Rajib emerges from the pit on a rickety ladder, his shoulders sagging under the weight of a jute sack loaded with coal. He unloads the sack on the wheelbarrow and exhales. He rubs his sweaty, dirt-stained forehead with his grimy hands. Rakib pushes the wheelbarrow away from the pit and towards the mound in the distance where the other kids have gathered, busy sorting impurities out from their shares of coal. Rajib trundles behind Rakib. They are fourteen, the youngest – and therefore the most disadvantaged – of the children working at the mine. The thought of encountering the older kids makes them both want to jump into the pit of darkness and heat and never emerge. After all, it is not unusual for the bigger children to tousle Rakib and Rajib’s hair, land a punch or a slap, spit on their faces, thrash their backs with steel rods, and kick their abdomens and shins, among other things, in order to hijack their shares of coal. Rajib thanks God when he notices the other kids are done sorting their bits and are shrieking in excitement down the peak, brandishing threadbare sacks full of coal, chasing one another.
Rakib is almost done with his sorting. Rajib, being the naturally faster twin, has finished his three minutes ago and is now lying on the dirt, staring at the expanse of winding roads, black pools, yellow excavators, trucks, cranes, generators, and ant-like people armed with bags and trunks, going about their work. Amena, their mother, comes gasping, stones and gravel crunching under her boots.
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