The Best Day of My Life (2 page)

Every few days the teacher came to our village. On the back of his bicycle was a box with a school inside it – chalk, maps, school books. A piece of chalkboard was tied across the top of the box. He rode his bike through the village, ringing the bell and gathering children together.

The teacher always set up his school on the empty bit of land behind the tea shop. All my aunt's children were allowed to go except for the baby. There was always a baby. And there was my oldest cousin, Elamma. It was her job to take care of the family.

Elamma did not like me. She couldn't go to school, either.

By the time I got to the tea-house yard, the teacher had set up his chalkboard. He covered the chalkboard with words and numbers. When he ran out of room on the chalkboard, he picked up a piece of coal and wrote on the mud brick wall.

‘She's not supposed to be here!' One of my cousins pointed at me. I was leaning into the folds of a banyan tree at the back of the yard, out of the way.

‘Education is for everyone,' the teacher said, as I knew he would. He continued with the lesson.

The teacher liked me.

I remembered what he taught us and, if I was around when he took his meal break, he gave me extra lessons while he ate his rice and dal.

Once he gave me a notebook and a pencil.

My cousins took them from me soon after, but I had them for a little while.

I formed letters and words in the dirt with a stick. I could read some English and Hindi words on billboards and packages. I knew how to add up money, although I never had money. I knew that the moon traveled around the earth somewhere up there in the deep, dark sky.

I leaned against the banyan tree and watched. And listened. And formed my letters in the dirt and did sums in my head.

That's where Elamma found me on the best day of my life.

She hit me. Hard.

‘You're supposed to be working.'

The baby on her hip started to cry.

The children in the yard thought we were more interesting than the lesson the teacher was trying to teach. They left the bit of chalkboard and formed a ring around me and Elamma.

‘Fight! Fight! Fight!' they chanted.

‘I'll work later,' I told Elamma. I couldn't hit her back because she was holding the baby. ‘The coal is not going anywhere.'

‘You'll work now. I have to work. Why should you get to go to school when I can't? I'm the oldest! I should get something for that!'

She hit me again, which wasn't fair because, as I've said, I couldn't hit her back.

‘You are welcome to come here, too,' the teacher said. He was trying to get everyone back to the chalkboard. ‘Bring the baby.'

‘And who will do the cooking? Who will do the laundry? You're a man. You think these things happen like magic.' Elamma turned her back to the teacher, grabbed me and pulled me away.

The children laughed and pointed.

‘If you let her stand here again,' Elamma called back to the teacher, ‘my father will run you out of the village.'

I had to laugh at that, even though it made her madder. Her father spent all his time coughing up blood, hitting my aunt and drinking up all the money my aunt made carrying coal.

I knew Elamma wanted to hit me for laughing, but she couldn't hit me without letting go of me, and if she let go of me I was going to bolt. So I got away with laughing at her.

But not for long.

She dragged me through the village. She was strong from so many years of lifting and carrying babies.

‘Where is your coal bag?'

I froze. I looked down at my side, hoping the bag would magically appear.

‘I dropped it,' I whispered.

‘Those things cost money. Where did you drop it? And don't tell me you don't know.'

‘It's with the monsters.' I could feel myself start to tremble. ‘Across the train tracks.'

Elamma shifted her hand from my arm to the back of my neck and marched me through the village. I tried to squirm away but she dug her fingers into my skin.

She dragged me to the railway tracks, to the rags and boards and piles of garbage where the monsters with no noses lived.

‘Go get it,' she said.

‘I'm not going back over there.'

‘Go get it.' She pushed me to the ground.

I was free. I could have run, but where would I go?

‘If you come home without it, he'll blame me,' Elamma said. ‘He'll beat you, but he'll beat me worse. You know he will. So here is your choice. Go and get the coal bag, and come home with it full of coal. Or don't come home at all.'

I thought of the stuffy little one-room shack where we all lived and slept. The cookstove smoke made the coal air even thicker. The room had mosquitoes and spiders, flies and ants that no amount of sweeping could get rid of. The whole family slept squished together on the dirt floor. There was hardly ever money for kerosene, so when the sun went down, the nights were long. It was a long way to the community toilet and the little ones often didn't make it.

The shack always smelled bad. Always.

But sometimes we had enough food and we played games like seeing who could stare the longest. My aunt taught us songs about animals. When my uncle was sober and not coughing, he would pretend that the little ones could hit him and make him fall over.

It was home.

I didn't know how Elamma could keep me from going back there without my coal bag. I just knew she would.

I stood up and took a few steps forward to the middle of the tracks. I waited there for a moment, half hoping a train would come and run me over.

‘Get moving,' Elamma said behind me.

I took a few more steps. I saw the monsters watching me.

And then something happened.

A girl stepped out of the monster pile and came toward me. She looked like me, but shorter. She didn't look like a monster, but I knew she must be one because she lived with them.

She was smiling. And carrying my coal bag.

It was all folded up in a neat and tidy square with sharp edges and pointy corners.

She held it out to me.

I didn't take it. I was afraid to get that close to her.

We stood that way for a long minute. Then the smile left her face. It wilted away like a weed drooping in the dry season.

She put the coal bag on the ground and walked away.

I didn't want to pick it up. I was afraid that I would turn into a monster by touching what a monster had touched.

But I was more afraid of what Elamma would do to me if I didn't pick up the bag. So I picked it up and crossed back over the tracks.

‘I was hoping you wouldn't do it,' Elamma said. ‘It would have been nice to get rid of you. More room for the family.'

‘I'm family, too.'

Elamma didn't say anything for a moment.

Then she said, ‘No. You're not.'

‘My mother was the sister of your mother,' I said. ‘That makes us family.'

‘Your mother was a sickly woman who died bringing you into the world,' she said. ‘Your grandparents gave my parents money to take you off their hands. They were neighbours. Even after they got rid of you, they had to move away.'

‘Why?'

‘Your mother shamed her family,' Elamma said. ‘You have no father.'

She held her head a little higher when she said these words. Then came her big finish.

‘You had better get used to carrying coal. That's all you will ever be good for. You'll never get a husband. And stay away from that school. Knowing how to read won't make you better at carrying coal. Now, get to work.'

She let me go and walked away.

I stood alone. After a while I started to pick up bits of coal that had fallen off a cart or out of somebody's basket. I put the coal into my bag. My bag got heavier.

I thought about what Elamma had said.

I had been told my parents were dead. I had never met them, so I didn't think about them.

Now I thought about them.

I decided Elamma was lying. But I had to be sure.

I headed over to the pit where I knew my aunt was working. I sat on the edge of the pit, dangled my feet and waited.

The pit was so big our whole village could be dropped into it and there would still be room left over. Dust rose up from the coal diggers at the bottom and from the feet of the women climbing in and out of the pit. I could hear the sound of pickaxes hitting rock.

The sun was shining but not much light got through the haze of coal dust and the smoke from the coal burning underneath the ground. I saw a few trees, but the leaves were grey, not green. If the sky was blue, it kept it a secret.

Everything was grey.

Except for the line of women coming up the trail from the pit. Their saris were points of bright colors. Not even the haze could blot them out.

It took a lot of scrubbing to get the coal dust out of those saris. I knew. It was one of my jobs to fetch the water to wash my aunt's sari clean.

My own clothes were grey. All I had to wear was what I was wearing. The coal was in them forever. That was just the way it was.

I watched the bright colors moving through the fog of dust. I imagined that the women were birds, strange birds, and that I was sitting on the moon.

Could people really sit on the moon? If they could, it would look a lot like Jharia. I had seen the moon when it was round and big. It looked like dust and coal pits.

I was thinking about this so hard that I almost missed my aunt. Then I saw her, loaded down with a large basket of coal on her head, almost at the top of the path that led from the pit.

I ran over to her.

‘Auntie, I need to talk to you.'

‘Is your coal bag full? It's not even half full.'

‘I need to ask you a question.'

She kept walking. She wanted to dump her load of coal. The bosses were standing by the truck, so I held back. I didn't want them to ask what was in my sack. They might take my coal without paying for it.

My aunt joined the line of ladies waiting by the truck. They dumped their baskets into the back of the truck. Workers on top of the truck shoveled the coal so it wouldn't slide off.

When her basket was empty, she came back to me.

‘Talk quickly. The bosses are in a bad mood.'

‘Elamma said that I'm not really her cousin.'

‘What? I can't hear you.' She bent down so that her face was closer to mine. Her face was lined with coal dust and sweat. Coal dust was even in her teeth.

‘She said you're not my mother's sister. She said my mother was just your neighbor, and that we are not family.'

‘Child, look where you are standing!'

I was standing on top of one of the cracks that had opened up in the ground. Smoke was climbing up my legs. Hot coals were underneath my feet.

My aunt moved me away and kneeled down to look for burns. I could see a hot piece of coal smoldering red against the bottom of my foot.

‘You've gone and hurt yourself,' she said. ‘Now how are you going to work? How are we going to get you medicine?'

I pulled my leg out of her hand.

‘Auntie, I'm fine. I don't feel anything. Is it true?'

She looked up at me. ‘Is what true?'

‘Are we really not family?'

She was busy dusting coal and ashes off the bottom of my foot with the hem of her sari. For a moment I thought she wasn't going to answer me.

Then she did.

‘We are not family,' she said. ‘Your mother's parents gave us some money to take you in. That's why you live with us.'

The bosses started yelling at her to get back to work. She put her hand gently on my shoulder and held it there for a moment. Then she picked up her basket and headed back into the pit for more coal.

I watched her go down the steep pathway until she got so far away that I could no longer pick her out from the other ladies with saris and baskets.

I was looking at my future.

I suppose I had always known it. What else could I ever do? But knowing something was different from admitting it.

On that day, that day for truth, I admitted it.

And when I looked clearly down the years at what I would become, another truth came into my head.

I had no family.

You stayed with your family because they were your family and families were supposed to stick together and care for each other.

But I had no family.

And I had no friends.

I had no reason to stay.

The truck behind me was getting quite full of coal. The worker jumped down from the back. The sides and flap were locked into place. The driver finished talking to the bosses and got behind the wheel. Another man got into the truck beside him. I heard the motor start up.

The bosses had their backs turned.

I was moving before I started to think about it.

I was good at moving fast. I was good at climbing and I had magic feet that didn't feel the rough points and edges of hard chunks of coal.

In an instant I was at the truck, over the side and crawling to the top of the coal pile. The truck started to move. Coal fell off as I tried to dig myself into the pile. I watched children below scramble to gather it up.

The truck went through my village.

It passed the shack that belonged to the woman who was not my aunt.

Elamma was outside, sweeping the dust out the door. She had to hold the broom with one hand because her other arm was still holding the baby.

She saw me.

She started to call out for the truck to stop. It was moving slowly.

Instead, she dropped her broom. It hit the ground with a bang. She moved quickly toward the truck.

I think she wanted to come with me. She even reached out to try to grab onto the back.

Then she remembered the baby.

Even then, she looked around for a place to put it down.

There wasn't a place. She was stuck.

I watched her cry as the truck rumbled out of the village and out of Jharia.