Notes from the Hinterland: Stories and Essays by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2019-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

*Extracted from Raag Darbari

seven

~

Lorry Raja

MADHURI VIJAY

What happened was that my older brother, Siju, got a job as a lorry driver at the mine and started acting like a big shot. He stopped playing with Munna the way he used to, tossing him into the air like a sack of sand, making him sputter with laughter. When Amma asked him anything, he would give her a pitying look and not answer. He stopped speaking to his girlfriend, Manju, altogether. He taunted me about playing in the mud, as he called it, breaking chunks of iron ore with my hammer. With Appa especially he was reckless, not bothering to conceal his disdain, until he said something about failed drivers who are only good for digging and drinking, and Appa wrestled him to the ground and forced him to eat a handful of the red, iron-rich earth, shouting that this was our living now and he should bloody learn to respect it. Siju complained to the mine’s labour officer, Mr Subbu, but Mr Subbu dismissed it as a domestic matter and refused to interfere. After that, Siju maintained a glowering silence in Appa’s presence. When Appa wasn’t around, Siju sneered at our tent, a swatch of blue plastic stretched over a bamboo skeleton. Never mind that he was being paid half a regular driver’s salary by the owner of the lorry, a paan-chewing Andhra fellow called Rajappa, because Siju was only fourteen and could not bargain for more.

Never mind that Rajappa’s lorry permit was fake, a flimsy transparent chit of paper with no expiry date and half the words illegible, which meant that Siju was allowed to transport the ore only to the railway station in Hospet and not, like the other drivers, all the way to port cities like Mangalore and Chennai, where he’d run the risk of arrest by border authorities. Never mind that the mine’s lorry cleaners, most of whom were boys my age, called him Lorry Raja behind his back and imitated his high-stepping walk. None of it seemed to matter to him. And, as little as I wanted to admit it, he was a raja in the cab of that lorry and moreover, he looked it. His hair was thick and black, and a long tuft descended at the back of his neck, like a crow’s glossy tail feathers. His nose was straight, and his eyeballs were untouched by yellow. His teeth remained white in spite of breathing the iron-laden air. He seemed, when he was in the cab of that lorry, like someone impossible and important, someone I didn’t know at all.

X

The ore went to the port cities, and then it went onto ships the size of buildings. I hadn’t seen them, but the labour officer,

Mr Subbu, had told us about them. He said the ships crossed the ocean, and the journey took weeks. The ships went to Australia and Japan, but mostly they went to China. They were building a stadium in China for something called the Lympic Games.

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