India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
This was Kundoo's grievance, and he spoke in the name of all the five men
who, with Janki Meah, composed the gang in Number Seven gallery of
Twenty-Two. Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during which he
had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar. All through
those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down,
drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil--just as if he had been
an eyed miner. What Kundoo's gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had
resented before, was Janki Meah's selfishness. He would not add the oil to
the common stock of his gang, but would save and sell it.
"I knew these workings before you were born," Janki Meah used to reply; "I
don't want the light to get my coal out by, and I am not going to help
you. The oil is mine, and I intend to keep it."
A strange man in many ways was Janki Meah, the white-haired, hot tempered,
sightless weaver who had turned pitman. All day long--except on Sundays
and Mondays when he was usually drunk--he worked in the Twenty-Two shaft
of the Jimahari Colliery as cleverly as a man with all the senses. At
evening he went up in the great steam-hauled cage to the pit-bank, and
there called for his pony--a rusty, coal-dusty beast, nearly as old as
Janki Meah. The pony would come to his side, and Janki Meah would clamber
on to its back and be taken at once to the plot of land which he, like the
other miners, received from the Jimahari Company. The pony knew that
place, and when, after six years, the Company changed all the allotments
to prevent the miners from acquiring proprietary rights, Janki Meah
represented, with tears in his eyes, that were his holdings shifted, he
would never be able to find his way to the new one. "My horse only knows
that place," pleaded Janki Meah, and so he was allowed to keep his land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account