But, above all things, write—so that Sahibs
may read, and his disgrace be accomplished—that
Ram Dass, my brother, son of Purun Dass, Mahajun of
Pali, is a swine and a night-thief, a taker of life,
an eater of flesh, a jackal-spawn without beauty,
or faith, or cleanliness, or honour!
Narrow as the womb, deep as the Pit, and dark as the
heart of a man.
—Sonthal
Miner’s Proverb.
’A weaver went out to reap but stayed to unravel
the corn-stalks. Ha! Ha! Ha! Is
there any sense in a weaver?’
Janki Meah glared at Kundoo, but, as Janki Meah was
blind, Kundoo was not impressed. He had come
to argue with Janki Meah, and, if chance favoured,
to make love to the old man’s pretty young wife.
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 holding 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.
