The Best Day of My Life (2012)
“This is how it happened.
I was picking up coal.
No. I was supposed to be picking up coal, but I wasn’t. I was tired of picking up coal. I was tired of coal.
Being tired of coal in Jharia is no good, because coal is all there is in Jharia. There is coal in pits and coal in piles and coal in mines under the ground. There is coal on the roads and coal in people’s hair and coal in people’s chests that makes them cough and cough.
There is even coal in the air. It comes up through cracks in the earth from the coal fires that have been burning under the town for nearly one hundred years.
If you’re a man, you work in the mines or the pits, hacking at the coal with pickaxes and shovels.
If you’re a woman, you walk up the narrow steep trails with large heavy baskets of coal on your head.
If you’re a child, you run around and pick up any stray lumps of coal you can find. If the bosses see you doing this they’ll chase you, and they’ll hit you if they catch you. So you have to move fast.
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