Walking to Work
Ravi Jain This happened a long time ago, when I was eighteen, home from college for the summer. We still lived in Zambia then, part of the tightly knit, insular expatriate Indian community. My father was an engineer in the copper mines, and I had found a summer job in the electrical repair shop, cleaning and calibrating instruments after the technicians had repaired them. It was a tedious job, especially for a bookish boy who had read a lot about the world, but the pay wasn’t bad, and I could walk to work. I had to leave the house quite early, about six in the morning. This morning was cold, I remember, and crisp. The weather had been mild for the previous few weeks, and I had carelessly left the house wearing only a light shirt and jeans. The sun had risen barely half an hour earlier, and the air had a bite that caught in my throat. The main road to the mine passed close to our house. I turned on to it and joined the steady trickle of men walking to the big gates. About a mile away the mine shaft rose dark and bleak in the early morning light. On the left, set back about twenty yards from the road, were the old slag heaps, thirty feet high, the remains of decades of copper mining. They said that when the Company had sucked all the copper out of the ground it would return to these slag heaps and squeeze out whatever metal was left in them. The slag heaps had pitted and cratered faces, and years of rain had cut strange, twisted little gullies down the sloping sides. The mine siren gave a short blast, punctuating the air sharply, just as it punctuated the lives of everyone in our town. My father