Arnab Ray [Ray - The Mine

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westland ltd

THE MINE

Amab Ray, better known as Greatbong, is one of India's most widely read bloggers (http://greathong.net). He has written for several media outlets like the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com), Times of India, Outlook magazine, DNA and the Telegraph . He graduated from Jadavpur University as a Bachelor in Computer Science and Engineering and went on to finish his PhD in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is presently employed as a research scientist at the University of Maryland and resides in the suburbs of Washington DC. His first book, May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss was published by HarperCollins in 2010.

westland ltd

Venkat Towers, 165, P.H. Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600 095 No. 38/10 (New No.5), Raghava Nagar, New Timber Yard Layout, Bangalore 560 026

Survey No. A-9, II Floor, Moula Ali Industrial Area, Moula Ali, Hyderabad 500 040

2323/181, Anand Nagar, Nehru Road, Santacruz East, Mumbai 400 055 4322/3, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002

First published in India by westland ltd 2011

Copyright Arnab Ray 2011 All rights reserved

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-93-81626-38-2

Illustration on page 118 by Shubham Bose Roy
Typeset in Aldine401 BT by SURYA, New Delhi

This book is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

To my parents

Acknowledgements

Thanking everyone who helped me write The Mine would have added fifty more pages to the book. So I will keep it short. I would like to express a debt of gratitude to the lovely people at Tranquebar/Westland, specifically Gautam, Renuka, Shalini and Anushree for their inputs, Gunjan for the cover and graphic design, my parents, my grandmother, my teachers from school and that person without whom no word would ever be writtenmy wife.

Prologue

Mother had always warned him of the dark.

What she had forgotten was to tell him about the light.

There was something about the light in this place that never ceased to unnerve Asgar. It illuminated every recess of his mind, some of which he had realised in the course of his life, are better kept in shadow.

The summer sun too was unforgiving in its stark relentlessness. But at least it was real. The industrial light here was not. It could not be. Because Asgar was deep inside the earth, in a place where not even nature could enter unless it came with a company badge.

Perhaps it was not so much the brightness that made him uneasy but the icy blue detachment of the ambient light, whose cold touch felt like that of a wet cotton shirt on a blustery, winter evening.

He had felt this way only in one other place before.

The morgue.

Battered, mangled what-had-once-drawn-breath lying still on cold slabs of aluminium. Hushed whispers of the living trying to make sense of the dead. The stench of formaldehyde, grief and despair.

For the past day or so, Asgar had been unable to shake off the feeling that he was back in a house of corpses. It was irrational, he reasoned, this fear, even more so after all the real horrors he had seen in his fifty-two years in the world above.

He tried to stop thinking.

Turning his attention back to the control panel, Asgar glanced across at the dials as they glowed and flickered in a steady rhythm of their own. He could not slack off, he told himself. All alone in Level 3 Sector 5, a football-field-sized room with two-storey-high ceilings, he was conscious of the cameras that watched his every movement, and of the automated loggers recording each action at the console.

Right now, one of the sensors showed a reading that was off the charts. That meant only one thing one of the moving parts in Purifying Chamber 6 had come off, with the sensors picking up the resultant vibration. This necessitated, according to Standard Operation Procedure, a shutdown of Chamber 6 and an immediate manual inspection.

Shit. All such fuck-ups just had to happen on his shift.

He looked at the waveform intently. Then he flipped a switch, the one that the engineers called the Ear', its purpose being to listen-in to the area where an anomaly has been detected.

Help Please no!

Asgar jerked back as if he had touched a hot stove.

What in the name of heaven was that?

His rational mind knew it was impossible. Yet there was no denying he had heard it. A voice, choked with tears, coming out from Chamber 6.

Asgar stood still. A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead and rested precariously on his brow. Building up in his bowels was a sudden pressure, a reaction to intense fear that had embarrassed him since early childhood.

Of course he must be hearing things. The room was yanking the strings of his mind. The doctor-lady, that know-it-all with the pierced nose, would possibly look at him now and say It is the forced isolation from your wife and daughter that is affecting you psychologically.

The thing was that he knew the doctor was wrong. He was really happy to be away from his wife. Fat, complaining and moody she had ceased to be of any interest to him years ago; just another creaking machine with interminable periods of bilious downtime that he was duty-bound to monitor. Making conversation according to the Standard Operating Procedures that marriage prescribed, and conducting periodic Are you doing all right?status updates, was all that was left of that miserable social compact. With the isolation and communication blackout that working in this mine had forced on him by contract, he was free of this distasteful duty for many months now, and for that he was most thankful.

Sexual tension? No, not even that. He had been a bad boy. As usual. A week ago, he had met Tanya in one of the rec-rooms. Tanya from the medical division. Twenty-two years old. The face of an angel. The body of a model. The mind of a whore. The energy of a tightly-wound spring. Their sex had been animalistic, devoid of love, tenderness and the sappy strawberry-coloured mush that decades of reading romance novels had brainwashed women into believing was reality. Tanya, refreshingly, did not suffer from such delusions. Unlike his wife she had never complained or cried. Is that the worst you can do?she had taunted Asgar, throwing her head back mockingly, every time he thought he had crossed her boundaries.

Yes, it had been marvellous. And best of all, she had hardly seen the worst of him.

Yet.

The blood rush triggered by memories of Tanya subsided quickly as he unsuccessfully tried to clear his mind of what he had just heard. Had someone actually cried out for help? Impossible. There was no one here.

Only one way of knowing for sure. He flipped the switch again.

I want to go home please, let me go home

Asgars blue shirt, framed by the large red and black company logo, now clung to his back, drenched with warm sweat. Was it happening to him? Like it had to the rest? No. He would not allow it.

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