Colour Of Gold

Prologue

From: Rob Flanagan

Sent: Saturday 25 October 2003, 7:48 PM

To: Bertie Flanagan

Subject: Getting in touch

Heathrow, UK

Dear Bertie Flanagan,

I have just come to know about you through Mr Ian Peterson, formerly of KGF, who now lives in Australia. Mr Peterson himself moved out of KGF several decades ago and never returned, so you may not know him personally. He got me your email address through his contacts.

I urgently need to get in touch with you regarding an important personal matter. I need to confirm your ID so I can correspond with you.

Since I am nearing hundred and am in frail health, I would request you to respond to my email as soon as possible. My number and address are attached.

I eagerly await your response.

Warm regards,

Rob Flanagan

Chapter 1

NOVEMBER 2003

T

he metal board arching over the shaft entrance was so rusted that they could barely make out the lettering – Champion Reef. A forbidden place once, now the gate stood wide open, hanging on a couple of broken hinges. The security guard positioned at the opposite building saw Lionel’s camera and waved to signal that they could go right in.

Sheila found it traumatic. No pass, no safety helmet, no smell of dust and ore, and not a miner in sight. She turned around, wanting to run away. But with a firm hand on her shoulder, Lionel persuaded her to go with him. It had been many years since she had left Kolar Gold Fields and this first visit back was heart-wrenching.

Her KGF was gone. The place she grew up in was gone. The dream town, with picture-perfect houses and lawns and big shady trees was subsumed by dust. She remembered the time when she lived in a house down the road and watched miners streaming out of the shafts, dark with the dust of the underground, talking to each other about mundane things: debts and marriages and children and wives. When she cycled to St. Joseph’s Convent School across the maidan, her plaits flying in the wind, Sheila could almost hear the sound of the siren which regimented the lives of the inhabitants of the town.

She looked up to see if by some magic the giant hoists which, in another era, lowered men into the belly of the earth had started moving again.

But everything stood still. Eerily so. The mines were officially closed. Dead.

They had just driven past rows of once-majestic bungalows – happy homes in which her friends had lived – that were crumbling to dust. Everything was gone: the gardens in which they played, the trees they climbed. And now this. Unimaginable. A shaft head bereft of miners!

Noticing that the couple had still not entered, the guard urged them on. ‘Go right in,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t be afraid. There is nothing there.’

Inside, the hoists stood still. The thick black cables which once hauled up the ancient lifts loaded with men and ore were missing. They had been brought all the way from England over a hundred years ago. Now they probably lay coiled in some godforsaken warehouse. Or had they been sold? The machinery had disappeared, so had the wagons which carried the heavy ore along trolley tracks. Even the tracks were gone. Probably torn out and sold for the metal. Thorny bushes had sprouted out of the mud floor trodden flat by the feet of generations of miners.

Sheila remembered the time she had gone down this very mine shaft for the first time. She was eighteen and in college. Women were considered bad luck by the miners. In the early days, they weren’t even allowed to cross the entrance of the shaft. But by the late 1980s, around the time she was eighteen, the rules had changed. Women were still not allowed to work inside the mine, but were let in as visitors.

It had seemed like an exciting adventure. Her father would often talk about his working life deep underground. He had worked in that shaft for over ten years and had finally given her permission to visit him in his underground work area. She would be able to see and experience everything for herself: the dark tunnels, the ore-bearing rocks, the drilling machinery.

Armed with all the data about the shaft she was descending into, she entered the ancient lift – called ‘the cage’ – with a sense of anticipation. It belonged to Champion Reef Mine, the second deepest in the world and nearly 100 years old. It went deep, deep down to about 10,500 ft. KGF was 3,200 ft above sea level. So how deep would the shaft go? Below sea level? She had no idea. Suddenly, all the figures that had not meant much earlier sounded frightening and she could feel the butterflies in her stomach.

As the lift went further down, the excitement turned to unease, for the mine looked exciting only on paper. This was more like a journey to the centre of the earth. The pioneers who dug these tunnels must have been beyond brave. They had nothing. No electricity, no power tools. Just some old-fashioned implements and oil lamps to light their way. Were they not afraid that of bumping into monsters or ghosts or even plain old giant earthworms?

Today, as she stood looking at the derelict shaft, she experienced in the pit of her stomach that nervous hollowness she had felt ages ago. The cage had suddenly seemed like a rickety contraption. But it must be strong … it must … she had told herself. After all, it has carried men and rocks up and down for nearly a hundred years.

She could still taste that memory, that thought which had clawed its way through a feeling of desolation as the contraption plunged down and darkness had closed in on her. She had clutched on to her metal safety helmet.

Deeper and deeper. Her ears were getting blocked. The pressure was becoming unbearable. It was neither exciting, nor an adventure. She wanted to escape … She couldn’t. She was sinking … down … down … further down.

The musty air rising from the bowels of the earth touched her skin with ghostly fingers. She wanted to scream. She wanted to break out. Go back to a place where she could see the sky above her. But the only thing visible here was the darkness all around. She tried closing her eyes. At least the darkness was familiar. Not so intense. An acrid smell. What was it? The reek of death?

She opened her eyes and looked fearfully at the miner standing next to her. He stood holding an empty wheelbarrow and seemed quite relaxed. ‘It must be safe … it must be safe …’ she muttered to herself.

And then it was over as suddenly as it had begun. The lift stopped and her father waited at the lift door to lead her into an air-conditioned passage. She could hardly believe she was hundreds of feet underground. Everything seemed so normal. This was the level for visitors like her. The lift moved down with the miner still in it. Most of the miners went much deeper, into the heart of the earth.

But she didn’t want to think about that. She focussed on her immediate surroundings. She read the visitor-friendly boards and charts and inspected the mock-up tableaux of miners at work. Her father wrapped his warm arm around her shoulder and walked her around, proudly showing her off to his men.

The attack of claustrophobia had started to fade. She was fine, listening with eager interest to what her father’s colleagues had to say, laughing at the jokes, even wielding a pickaxe at a promising looking rock, until they came to an old unused passage.

The passage – or tunnel – had been left in its original state to show visitors the conditions in which the miners worked once. It was dark and musty and she cowered behind her father.

As they entered, torch in hand, she could see the glint of gold in the rock above her head. Her father was talking, but his voice came to her in waves as the irrational fear rose once more from her very guts.

‘In those days,’ her father was saying, ‘the miners crawled through such passages holding kerosene lamps and wearing straw hats for protection. They had to blast their way through. Noxious gases would fill the passages. Water would seep in. Sometimes the rocks would develop major fissures and huge chunks would fall down.’

He pulled her by the arm and made her stand in front of him. ‘Look, Sheila,’ he said, pointing to the rock above him. ‘Look at this crack. Imagine if it became bigger. It could fall and block the narrow entry to this tunnel. We would be trapped inside, maybe forever. Imagine the fate of the men who did get trapped. Hundreds of miners lie beneath the rocks. Some were buried alive, others killed by falling rocks or dynamite blasts.’ He reached his hand up and touched the golden vein above his head. ‘All for this,’ he said, almost jovially. ‘This is what they died for.’

The panic peaked. Sheila could almost feel the dead miners next to her. She clutched her father, weeping. ‘I can’t bear it. I want to get out. I want to get out,’ she cried.

‘Sheila, it’s okay. It’s okay. Really.’ Lionel was shaking her.

She steadied herself, holding his arm, and nodded. She looked up once more at the giant hoist that had been stilled for eternity. No one would ever go down the mine again. No more men would die here. There would be no life, no death. Nothing. The shafts were flooded with water and the gold that lay beneath was buried forever.

The tears were still trickling unchecked from her bright, kajal-lined eyes. Lionel put his arm around her shoulder and started leading her out.

And then they heard the rattling. A loud rumbling sound, as if some machinery had been switched on. The guard had said there was nothing. And indeed, nothing seemed to move. But there was that rumbling again. So what was it? A rock that had burst underground? How? The mines were not even working. Ghosts? Dead miners bursting out?

Terrified, Sheila shook off Lionel’s arm and started running. But he laughed and pulled her back. ‘Look, Sheila,’ he said, pointing upwards. ‘Cute rascals, aren’t they?’

Not ghosts but monkeys. Families of them, playing on the hoists, climbing the tall metal girders, jumping on the zinc sheet covering. And as they watched the primates, they heard the wind. The famous gusty KGF wind rattling the zinc sheets.

They made a handsome pair as they stood still, listening to the wind tearing through the sounds of silence. Lionel Peterson, 35, Reuters correspondent from Australia, tall and lithe, with unruly brown hair and piercing blue eyes, and Sheila Gururaj, 32, social researcher from Bangalore, dusky and lean, her dark cascading curls tied up in a bunch on top of her head.

‘How do you think Lavelle would have come to Kolar from Bangalore?’ Sheila asked suddenly as the wind roared around them.

‘Who?’ Lionel asked, cupping his ears.

‘Lavelle!’ Sheila shouted. ‘You know, the guy who is responsible for all this,’ she gesticulated. The tears were still wet on her cheeks.

Barely 150 years ago, the wind had blown unchecked across this barren, thorny plateau. No one lived on the rocky, waterless, unusable land. Until Michael F. Lavelle came along.

Lavelle was an Irish soldier recuperating in the salubrious climate of the Bangalore Cantonment after fighting in the Maori Wars in New Zealand. The year was 1870. He had heard of the legendary ‘native’ gold mines of Kolar and decided to explore them.

‘Oh. Lavelle,’ Lionel replied. ‘I don’t know. Must be on horseback. I’m sure he had a couple of coolies and supplies following him in bullock carts. It’s not that far from Bangalore. Enough. Let’s go.’

He whirled her around and marched her out. The guard saluted. Lionel fished out a ten-rupee note from his pocket and gave it to him. They got back into their taxi and sat for a while in silence.

Lionel recalled the conversation he’d had with Sheila when they met for the first time a few days ago at a coffee shop on Lavelle Road in Bangalore.

‘This road was named after Lavelle,’ she had said. ‘But that’s because the British named it and they thought the world began and ended with them.’

Lionel had watched her, amused, thinking she looked like a beautiful oriental dancer with her eye make-up and chunky ethnic earrings. Except that she was dressed in Western clothes – a well-worn pair of jeans and a snugly fitting tee. Her hair hung in loose, soft curls which she kept tossing back.

‘And why wouldn’t they name a road after Lavelle?’ she had continued. ‘He was a hero. He discovered this goose which laid them any number of golden eggs. And they just whisked away all the gold, everything away to England before the natives could get their filthy hands on what rightfully belonged to them.’

‘Come on, Sheila! Aren’t you being a bit harsh?’ Lionel had laughed. ‘If he hadn’t gone and dug around, would you ever have had your town of gold?’

‘The mines were there long before he came,’ Sheila retorted. ‘In fact, my grandma used to tell me a story from the Ramayana about how the gold came there. When Mareecha the rakshasa in the form of a golden deer enticed Sita, Rama chased after him. The deer led him to this spot and Rama suddenly realized that this was no golden deer but a demon. Rama shot him dead with an arrow and the deer burst into smithereens. And every single droplet of his blood turned to gold when it touched the land! This happened here in Kolar where the mines stand.’

‘I haven’t heard that one before,’ Lionel said, jotting it down in his yellow notebook. ‘What did you say the monster’s name was?’

Sheila ignored his question and continued talking. ‘And long long before the British ever thought of coming to India, a poor shepherd – just a shepherd, mind you – found enough gold here to build a kingdom which he called Kolar. The gold was obviously just there for the taking. And it belonged to the people of this land.’ She gestured forcefully, pointing to the land beneath her feet. ‘Even the Roman historian Pliny, who came here in the first century, has written about gold mining in this area. In fact, that’s why Lavelle came here in the first place. He found deep pits with old mining tools …’

‘I know, I know,’ Lionel had said, throwing up his hands. ‘I’ve done my reading. Archaeologists have found that the gold used in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa as far back as 2,600 BC came from Kolar.’

Lionel gazed now at the teary eyed woman sitting next to him in the roomy back seat of the Ambassador car. All her animation was gone. There was just deep sorrow etched into every line of her being. Sunil, his colleague who was her classmate from college, had introduced him to Sheila, saying that she worked with a social research institute and had collected quite a lot of data on the impact of mining on native populations.

‘You might find it interesting to talk to her,’ Sunil had said. ‘Her father was a senior officer in KGF. She grew up in an almost feudal society with servants at her beck and call. Just like the British did. I don’t think she ever looked beyond her nose those days. And look at her now! After her father died – I think she was twenty then – she moved to Bangalore with her mother. Today, she is a star researcher at her institute, very passionate about what she does. She is always out in the field and has done some excellent work on other mining activities in Karnataka. But strangely, she has never returned to KGF. She says she is afraid to go back because her KGF has disintegrated into dust. I am sure she could give you a lot of useful information though. In fact, if you can actually persuade her to go with you to KGF, it would work out perfectly for both of you. You want to visit the town to write your article and she is actually thinking of visiting the place after all these years. She wants to be with her classmate Belinda Flanagan, whose father was run over by a train last week. Belinda has just arrived from your country, Australia, where she lives.’

Sunil had put the two in touch and Sheila had agreed to accompany Lionel to KGF.

A day later, Lionel hired a taxi and picked Sheila up at dawn and they were on their way to the now-abandoned town.

‘The truth is, I am uneasy about going back,’ she had confessed on the way as they drove past huge boulder-covered hills and scraggy fields enclosed with cacti fencing. ‘I am afraid of what I’ll see. That’s why I’ve never returned.’

She told him about her ‘magical experience of growing up in a town of gold’. She spoke of long cycle rides along quiet, unpaved roads, of picnics amidst boulder-strewn hills, of Christmas fun fairs and dances, of romances which grew over cups of hand-churned ice-cream at the Oorgaum dairy, of uncles and aunts and birthday parties and weddings and …

‘Come, Sheila,’ Lionel said, touching her gently on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go, shall we? I know this is no longer your magical town of gold. But, as you yourself said, that’s just a phase. Like many others. Pre-Lavelle. Post-Lavelle. In the larger scheme of things, they were just tiny patches of time.’

‘Just a minute, Lionel,’ Sheila said. She was looking into a small hand mirror and wiping the kajal stains off her cheeks with a paper tissue. She put the mirror back and got out of the car. ‘I’ve got to go