Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [4]
Like tens of millions of other Indian children, Padmini and her brothers had never been anywhere near a school blackboard. The only lessons they had learned taught them how to survive in the harsh world into which the gods had ordained they should be born. And, like all the other occupants of Mudilapa, Ratna Nadar and his family were always on the lookout for any opportunity to earn the odd rupee. Each year, at the beginning of the dry season, one such opportunity arose: the time came to pick the various leaves used to make bidis, the slender Indian cigarettes with the tapered tips.
For six weeks, along with most of the other villagers, Sheela, her children and their grandparents, would set off each morning at dawn for the forest of Kantaroli. There, the people would invade the undergrowth like a swarm of insects. With all the precision of robots, they would detach a leaf, place it in a canvas haversack and repeat the same process over and over again. Every hour, the pickers would stop to make up bunches of fifty leaves. If they hurried, they could generally manage to produce eighty bunches a day. Each bunch was worth thirty paisa, not quite two U.S. cents, or the price of two eggplants.
During the first days, when the picking went on at the edge of the forest, young Padmini would often manage to make as many as a hundred bunches. Her brothers Ashu and Gopal were not quite as dexterous at pinching off the leaves. But between the six of them, the children, their mother and their grandparents, they brought back nearly a hundred rupees each evening, a small fortune for a family used to surviving for a whole month on far less.
One day, word went around Mudilapa and the surrounding villages that a cigarette and match factory had recently been set up in the area, and that children were being taken on as labor. Of the hundred billion matches produced annually in India, many were still made by hand, and mostly by children, whose little fingers could manage the delicate work. This was true also for rolling bidis.
The opening of this factory created quite a stir among the inhabitants of Mudilapa. There were no lengths to which people would not go to seduce the tharagar whose job it was to recruit the workforce. Mothers rushed to the mohajan, the village usurer, and pawned their last remaining jewels. Some sold their only goat. And yet the jobs they sought for their children were harsh in the extreme.
“My truck will come by at four every morning,” the tharagar announced to the parents of the children he had chosen. “Anyone who is not outside waiting for it had better look out.”
“And when will our children be back?” Padmini’s father gave voice to all the other parents’ concern.
“Not before nightfall,” the tharagar responded curtly.
Sheela saw an expression of fear pass over Padmini’s face. She sought at once to reassure her.
“Padmini, think what happened to your friend Banita.”
Sheela was referring to the neighbors’ little girl whose parents had just sold her to a blind man so they could feed their other children. There was nothing particularly unusual about the arrangement. Sometimes in the mistaken belief that their children were going to be employed as servants or in workshops, parents entrusted their daughters to pimps.
It was still pitch dark when the truck horn sounded the next morning. Padmini, Ashu and Gopal were already waiting outside, huddled together against the cold. Their mother had risen even earlier