We suggest doing a discreet wide shot while we’re waiting but Mr Das shakes his head.
‘This is a very disturbed place.’
He smiles tolerantly, like a teacher dealing with hyperactive pupils.
‘It is our headache to look after you.’
He seems a decent man, around 40, a Bengali, with intense dark eyes, a thick moustache, brown bobble hat, a windcheater with ‘Herod Active’ written across it and an uncle who’s an accountant in Guildford.
He invites us to his office. It’s a low, brick building, painted pistachio green, inside and out. There is a concrete floor and a board on the wall with three columns marked ‘Production Totals’, ‘Targets’, ‘Achievements’. A one-bar electric fire glows and two or three of his colleagues are introduced and sit at the table with us. Our two armed guards, thin men wrapped in headscarves, walk by outside the window.
Sidestepping any further questions about security with a brisk ‘there is some insurgency’, Mr Das clambers onto the safer ground of statistics. In quick succession, I learn that India is the fourth largest producer of coal in the world (after the USA, Russia and Australia) but the biggest employer (600,000 people), that Tipong produces a particularly valuable high calorie coal, that they have had no fatal injuries of any kind since 1994, when nine were killed after an electrician tried to mend an electrical motor without turning the current off, that, instead of shafts and lifts, the miners here walk to work down inclined passageways that reach 1150 feet (350 m) below the surface. The only shadow over Tipong is that they only have technology to bring out 40 per cent of the coal deposits. The rest they have to leave in the ground.
What really animates him is an obvious and glowing pride in his labour relations. Tipong has a cosmopolitan work force, from South India, Nepal, Orissa, Bihar, comprising Muslims, Christians and Hindus, but everyone looks after everyone else and they provide schools and communal activities for everyone equally. Women who are widows of company employees are offered surface jobs.
David’s wheezy whistle announces that the 140-year-old tank engine is coupled up and ready to leave for the depot two miles down the line. I’m privileged to ride the footplate as we bowl gamely down the hill past lineside exhortations like ‘All Time is Safety Time’ and ‘There is no Substitute for Hard Work and Sincerity’.
We cross the river on a girder bridge with elegantly functional red-brick piers bearing a construction date of 1923. The line levels out. Bicycles overtake us easily. Goats and chickens stroll by. The fireman doesn’t so much toss coal into the boiler but places it there by hand, positioning each piece carefully before ramming it home with a metal rod. Once away from the cleared area of the mine, the jungle closes in and David has his work cut out to push us past overhanging branches and bushes. It’s an enchanting run, a blend of Thomas the Tank Engine and The Jungle Book.
After lunch at the Tipong Mine Guest House, a once elegant, plantation-style building, now surrounded on all sides by coal heaps, Mr Das takes us up onto one of the hills overlooking the river to hear a selection of Safety Songs, specially written for Tipong. A five-man choir, accompanied by a harmonium and a tabla, a pain of small hand-drums is set up in the garden of a red-brick terraced house overlooking a hillside of mango, pineapple, jackfruit, guava, betel and banana trees. Across the river a slowly moving plume of white smoke rises above the trees, tracing the progress of David back up the valley again. Against this background of an industrial Arcadia, Hahmid Rachmar and his group, all sweatered up like a glee club, perform the safety song they’ve written themselves. It’s a catchy song, beautifully performed, and in the abundant goodwill afterwards Mr Das shyly reveals that he’s learning the violin at home.
‘Does your wife mind?’ I joke.
His brow furrows. ‘No, she is very helpful.’
I leave Tipong with some doubts as to whether there really is a mine here at all and thoughts that this grubby Garden of Eden might simply be kept going by Mr Das and his friends so that they can learn music and write hit songs.
The last thing I do is ask him to write down the words of the catchy Safety Song.
I try them at the guesthouse, in the bath.
‘Safety First, Safety First
In every step of work, be it the rule,
It is for us to remain awake all the time, There’s danger in every move.
If we obey the rules
There will be no sorrow for us,
Safety First, Safety First.’
Perhaps we should adopt it as the crew’s anthem. On second thoughts, it’s too late now.
Day Ninety Four : Digboi to Dibrugah
A pack of pye-dogs circles the entrance to Digboi station, backing away with wary reluctance at the approach of my cycle-rickshaw. I buy a ticket for Dibrugah, 52 miles (80 km) down the line, for 18 rupees, about 25 pence. I notice that a ticket on the sleeper service to Delhi, over 1000 miles (1600 km) away, would set me back PS8.
That the railway extends here at all has everything to do with oil, tea and coal and very little to do with passengers. The wooden bench seats are functional rather than comfortable and progress is slow and punctuated every few hundred yards by a blast of the engine’s horn to clear the railway line of all those who use it as a highway, meeting place, or just for grazing.
Fortunately, I have some good companions. Sitting opposite me are two women, one tall and slim with classic English features, the other a short, stout, bespectacled Indian lady whose face wears an expression of such serene good nature that it’s impossible not to want to talk to her. The reason why they’re travelling together is a remarkable story that unfolds as the train shrieks its way westwards.
Anne, the older of the two, is the daughter of an illicit relationship between an English tea-planter and one of the women from ‘the lines’ (i.e. a tea picker). Such liaisons were strictly forbidden and Anne’s father could never publicly acknowledge his child. He went off to the Second World War and died in Singapore in 1942. Anne’s mother, poor, uneducated and illiterate, had no idea how to find information about him. She didn’t even know how he spelt his name.
Anne, neither English nor Indian, never really fitted in with the tea-planters, who, embarrassed at such situations, were unapproachable and unhelpful. Enquiries about her father were stonewalled.
Anne was sent to a convent school and later met and fell in love with an Indian fighter pilot, who wrote to her every day, and even once dropped a letter to her from his plane. They had a daughter together, but he was a married man and, in a mirror image of her mother’s situation, they kept their relationship secret. He eventually returned to his wife. Anne got a job as a secretary in a tea company, where she saw a copy of the London Daily Telegraph in her office. She noted down the name of their defence correspondent and, on a whim, wrote and asked him how she might find out about a tea-planter called Stuart who went missing in 1942.
Thanks to his help, she eventually learnt her father’s name, one of many on the wall of a mass grave in Singapore. Armed with this lead, and with some help from one of the tea company’s directors, she finally made contact with her father’s family in England, 47 years after his death. His sister Mary was still alive and asked to meet Anne. Mary’s granddaughter Sarah is the girl travelling with Anne today.
The two women derive so much pleasure from each other’s company, that one can only wonder what things might have been like if they’d known of each other’s existence years earlier.
It seems years have passed since leaving Digboi when the train finally pulls into Tinsoukia, less than 30 miles down the track. As we approach Tinsoukia station the view on both sides is of decommissioned steam locomotives, row upon row of them in overgrown sidings. Some lie on their sides, some are hung around with vines and creeper and, as there seems to have been no attempt to strip them down, they remain intact, as if a spell had been put on them.