“Miracles,” by Seamus Heaney, has always been a favorite poem of mine. This week it felt turbocharged in its power and humility.
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in—
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
Since November 12, people all over the world have followed the story of forty-one laborers trapped in a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand, the Indian state where I live. The efforts to free them became a national and international obsession, with many people here in India following their progress every waking hour. In the end, it was a ragtag group of twelve “rathole miners” who saved the day, risking their own lives to rescue forty-one men they had never met.
Feroze Qureshi, lauded in the media as an “expert rathole miner,” said he could never forget the respect the trapped workers gave him. “I removed the last rock. I could see them. Then I went to the other side. They hugged us and lifted us. And thanked us for taking them out. We worked continuously in the last twenty-four hours. I can’t express my happiness. I have done it for my country.”
“When we saw them inside the tunnel after the breakthrough, we hugged them like they were family,” said Qureshi’s colleague, Nasir Hussain. Another rescuer, Monu Kumar, said that the laborers “gave me almonds and asked my name.”
Rathole mining is banned in India. Though incredibly dangerous, it remains the method of choice for extracting coal from tiny seams reachable only by extremely narrow passages. Small children were often chosen for the work (and in some areas still are); some children have lost their lives in the process. In general, such work is done only by the poorest people who are often spurned by upper-caste communities. The respect Monu Kumar described (“they asked my name”) was probably an entirely new experience.
“Not the one who takes up his bed and walks / But the ones who have known him all along / And carry him in—” It is also notable that Feroze Qureshi and Nasir Hussain are Muslims. The tunnel they rescued their “brother workers” from is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu vote-bank project to create an easy pilgrimage route to four major Hindu shrines in our state. Modi’s rise to power has been built on an aggressively anti-Muslim and anti-Christian platform, which attempts to weaken the simple humanity that poor laborers so often demonstrate toward one another.
The Indian government, which had been warned repeatedly by environmental scientists that the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas could not sustain the tree-felling, road-widening, and tunneling the project required, spared no expense in its attempts to rescue the men. The hurried airlifting of earthmovers, excavators, and other heavy machinery to the site demonstrated not only a complete lack of disaster planning (there was no emergency exit from the tunnel), but also a lack of understanding of the local terrain. When one machine after another broke down, some bright soul finally thought of the rathole miners.
“Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked / In their backs, the stretcher handles / Slippery with sweat. And no let-up…” Trapped in a three-mile underground space, those forty-one men must have been losing hope seventeen days in. Imagine their wonder and amazement as they heard the sounds not of drills and bores, but the tap, tap, tap of handheld pick axes and scrapers and the slow, careful digging of men like themselves, who knew just how fragile their prison was and just how much was at stake. They didn’t burst through in a blaze of technology. They had more respect for the power of the mountain and the weight of the earth than that.
“Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable / And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing. / Be mindful of them as they stand and wait…” Despite differences of language, politics, and religion, these men share the bond of poverty, a respect for nature, and the knowledge that all they really have is one another. In the end, it was humility that won the day.
“For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool, / Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity / To pass, those ones who had known him all along.” The twelve rathole miners may not have met the forty-one men they rescued. And yet they knew them in every way that matters: in their numb shoulders, in their stooped and aching backs, in the no let-up until they were freed. They knew them as men like themselves. Be mindful of them.
