The Best Day of My Life Read Free Page A

hand.
    â€˜Auntie, I’m fine. I don’t feel anything. Is it true?’
    She looked up at me. ‘Is what true?’
    â€˜Are we really not family?’
    She was busy dusting coal and ashes off the bottom of my foot with the hem of her sari. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to answer me.
    Then she did.
    â€˜We are not family,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s parents gave us some money to take you in. That’s why you live with us.’
    The bosses started yelling at her to get back to work. She put her hand gently on my shoulder and held it there for a moment. Then she picked up her basket and headed back into the pit for more coal.
    I watched her go down the steep pathway until she got so far away that I could no longer pick her out from the other ladies with saris and baskets.
    I was looking at my future.
    I suppose I had always known it. What else could I ever do? But knowing something was different from admitting it.
    On that day, that day for truth, I admitted it.
    And when I looked clearly down the years at what I would become, another truth came into my head.
    I had no family.
    You stayed with your family because they were your family and families were supposed to stick together and care for each other.
    But I had no family.
    And I had no friends.
    I had no reason to stay.
    The truck behind me was getting quite full of coal. The worker jumped down from the back. The sides and flap were locked into place. The driver finished talking to the bosses and got behind the wheel. Another man got into the truck beside him. I heard the motor start up.
    The bosses had their backs turned.
    I was moving before I started to think about it.
    I was good at moving fast. I was good at climbing and I had magic feet that didn’t feel the rough points and edges of hard chunks of coal.
    In an instant I was at the truck, over the side and crawling to the top of the coal pile. The truck started to move. Coal fell off as I tried to dig myself into the pile. I watched children below scramble to gather it up.
    The truck went through my village.
    It passed the shack that belonged to the woman who was not my aunt.
    Elamma was outside, sweeping the dust out the door. She had to hold the broom with one hand because her other arm was still holding the baby.
    She saw me.
    She started to call out for the truck to stop. It was moving slowly.
    Instead, she dropped her broom. It hit the ground with a bang. She moved quickly toward the truck.
    I think she wanted to come with me. She even reached out to try to grab onto the back.
    Then she remembered the baby.
    Even then, she looked around for a place to put it down.
    There wasn’t a place. She was stuck.
    I watched her cry as the truck rumbled out of the village and out of Jharia.

2
    The Moving Mountain
    R iding on a pile of coal was fun while the truck moved slowly through the village. It got scary as the truck turned onto a highway and picked up speed.
    It was scary, but it was also exciting. I had never ridden on anything faster than a handcart. I had never been away from my village, not once in all my life. All I had ever seen was coal.
    Now I saw green. Real green, not green covered by grey. I saw fields and trees and paddies of rice and lakes full of water lilies. The sky was bright blue, the wildflowers were yellow and purple and pink. I saw buffalo and donkeys, mango trees and rows of cauliflower, tea plantations and bamboo stacked high for building.
    I didn’t know most of the time what I was looking at. We were moving so fast that I felt like I was a bird, flying high and fast and looking down at the world.
    The deeper I buried myself in the coal, the safer I felt. The weight of the coal on my back kept me from slipping off the mountain. Just my face peered out of the pile. I rested my chin on my hands and watched the road roll out behind me.
    I didn’t think at all. I just looked.
    Even after the sun went down, I looked out hard into the