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Ganesan and I, as I said, were supposed to be on-site to direct operations. We had planned to live at the village, but after one good look at the place, open sewers and all, we decided it would be better, more convenient, and altogether more sensible to set up camp at the mine itself. The old mining buildings were all uninhabitable. Some had lost their roofs, others their doors and windows, and the walls were cracked and the floors rotted through. We had tents, and at first, reluctantly decided they would have to do. But then, where the old rails ended, we found a freight wagon, buried up to the wheels in earth and the grass growing up its sides. The walls were covered with rust but still sound and it was far more spacious than our tiny tents. We cooked on a small kerosene stove in the mornings, taking turns, and washed at a tiny spring we had found in the forest not far away. The water was cold but wonderfully clear.

The day after we moved in, we began gathering labourers together for the preliminary work. Since it was the agricultural off-season, most of the men of the village had nothing much to do and we hired a lot of them, through the village chief, naturally. The village chief was the one whose word counted. We talked to him, he talked to the villagers, arranged everything, and we were to pay him and he would pass on the payment to the labourers, and so on. He was a charming old rogue with a deeply seamed and wrinkled face who loved liquor, and he had a tremendous capacity for it. I’m sure most of what he was given to hire workers with went on to the local bootleggers instead, but that was none of our business. We had to spend a fair amount of time with him to keep him in good humour. His name, if memory serves, was Matal.

The labourers began gathering on the third day, and they worked very, very slowly. We had to be with them virtually all the time, Ganesan and I, to tell them what to do, to make sure that they did it, and to keep track of what they discovered. And in the evenings we had to go down to the village, bottles in hand, and eat and drink with old Matal until the oil in his lanterns burned low and he would consent to our going back to the camp.

On the fourth day we began to find the remnants of rusted military equipment – as I said, the place had been fought over in the war – rusted helmets, a bayonet, and other odds and ends: metal belt buckles and the like, all far too damaged to be able to tell to which side they had belonged. On the day after that Ganesan came to me where I was helping in cutting down vines from the base of a derrick.

"You should have a look at this," he said.

I stood beside him looking down at what one of the labourers had dug up. It was covered in earth and looked like a large rounded lump of rock, but there were teeth showing at one side and the curve of it was broken where the bone had collapsed.

"I wonder who he was," Ganesan said. "This whole job is getting on my nerves."

The other labourers had stopped work and come crowding round. Feeling vaguely like an archaeologist at a dig, I shooed them away, and together the three of us – Ganesan, the labourer who had found the skull, and I – dug around, and we found some more bones. After a little discussion we put those bones in a sack and stowed them away in one of the ruined old mine buildings. It was up to the government what they’d want done with them.

After that we found many more bones. Soon we had to keep one room apart for the remains we had dug up, and it became almost impossible to keep them all separate. No, we had no problems with the ghosts of the owners of those bones demanding we put them back. This isn’t that kind of story.

By the time the first week was over only part of the site had been cleared and the workers had to be promised a bonus to work even as fast as they had been supposed to do all along.

One thing always surprised me about old Matal, the chief. I’d worked in other such remote places before, and I knew all about the tribal chiefs. Generally they were eager – more than eager – to come to where the work was going on and to throw their weight around, order people, supervise and in general make a nuisance of themselves. Matal never did that. I even asked him whether he’d come round and visit – he refused, and gave me to understand that he’d never visited the site for years, and never would again. When I asked why, he just shook his head and took another swig of liquor.

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