Wild Life | 21 March 2009

‘Where’s Ajay?’ My producer Ed and I are making a film about India’s coalfields. ‘Ajay is busy.’ I complain, ‘But he’s our fixer. Why isn’t he out fixing things?’ In the world of journalism, a fixer is employed to arrange things on the ground. Paleologue in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop was a fixer. Others get fixers like Dith Pran in The Killing Fields. But Ajay is one of a kind. ‘Ajay is drinking whisky,’ comes the reply.

It’s been like this since Ajay arrived by train from Benares. On day one, he accompanied us to a vast open colliery where hordes of impoverished Dalits were toiling in the dirt. Later he said, ‘Body exhausted, mind disturbed.’ We rarely saw him after that. He let me know he was a novelist. I suspected that he might be hiding himself away to polish off his latest Veranasi epic. One day at lunch Ed said, ‘Got anything for us, Ajay?’ ‘No,’ said Ajay, ‘but I will have a beer.’ We decided to leave him alone. No use antagonising him.

We survived thanks to Tanmoy, our other guide who had to put in double the effort. Without Tanmoy we would be lost in the heart of India with its ‘bed tea’, steam-driven pulleys, buzzers, serial numbers, water buffaloes and the 30 electrical switches on my hotel room wall. And it’s thrilling to be in an India tourists will never witness. During Holi, the festival of colours, we saw coal-blackened miners coming off shift throwing clouds of bright red, yellow and green powders. In one mining village I saw a tree hung with gold rags, under which Hindus cremated their dead on platforms across a narrow river. A few yards downstream people were drinking and washing.