1There was a province of flat fields and slow rivers, where the earth is a fine grey clay. For forty miles around its chief town stood the chimneys of the brick kilns, tall as towers, each with its smoke.
2In that town lived a judge named Devraj. He was sixty-three, and he had two years left before his pension. He had sat on the bench for thirty years without a stain. He was known as a careful man who read every paper. He was known for one thing more, though no one said it aloud. He had never once ruled against anyone who mattered.
3He would have told you that it had never been needed. That may even have been true. A man can go thirty years down a road without meeting the one thing on it that would test him.
4In the cold season of that year a case came before him. A society of lawyers from the capital had brought it on behalf of forty families who worked at the largest kiln in the province. They said the families were not workers but captives. The owner of the kiln said they were workers who owed him money, and that he had the papers to prove it.
5The owner's name was Kalra. He had nine kilns. Every school in the province was built of his bricks, and so was the new wing of the hospital, which bore his mother's name. He sat in the front row in a cream-coloured coat, and nodded to the judge as one nods to a man one has met at weddings.
6The lawyers from the capital called one witness. She was a girl of fifteen named Rupa.
7She was small for her age and her hands were not a girl's hands. They were grey to the wrist and cracked like a dry field. She stood in the box and looked at the floor, and the judge had to ask her twice to speak up.
8She said she had been born at the kiln. Her father had come there before she was born, with a debt. Her mother had been sick, and he had borrowed from the owner's man for the medicine, and put his thumb on a paper. The family had been paying the debt ever since, by making bricks.
9"How many bricks?" asked the lawyer.
10"Twelve hundred in a day," said Rupa. "My father digs and mixes. My mother and I fill the moulds and turn them out. My brothers carry. If it is fewer than twelve hundred, there is no food from the shop that day."
11"Since what age have you filled moulds?"
12"Since I could lift one."
13"Can you read, Rupa?"
14"No, sir."
15"Can you count?"
16She looked up for the first time. "Yes, sir. I can count. I count bricks."
17Kalra's lawyer was a smooth and pleasant man. He simply laid forty papers before the judge, each with a thumbprint. Each paper said that a man had borrowed a sum, of his own free will, and would work until it was repaid. He laid down the kiln's account book as well, bound in red cloth, in which every family's debt was written.
18"No one is chained, my lord," he said. "There is no lock on the gate. Any one of these families may leave on the day they pay what they owe. That is not captivity. That is what a debt is. If the court says a poor man need not repay a loan, no one will ever lend to a poor man again."
19It was well said. The judge wrote it down. He told them he would hear the rest in the morning, and he took the red book home with him, as was his right.
20That evening a visitor came to his house, an old friend, a man close to the governor. He stayed for tea. He spoke of the judge's son, who had a post in the governor's office. He spoke of the pension, and how slowly such papers could move through the capital, or how quickly. He did not mention the case until he was at the door.
21"Kalra is a rough fellow," he said, putting on his shoes. "But the province stands on his bricks, Devraj. Half the town eats because of those chimneys. One does not pull a brick from the bottom of a wall to see what happens."
22When he had gone, the judge stood a while in his own front room. He had lived in that house for thirty years. He looked at the wall, where the plaster had come away in one corner. Behind the plaster there was brick. He had never before wondered whose hands had made it.
23Then he sat down at his table and opened the red book. He was a careful man who read every paper, and he was not hurried now.
24He found the page of Rupa's father. The first line was sixteen years old, a loan no larger than a clerk's pay for two months. Each week the family was credited with its bricks, at a price for each thousand. Each week it was charged for its food from the kiln's own shop, at the shop's own prices. And each month a charge was added for the use of the money. The judge took a clean sheet and a pencil and began to add.
25In the first year the family had made some four hundred thousand bricks. At the end of that year the debt was larger than at the beginning.
26He thought he had made an error, and did it again. Then he did the second year, and the third. He did all sixteen. It took him until two in the morning.
27There had not been one year in sixteen in which the debt had gone down. However fast the family worked, the debt grew a little faster. A man, a woman and three children had made more than six million bricks. At the end of it they owed eleven times what they had borrowed.
28He tried it another way. He asked how many bricks a day the family would need to make to get free. The answer was more than there are hours in a day to make them. The debt had been reckoned so that no one could ever pay it.
29There was no lock on the gate, and none was needed. The book was the lock. Each of the forty papers was true, and each thumbprint had been given freely. But together they were a rope, and the far end of it was tied to children who had not yet been born. Rupa had come into the world owing money. Her children would too.
30The judge put down his pencil. He had sat thirty years on the bench. He thought of all the papers he had found to be in order because each one, taken alone, was in order.
31In the morning Rupa was not in court.
32The lawyers from the capital were on their feet. Their witness and her whole family had gone from the kiln in the night. Kalra's lawyer was very sorry to hear it. He understood the family had gone home to their village, as they were free to do. Without the witness there was nothing left to answer, and he asked that the matter be closed.
33The judge looked at Kalra. Kalra looked back, quite calm, in his cream coat.
34Devraj knew what a careful man would do. The witness was gone, and the petition must fail. There would be no blame in it. He would have his pension, and his son would keep his post.
35He thought of the hands on the edge of the witness box. I can count. I count bricks.
36"The court is not finished with this witness," he said. "The court will go and look for her. I will inspect the kiln this afternoon. The officer of the court will come with me, and two constables."
37There was a stir in the room. Kalra's lawyer said that this was most irregular. "It is in the rules of this court," said the judge. "No one has used it in thirty years. I looked it up this morning."
38They came to the kiln at four, when the light was turning yellow. The chimney stood over everything. Around it the ground was laid with raw bricks drying in rows, grey and all alike. Among the rows people were working. They did not look up when the car came.
39Kalra was there before them, with six of his men, who carried long sticks. He was polite. He showed the judge the pits and the moulding yard and the workers' huts, which were made of broken brick and were lower than a standing man. "You see, my lord," he said. "No walls. No chains. They go as they please."
40"Where does Rupa's family live?" said the judge.
41It was an empty hut. The cooking pot was still on its three stones, and there was rice in it.
42"They left in a hurry to see their village," said the judge, "and they did not take the pot."
43Then a small boy with a load of moulds went past him. He was perhaps six. He did not stop or turn his head. But as he passed, he said one word in the speech of the kiln people, quite softly. The judge did not know that speech. The officer of the court did. He was an old clerk named Nasir who had carried the judge's files for twenty years.
44"He said, the coal store, my lord," said Nasir.
45Behind the chimney was a long shed of iron sheets, where the coal for the firing was kept. Its door was shut with a bar and a lock. Two of the men with sticks stood before it.
46"Open that," said the judge.
47"It is only coal," said Kalra. He was not smiling now. "The key is with my manager, who is in town. Come tomorrow, my lord, and you may see all the coal you like."
48The six men had drawn in close. The two constables were young, and of that district. They looked at Kalra, and at the sticks, and then at their own boots. The judge understood that they would not move, and that he was a long way from his courtroom, with the sun going down.
49He was afraid. He was sixty-three and had a weak knee, and no one had ever raised a hand to him in his life. He felt how easy it would be to say tomorrow, then.
50"Mr. Kalra," he said. His voice shook, and he let it. "I am not here as a man. As a man I am nobody, and your watchmen could put me in the road. I am here as the court. Where I stand, the court is sitting. If that door is not opened now, I will write in the record tonight that the court was refused. Then it will not be forty families and a book of accounts. It will be you and the State, and all nine of your chimneys cold. Open the door."
51Nobody moved. Then old Nasir, who had never done a bold thing in his life either, walked forward between the two men with sticks. He took hold of the bar on the door with both hands and shook it. It made a great noise of iron. All across the yard the workers straightened up from the rows and stood watching, some two hundred of them, without a sound.
52Kalra looked at them. He looked at the judge. He said a word to one of his men, and the man took a key from his own pocket.
53They were in the dark at the back, behind the coal. The father, the mother, the three brothers and Rupa sat on the floor with a jug of water. The father's face was swollen on one side. The girl got up when the light came in. She was black with coal dust from head to foot, and she did not know at first who was standing in the door.
54"It is the judge," said Nasir gently, in her own speech. "He came to ask you the rest of the questions."
55The ruling was given three days later. Its words are set down as he wrote them.
56A debt is a thing that can be paid. If the lender has so arranged matters that no labour of the borrower can ever pay it, then it is not a debt, whatever the paper calls it. It is a rope. The thumbprint on such a paper binds no one. Least of all does it bind a child who was not born when it was made. No one may sell the days of a person who does not yet exist. These forty families owe nothing. They are free to go or to stay, and if they stay they are to be paid in money. The accounts of the other eight kilns are to be brought before this court.
57It cost him what he had been told it would. Within the month he was moved to a court in the far hills, in a town with one street. His pension papers sat in the capital for four years. His son lost his post, and for a long time did not write.
58His wife asked him once, in the rented rooms in the hill town, whether he was sorry.
59"I lived thirty years in a good house," he said, "and never asked who made the wall. I was a judge and I did not ask. I am not sorry about the house we have now. I can look at the wall."
60Two years on, a letter came to the hill town. The envelope was cheap, and the address was written in large letters. Inside was a single line.
61Sir. I am at school with the small children. They laugh but I do not mind. I can read your judgment now. I read it all, it took four days. Rupa.
62Under her name she had drawn a small rectangle. He looked at it for some time before he saw that it was a brick. She had drawn a second one beside it, and that one was a book.
63Now hear of the newest kind of fire, and of a woman who was not sure she should light it.