It starts very early in the Morning with dipping a 5 taka bun (bread) into a shallow milked tea. Then a short walk to the Peat Coal stack with a Tupri (basket); the wheel of my life. The lighter ship with coal anchored at the terminal a quarter kilometer away from the Coal stack, the workstation. Carrying coal from ship to stack and building coal stack to a coal mountain along with my co-workers is my everyday’ s duty. Even after this hard work what I earn, nothing is left behind for my family if I had two mouthful meals with it, Said a worker.
Sweet becomes like black ink mixing with coal dust to earn a single token as a sign of his earnings after dispatching one basket of coal from ship to stack. All tokens are calculated by his stack Master to fix his earnings for the day. Earning $10 requires a minimum of 350 tokens means 350 baskets of coal from a quarter kilometer distance from the Ship to the coal stack. In the language of Chemistry `Diamond` & `Coal` are made from the same compound; CARBON. In the scale of beauty, these two Substances stand at the two ends of the scale, but in the court of economics, they are equally important. In our daily life, it can be possible to rid of the pain of Diamond’s paucity in life, but the contribution of fuel is not possible to deny for a single moment. The people who work with this BLACK DIAMOND (Coal) every day never enjoyed its glow in their life even as a faint ray. That is the irony of Life; A faded Life with Black Diamond!!