The rope was yellow and it was nylon and my brother Rakesh had bought it with his own money at the hardware shop near the depot, and he'd bought it because the old one was hemp and with sewer water hemp rots and goes hard and cuts your hands, and this one was yellow and smooth and it didn't cut. It was new. And he was pleased with that rope and he kept it coiled at the back of the cart and he was the one who coiled it, and nobody else touched it.

And the cart was ours, with the buckets, and the small spades, and the long-handled broom that you use for the stuff that floats, and the rope.

And that morning it was me and him and Devi Lal, and the neighbourhood was the one behind the flower market, where the houses are new and the manholes are old, and it was hot from seven o'clock on.

And the manhole was narrow at the mouth and wide underneath, one of the old ones, and the suction truck can't get down the street because the street is narrow, and when it can't get down, somebody goes in.

And you go in like this, that a man strips to the waist and puts the rope under his armpits or round his waist, it depends, and takes the bucket, and the other two hold, and there's no mask because the foreman has the mask and the foreman is in another neighbourhood, and there's no harness because the harness is in the cupboard at the depot and the cupboard has had a broken lock since before I started, and so there's the rope, and the rope is what we hold.

And before you go in you wait, which is the thing everybody says, wait a bit with the cover off, and we had the cover off and we had waited, and Devi Lal had even thrown down a bucket of water which is what people do where we are, and Rakesh went in after that.

And you hear everything, from up above, because the manhole works like a funnel and the voice comes up, and the first time he answered straight away, and the second time he answered quieter but he answered, and he said the bucket was full, and we pulled it up and emptied it onto the cart, and then Devi Lal called the third time.

Nobody answered.

And the rope went heavy all at once, that before it was him giving it the weight by moving and now it was just giving weight.

And I had the rope wound round my forearm, three turns, which is how you do it when the one below is still and all you have to do is hold, and Devi Lal was holding me by the belt from behind and he wasn't letting go, and he was saying in my ear that if I went in we'd be two and that my sister-in-law would have nobody left bringing money into the house, and he was saying it quietly, he wasn't shouting it at me, and that's the thing that stayed with me, that he was saying it quietly the way you say a thing that's true.

And he was right.

And the fact that he was right is what weighs, because if he'd been wrong I would have gone in and now there'd be nothing to tell anybody, there'd only be that I went in.

And so I unwound the rope from my forearm, one turn, and then the second, and the third I unwound slower than the other two, and the rope stayed taut. Underneath there was the weight and the weight wasn't moving, and I was holding with my hands only, which is another way of holding and it means another thing.

And the siren could be heard already but it was far off, and it was coming from behind the market, and it was doing that long way round they always do because the underpass is low and the big vehicles can't get through.

And the fire brigade came and they put the big fan over the mouth of the manhole and they waited, and then one of them went in with the mask and the cylinder and the straps, and he tied my brother under the arms, and we pulled from up top, and up came first the bucket and then the long-handled broom and then him.

And the broom was pulled up by one of the firemen and he laid it on the rim and nobody touched it after that, and that broom stayed there. Three days.

And then there was the office, and it was Sunita who went to the office and not me, and they gave her a sheet of paper with a number on it, and with that paper the money came before the end of the year, and it came.

And what they'd written on that sheet, on the line where you write how he died, I never knew, because Sunita has the paper and I didn't ask her for it, and because that line is in English, and because at a certain point a man stops asking about things that are written down already anyway.

And the yellow rope stayed at the depot, and now Bhim's crew uses it, and I saw it last month coiled on their cart, which is the same as ours but has a new right wheel.

And the thing I never asked, and that now I don't even know who you'd ask any more, is why that morning he took his shirt off before going in, and where he put it, because when they pulled him up the shirt wasn't there, and it wasn't in the cart, and it wasn't on the rim, and that shirt I never saw again.