The Sarang coal-mine disaster occurs during the pilgrimage journey through Sarang, where fifteen thousand pitmen are buried alive beneath the hill. As emergency crews arrive and later depart without a reported resolution, the catastrophe also exposes a sharp divide within the group: Mirza Saeed Akhtar rejects Ayesha’s religious explanation, insisting that the miners were working underground rather than confronting the pilgrims.

Arrival at the coalfield

The disaster follows a severe rainstorm. Mirza Saeed Akhtar drives through the rain, partly blinded by it, with water coming through the smashed windscreen. He stops at the gates of the No. 1 Sarang Coalfield, where the pitheads are dimly visible. Mishal Akhtar, weak and frustrated, questions his decision to bring them there, since the miners they had encountered earlier are back at the coalfield.

The party has no further trouble from the miners. Instead, the day brings the mining disaster: fifteen thousand pitmen are buried alive beneath the hill. Mirza Saeed, Mishal, Muhammad Din, Osman, Mrs. Qureishi, Srinivas, and Ayesha stand exhausted and soaked by the roadside as the catastrophe unfolds.

Emergency response and loss

Ambulances, fire engines, salvage operators, and pit bosses arrive in large numbers. Much later, they leave, shaking their heads. The passage reports the scale of the entrapment and the presence of the response crews, but does not establish the miners’ eventual fate or describe a completed rescue.

The disaster is set against other losses along the pilgrimage. Muhammad Din has lost his beloved wife, Khadija, and Osman has lost his bullock; both men weep. Mrs. Qureishi tries to draw attention to the fact that their party is safe, but no one responds. The miners’ mass entrapment shifts the roadside gathering from relief at the group’s survival to grief at suffering on a far larger scale.

Dispute over the disaster

Ayesha closes her eyes and delivers her interpretation in a prophetic, sing-song voice: the disaster, she says, is judgment for the miners’ earlier attempt against the pilgrims. Mirza Saeed answers angrily that the miners were not at the barricade; they were working beneath the ground. His objection draws a distinction between the miners’ work and the confrontation Ayesha invokes to explain their fate.

Ayesha replies that the miners dug their own graves. The exchange leaves the catastrophe suspended between incompatible accounts: for Ayesha, it carries the force of judgment; for Mirza Saeed, that explanation disregards the miners’ actual circumstances. The disaster thus brings the pilgrimage’s religious certainty into conflict with the material fact that thousands of workers were underground when the hill became their prison.