country and kin, much like the Indian men who literally turned machetes against their partners. Through the imagery of lost body parts that take centuries to recuperate, Das alludes to one of indenture’s most brutal legacies.

Das’s life was cut tragically short when she died of a heart attack in 2003, at the age of forty-eight. Heiress to so much muted history, she was herself silenced in many ways. For more than a year after suffering a stroke, she lost her voice, described as “gentle but dangerous” by a Trinidadian poet in New York who knew her. Her letters to friends in Brooklyn, detailing her creative and material hardships, were also discarded by accident. Published by her paramilitary unit and small independent and radical presses, Das’s work never reachedfrom the casing to allow production up the well from the different sets of perforations.
The length of the horizontal section of the well can be limited by the process of drilling bridge plugs from the casing. Drilling of bridge plugs is often performed with a fluid motor and bit on the end of coiled tubing by pumping a water-based fluid down the tubing, through the motor and bit, and back up the annulus inside the casing. Drilling may also be performed by a workover rig with a power swivel to rotate jointed pipe and turn the bit. The friction between the coiled tubing or jointed pipe and the casing in the horizontal section of the well may become equal to the force available to move the coiled tubing