JIVAN
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, there was a knocking. It was late, two or three a.m., when any sound brings your heart to your throat. My mother was shouting, “Wake up, wake up!”
A hand reached out of the dark and dragged me up in my nightie. I screamed and fought, believing it was a man come to do what men do. But it was a policewoman.
My father, on the floor, his throat dry and his painful back rigid, mewled. Nighttime turned him into a child.
Then I was in the back of the police van, watching through the wire mesh a view of roads glowing orange under streetlamps. I exhausted myself appealing to the policewoman and group of policemen sitting in front of me: “Sister, what is happening? I am a working girl. I work at Pantaloons. I have nothing to do with police!”
They said nothing. Now and then a crackle came from the radio on the dashboard, far in front. At some point, a car filled with boys sped by, and I heard whooping and cheering. They were coming from a nightclub. The doddering police van meant nothing to those boys. They did not slow down. They were not afraid. Their fathers knew police commissioners and members of the legislature, figures who were capable of making all problems disappear. And me, how would I get out of this? Whom did I know?
LOVELY
AT NIGHT, AFTER THE acting class, I am lying in bed with Azad, my husband, my businessman who is buying and reselling Sansung electronics and Tony Hilfiger wristwatches from Chinese ships docking in Diamond Harbor. I am showing him my practice video from the day’s class, and now he is saying, “I have been telling you for hundred years! You have star material in you!”
He is pinching my cheek, and I am laughing even though it is hurting. I am feeling peaceful, like this thin mattress on the floor is our own luxury five-star hotel bed. In this room I am having everything I am needing. A jar of drinking water, some dishes, a small kerosene stove, and a shelf for my clothes and jewelry. On the wall, giving me their blessings every day, are Priyanka Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan. When I am looking around, I am seeing their beautiful faces, and some of their good fortune is sprinkling down on me.
* * *
*
“AZAD,” I AM SAYING this night. My face is close to his face, like we are in a romantic scene in a blockbuster. “Promise you will not get angry if I am telling you something?”
I am taking a moment to look at his face, dark and gray. Some long hairs in his eyebrows trying to escape. I am having difficulty looking eye to eye for these hard words.
“Aren’t you thinking,” I am saying finally, “about family and all? We are not so young—”
Azad is starting to talk over me, like always. “Again?” he is saying. I am knowing that he is annoyed. “Was my brother coming here?”
“No!”
“Was my brother putting this rubbish in your head?”
“No, I am telling you!”
Why Azad is always accusing me of such things?
“Everyone knows it is the way of the world, Azad,” I am telling him. “Yes, the world is backward, and yes, the world is stupid. But your family is wanting you to marry a proper woman, have children. And look at me—I can never give you a future like that.”
Immediately, I am regretting. This is a great big mistake. I am wishing to be with Azad always, so why I am pushing him away?
* * *
*
ACTUALLY, AZAD IS RIGHT. His brother was coming one night. He was coming before dawn, ringing the bell, banging his fist on the door. He was making such a racket the street dogs were barking gheu gheu.
When I was finally leaping out of bed and unlatching the door, Azad’s brother was immediately shouting at my face, “Whatever curse you have given him, let him go, witch!”
“Shhh!” I was saying. “Be quiet, it’s the middle of the night!”
“Don’t you tell me what to do, witch!” he was screaming, wagging a finger in the air. One man pissing in the gutter was looking at him, then at me, then at him, then at me. Otherwise, all was quiet and dark, but surely everybody was hearing everything.
“You have trapped him!” this brother was screaming. “Now you have to free him! Let him get married like a normal person!”
I was only standing, holding the open door. “Calm yourself,” I was saying quietly. “You will make yourself sick.”
I was wearing my nightie. My ears were burning. The whole neighborhood was learning my business. Now this was making me angry. Who was giving this good-for-nothing brother the right to shout at me in front of the whole locality? All these people were hardworking rickshaw pullers, fruit sellers, cotton fillers, maidservants, guards in the malls. They were needing sleep. Now what respect was I having left in their eyes?
So finally I was shouting back some rude things. I don’t like remembering them.
* * *
*
“OKAY,” I AM ADMITTING to Azad now. “Fine, your brother came. He was saying to me, ‘Lovely, I know your love is true. My brother refuses to even eat if you are not there. But please, I am begging, talk to him about marriage and children, for our old parents’ sake.’ ”
Azad is looking at me. “My brother? Said that?”
He is not believing his ears.
“Yes, your own brother,” I am saying. “So I am thinking about it.”
A spider with thin brown legs is crawling through the window. With all eight legs it is exploring the wall. Both of us are watching it. When Azad is getting up and about to slap the spider with his shoe, I am saying, “Leave it.”
Why to always ruin other creatures’ lives?
“No!” Azad is saying. “I am not going to follow such stupid rules! I will marry you!”
JIVAN
THE NEXT MORNING, AT the courthouse, a policewoman opens for me a path through a crowd moving like they are joyous, like they are celebrating at a cricket stadium. The sun blazes in my eyes. I look at the ground.
“Jivan! Jivan! Look here,” shout reporters with cameras mounted on their shoulders or raised high above their heads. Some reporters reach forward to push recorders toward my mouth, though policemen beat them back. I am jostled and shoved, my feet stepped on, my elbows knocked into my ribs. These men shout questions.
“How did the terrorists make contact with you?”
“When did you start planning the attack?”
I find my voice and shout, a brief cry which dies down like a rooster’s: “I am innocent! I don’t know anything about—”
I stand tall, though colors appear bright in my eyes, the greens of trees luminous as a mineral seam, the ground beneath my feet composed of distinct particles. My legs buckle, and the policewoman catches me. A shout goes up among the crowd. The policewoman’s grip on my arm is the kindest thing. Then indoors, where the noise recedes and I am allowed to slump in a chair.
A lawyer appointed to me appears. He is young, only a little older than me, though he has the potbelly of a wealthy man.
“Did you get food this morning?” is the first thing he says.
I look at my policewomen handlers and cannot remember. I nod.
“I am Gobind,” he says. “Your court-appointed lawyer. Do you understand what ‘lawyer’ means? It means that—”
“Sir,” I begin. “I understand what it means. I went to school. I am a sales clerk at Pantaloons, you know that shop? You tell me this, why am I arrested? Fine, I posted one stupid thing on Facebook, but I don’t know anything about the train.”
The lawyer looks not at me but at a folder in his hands. He licks a finger and turns the pages.
“Are you telling the truth?” he says. “They found your chat records talking to the terrorist recruiter on Facebook.”
“Everybody keeps saying this to me, but this boy was just someone I chatted with online. We were online friends,” I plead. “I didn’t know who he was.”
From
my chair, I hear the wheeze of a ceiling fan above me, and the chatter of visitors entering the courtroom behind. In front, all I see is an aunty sitting at a typewriter. Tendrils of hair slip loose from the coil at the base of her neck.
“On Facebook I made many friends, including this friend in a foreign country. At least, that is what he told me,” I explain to Gobind. “This friend asked me about my life, and my feelings. I sent him emojis sometimes, to say hello. Now they tell me he was a known terrorist recruiter. Known to whom? I didn’t know any of this.”
Gobind looks at me. A woman like me is never believed.
“What about these cloths soaked in kerosene found at your house?” says Gobind after a while. “Very much like the kerosene-soaked torches that were tossed into the train. What about that?”
“Those were…” I think hard. “Probably my mother’s cleaning cloths. Kerosene to get grease off. I don’t know! I have never seen them.”
They say I helped terrorists set fire to the train. Not only do they have Facebook chat records with a man I now know is a recruiter, there were witnesses at the railway station who saw me walking to the train station with a package in my arms. Must have been kerosene, they say. Must have been rags, or wood for torches. Other witnesses saw me running away from the train, with no package in my arms. Though they saw no men with me, they allege that I guided men, terrorists, enemies of the country, down the unnamed lanes of my slum, to the station where the cursed train would be waiting.
When I protest my innocence, they point to the seditious statements I posted on Facebook, calling my own government a “terrorist” and showing, so they say, a marked absence of loyalty to the state. Is it a crime to write some words on Facebook?
Gobind points to a document I signed while in police lockup. He tells me I confessed.
“Who believes that?” I charge. “They forced me to sign. They were beating me.”
I turn to the courtroom, wishing for my mother and father to be here, for their soothing hand on my head, at the same time as I wish for them to never see me here. They would not be able to bear it.
Then the judge arrives, and reads a list of charges.
“Crimes against the nation,” he says. “Sedition.”
I hear the words. I raise my hand and gesture no, no, no.
“I was taking a few books, my schoolbooks,” I say. It is the truth, so why does it sound so meager? “That was my package. I was taking my schoolbooks to a person in the slum. Her name is Lovely. Ask her. She will tell you that I was teaching her English for some months.”
From the back, a voice scoffs, “Keep your stories for the papers. A terrorist doing charity! What an A-plus story! The media will eat it up!”
The judge threatens to throw the voice out of the room.
“They made me sign the confession,” I tell the judge later. I lift my tunic to reveal my bruised abdomen, and hear people shift behind me.
This time the judge listens, his eyebrows raised.
Days later, in a newspaper, I will see an artist’s drawing of me appearing in court that morning. The sketch shows a woman with her hair in a braid. Her hands are cuffed but raised as in prayer or plea. This is a mistake, I think. I was not in cuffs. Was I? The rest of her body is hastily penciled, decaying already.
JIVAN’S MOTHER AND FATHER
NO MORE THAN AN hour after Jivan was arrested, a reporter found the house in the slum and knocked. The door was a sheet of tin, unlatched. It fell open. Jivan’s mother was sitting by Jivan’s father on the raised bed, and fanning him with a folded newspaper.
At the sight of the reporter, Jivan’s mother rose and walked to the door. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you police?”
The newsman held a recorder at a respectful distance and said, “Daily Beacon. I am Purnendu Sarkar.” He flipped open his wallet to show her ID, then tucked it into a back pocket. “Do you know why your daughter has been arrested?”
Jivan’s mother said, “They will send a policeman with the information, that is what they told me. Where did they take Jivan?”
This mother was confused, the reporter saw. She did not know anything. He sighed. Then he turned off his recorder, and told her what he knew.
“Mother,” he said in the end, “did you understand what I said?”
“Why would I not understand,” said she. “I am her mother!”
And to her husband she turned. Jivan’s father, stiff-backed on the bed, knew, had known, something terrible was happening.
“They are saying something about Jivan,” she cried. “Come here and see, what are they saying?”
But her husband only lifted his head, sensing a frightening disturbance in the night. He moved his dry mouth to speak, and stopped. His chin trembled, and his arm, raised from the elbow, hailed somebody for help.
A figure peeled away from the carrom players outside. He was Kalu the neighbor, with his bulging neck tumor. By that time, more reporters had arrived, and a curious crowd had formed outside the house. This crowd made way for him in fear and disgust. Kalu shut the door behind him, and a shout of protest went up from the gathered reporters.
“Mother,” he said, “have you eaten? Then let’s go. These people are saying they know where Jivan is.”
Then he took her, sitting on the back of his motorcycle, her legs dangling like a schoolgirl’s, to the police station the reporters had named. By the time Jivan’s mother stepped off the motorcycle, in her arms nothing but an envelope, much crushed—her daughter’s birth certificate, school-leaving certificate, polio drop receipt, for documents were all she had—the sky was turning from black to blue.
Jivan’s mother made her way to the entrance of the police station, where, she had been told, her daughter was held. There was a crowd of reporters here too. They had lights and cameras. One reporter applied lipstick, while another crushed a cigarette underfoot. At the gate stood two guards, rifles strapped to their backs. Periodically they shouted at the journalists to step back. Otherwise they leaned in the doorway, chatting.
They turned to look at the stooped woman who came right up to them, her feet in bathroom slippers.
“Stop, stop,” one said. “Where are you going? Can’t you see this is a police station?”
Jivan’s mother told them she was there to see her child.
“Who is your son?” said the guard, irritated, while his friend wandered away.
“My daughter. Jivan, she is called.”
The guard’s mouth fell open. Here she was, the mother of the terrorist.
“Not now,” he said finally. “No visiting in the lockup.”
The guard, on order to let nobody meet with the terrorist, refused to let her mother in.
JIVAN
EARLY ONE MORNING, A man appears outside my cell, holding in his hands a foolscap sheet of paper. “Undertrials!” he barks.
A line of filthy men forms. The men wear slippers rubbed thin at the heels, and vests pasted to their sweating chests. One shouts, “Is this the line for omelets?”
A few of the men laugh, no mirth in their voices.
Some say nothing, watching the specimen of me in my cell. I am to stay in prison until my trial a year later.
The man in charge unlocks the gate and pokes his head in.
“You, madam! You need a special invitation?”
So I scramble up from the floor. With a dozen others, I climb into a police van. When a man raises his handcuffed hands to touch my breasts, I slap them away.
“Keep your hands to yourself!” I shout.
The driver shouts at me to be quiet.
That is how I am transported from temporary lockup to this prison, where I now live.
PT SIR
THE PLAYGROUND IS A rectangle of concrete, surrounded first by a slim row of trees wilting in the sun, then by the five-story building
of the school. The physical-training teacher, in collared shirt and ironed pants, his mustache thick as a shoe-brush and his bald pate shiny, stands in the sun and shouts commands for the students to march in rhythm, arms raised in salute, feet landing sharply on the ground.
The girls, his students, are thirteen years old, their skirts down to their knees, bra straps falling off their shoulders, tired socks curling off their shins. Many have cleaned their white sports shoes with a rub of blackboard chalk. Now their backs slouch, and their arms flop when they should be rigid as blades.
“Haven’t you seen,” PT Sir scolds as he walks down their rows, “the soldiers’ procession on TV? You should look exactly like that!”
Republic Day, the national holiday celebrating the country’s constitution, is coming up, and this will not do. The students’ parade, the most patriotic performance on this patriotic occasion, is PT Sir’s responsibility. It is the one time in all the school year when he, this odd teacher who teaches not geography or mathematics or chemistry, not even home science, showcases his work. Well, he thinks meanly about himself, that is other than all the times he steps up during assembly to fix a malfunctioning microphone, the only man at this girls’ school called on for handiwork.
“Quiet!” he scolds when murmurs arise from the girls. “Be serious!”
The class falls silent. Girls look at the ground, laughter suppressed in their mouths.
Off to the side, two girls sit in the shade of a tree and giggle. At the beginning of class, they had come up to him and each whispered in his ear, “Sir, I have got my period. Can I please be excused?”
PT Sir thinks, but is not sure, that they perhaps had their periods last week also. Frowning, he removes a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipes the sweat off his head, his forehead, his nose. What else can he do?
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